Item: Mattermost
Rating: 8
Author: Justin Leopold

Overall Satisfaction with Mattermost

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Mattermost is used by the infrastructure team as the main communication platform. It's also used for alert aggregation and chat-ops like functionality.

Using Google Chat before left a lot of gaps for team collaboration and chat-ops functionality. The value of being able to search past messages has also been extremely useful. This product also is open source which is part of the IT organizations values.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Chat and chat groups functionality
Simple and robust webhooks
Easy to use and understand web interface
Easily searchable chats and groups

Cons

Update process isn't as streamlined as I would like
Not as easy to integrate outside services as other chat platforms
Using a third party identity wasn't straightforward or was costly
This might have changed but RBAC style access controls were quite limited

Return on Investment

Much greater real time communication that isn't lumped into the entire Google ecosystem.
Webhooks allowed much, much greater visibility for various alarm conditions as well as some automated remediation.
Searchable chats and control of retention allowed chats to cover some documentation gaps.

Open Source Platform

This platform hasn't really affected risk exposure and we haven't contributed anything back upstream. We are a small team so we value the open source nature as we host our own infrastructure.

Ease of Integration

API and webhooks for this platform are very easy to use and allowed us to spread the use of this to all our observability tooling.

Alternatives Considered

Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat

These products all required cloud connectivity and licensing that was a significant cost. Mattermost allowed us to pilot this among just the Ops team and then evangelize this to the other infrastructure team. This allowed us to slowly show the value of this software and expand and grow it over time by bringing on new teams.

Key Insights

Do you think Mattermost delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Mattermost's feature set?

Yes

Did Mattermost live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Mattermost go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Mattermost again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps Services

Likelihood to Recommend

This is an excellent open source chat platform for small to medium teams. I can't see it working well at a massive scale due to having a smaller set of permissions and security settings.It is very nice to own the data that backs the chats and files. It would be nice to have more of the meeting style features built in as well as greater integration with something like nextcloud or similar tools.

Mattermost Feature Ratings

Comments

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