Described are techniques for performing system management such as a system including one or more data storage systems or appliances. User input may be received by a chat processing engine. The user input may be a natural language input to perform a request. The user input may be received from a management application used to perform data storage management. The chat processing engine may perform first processing of the user input to determine a response to the request. The response may be sent to the management application. The natural language input from a user may be in the form of text or voice that is converted to text for processing by the chat processing engine.