Slack and the AI agent
The Alien Slack app lets your team approve access requests (time-boxed permission to act in a customer environment), get rollout and deployment reports, and ask the Alien AI agent to investigate an incident:
@Alien why is customer-1/us-east-1 not reporting?Everything here also works from the dashboard and the CLI.
Connect Slack
Open Settings → Integrations in your workspace and choose Slack.
Select Add to Slack and install the Alien app into your Slack workspace.
Under Monitor Reports Channel, pick the channel for rollout and deployment reports. Invite the bot to that channel.
Alien matches each Slack user to their Alien account by email, with no separate linking step. Alien accepts actions that run something, such as approving a request or starting an investigation, only from Slack users who are members of your Alien workspace.
Disconnect revokes the bot token and removes the app. You can reconnect at any time.
Notifications
When the AI agent finishes watching a release rollout or a deployment, it posts a summary to the Monitor Reports Channel. Choose None (disable posting) to turn reports off.
Approvals
When an investigation needs access, the agent posts an Access request ready card in your team's thread. A teammate decides where the customer's approval goes:
- Send to original thread, or pick a channel, posts the approval card there. Use a shared Slack channel with the customer.
- Get kubectl command posts only the
kubectl patchcommand, so you can pass it to the customer another way.
The approval card lists the commands and the reason, with the note Diagnostics only by default. Changes need separate approval. No secrets or shell access.
Its buttons are Approve for 6 hours and Deny. The approver must be someone other than the requester.
Requests created from the CLI (alien access-requests create) use the same approval flow. See Access requests for who approves on each platform.
The AI agent
The agent watches release rollouts and deployment infrastructure, and answers @Alien in Slack. It reads deployment status, logs, and inventory, runs read-only operations your policy allows, and proposes an access request when a fix needs more.
Ask it in any channel the bot is in, or in a direct message:
@Alien did rel_7x2kq9 roll out to every production deployment?To investigate an existing message, use the Investigate shortcut from the message's More actions menu.
The agent is on by default. Turn it off in Settings → Agent with Enable AI agent.
Turning it off stops all agent sessions in the workspace. Operations → Agent lists past sessions.
Next
Debug sessions
Run kubectl, aws, gcloud, or az against one deployment with scoped, time-boxed credentials, and open a shell on Machines and local deployments.
Upgrade, rotate, and remove
Rotate an installation's connection key, upgrade or roll back the Operator, recover a stuck Helm release, repair a lost connection, and uninstall it.