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# App Overview

The ChatOps plugin is a Nautobot Plugin that provides a Chatbot framework for Nautobot.

## Description/Overview

The ChatOps framework provides Network Engineers power to query Nautobot or their Network (through ChatOps plugins) while staying within their preferred Chat application. The goal of ChatOps is to bring people, processes and Automation together.

## Glossary

- Chat Platform: A communication service (e.g., Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Cisco Webex).
- Command: A particular instruction sent by users via the Chat Platform, which is then processed by an Integration.
- Dispatcher: A class specific to the Chat Platform that processes incoming chat messages, executes commands, and sends results back to the Chat Platform.
- Integration: A component that defines commands, handles data retrieval, and manipulation for specific tools or services (e.g., IP Fabric, AWX / Ansible Tower, Palo Alto Panorama, Grafana, Cisco ACI, Cisco Meraki, Arista CloudVision).
- Platform View: A Django View designed to handle Chat Platform data.
- Sub-command: An instruction that is nested within a Command.
- Worker: A module within an Integration, designed to handle and process a Command, receiving data from Platform Views and returning results via a Dispatcher's generic API.

## Audience (User Personas) - Who should use this App?

- Network Engineers
- Network Automation Engineers
- Site Reliability Engineers
- Network Operations

## Authors and Maintainers

- Glenn Matthews (@glennmatthews)
- Josh VanDeraa (@jvanderaa)
- Jeremy White (@whitej6)
- Stephen Kiely (@smk4664)