The Best thing about StackStorm? The Community

The StackStorm documentation is pretty good. But it’s not always enough. Sometimes you need a bit of help. Sometimes you think you’ve found a bug, and want to talk with the developers about it. That’s where our StackStorm community support can help.

I’m sure you’ve heard us talk about our Slack channel. It’s a great place for StackStorm users to get together, share ideas, and solve problems. But did you know that our Stormers are in this channel, and do their best to help support the community?

Our engineers hang out here from 9:00 -> 17:00 PST, and often later. They’re happy to answer whatever questions you have. Just in the last few days, we’ve had questions about installation, ChatOps setup, writing sensors, purging history, creating actions, etc. Because the core engineers are involved in those discussions, not only can they help fix problems, they can also explain the design thinking.

Using Slack means we can have rapid-fire back & forth discussions. You can get to the bottom of an issue much faster than you would via email, or a traditional forum.

StackStorm users clearly love this level of support – here’s just a random sample of comments over the last few weeks:

“you guys are doing a great job, even though this is community support, your efforts are above expectations”
…
“The Stormer’s do a great job of supporting folks with the community”
…
“@doriftoshoes: You’re the man. I’m much further than I was before. Thanks for taking the time to explain this to me.”

Wait, I get all that for free?

Yes – but remember that this is a best-efforts service. We’ll do our best to help, but it’s not a complete replacement for full support. We can’t guarantee to answer all questions, and don’t promise any SLAs. It’s great for a few quick questions, but it’s not meant to be enterprise support, or free professional services for a complex design. If you do need that sort of service, get in touch.

Help us to help you

There’s a few things you can do to make it easier for us to help you:

• Tell us the key points about your environment – StackStorm version, OS, etc.
• Post the actual code for your action/sensor/workflow.
• If it’s more than a few lines of logs or code, use GitHub Gists. Create a new Gist, and post the link to Slack. Much easier to read for long outputs.
• Don’t forget to read the docs and the tutorials.

Giving back

When you start out with StackStorm, there’s a lot to learn, and you’ll mostly be asking questions. But pretty soon you’ll know enough to be able to help others. Feel free to pitch in. No need to wait for an ‘official’ answer.

If the documentation is confusing/non-existent, feel free to submit an issue. Or even better, a PR!

See you on Slack!