How we made a Slackbot profile our code for a Hackathon (Part 1)

Why we built Pyroscope Bot for profiling

As maintainers of Pyroscope, an open source continuous profiling library, we are very familiar with Slack and the various ways that it has empowered us to move faster. We are members of more than 20 different slack groups and we use our slack as our main hub for managing our open source community.

Not only that, but we also use Slack as our hub for the observability stack that we use for our dogfooding servers that we have deployed in production. Logs, metrics, traces, and alerts all flow through Slack so when there is some sort of critical issue Slack will be the first place that we receive that alert.

With that in mind, for this hackathon we decided to create a bot, Pyroscope Bot, that allows for a workflow where we can also analyze and debug the same issues using the functionalities existing via the Slack/Slack Bot API

We were able to do this as a result of our adhoc profiling mode (see blog for more information)