GitHubbers invited to hack Davis, the microservices chat bot

Dynatrace has launched a virtual digital assistant named Davis which you can talk to using Amazon's Alexa or via text on Slack through a proprietary engine - and has invited devs to take a pop at it.

The idea is you quiz Davis on the status of your systems, as opposed to logging in and typing.

Behind Davis lies a Node.js server that Dynatrace, Compuware's application performance management spinout, released under an MIT licence to open source and posted to GitHub in January.

Dynatrace wants to surround its bot with an "ecosystem" of developers' construction extensions to DAVIS by hacking the code on GitHub.

The idea is you can talk to your microservices running Dynatrace's AWS and on-prem software.

"We want people to build AI into their IT fabric," Dynatrace chief technology officer Bernd Greifeneder told The Reg.

Denmark's largest retailer, Coop, is one of the first users of Davis.

Coop is using Dynatrace's assistant to report on performance of middleware and databases the VMware VCloud used to float its web services and online commerce. The retailer is expanding use of Davis to include application deployment.

The next step from Dynatrace is to have Davis push notifications and alerts, Greifeneder said.

Davis comes with an abstraction layer that'll let it talk with conversation bots, such as Amazon's Lex, the Facebook-owned WIT.ai and IBM's Watson.

Integration with Microsoft's Cortana is next, according to Greifeneder. ®