Redesigned and Redundant Incident Response

Starting today, incident response in both Slack and the Web has been completely redesigned and simplified. Let’s talk through some of the updates.

Guided workflows to help responders ramp

• Simplified incident declaration - speed up declaration, reduce fear in new responders, and stay flexible for power users with our new multi-step incident declaration.
• Updated status message - Get new responders and interested parties up to speed quickly with an updated /fh status command that is also sent as an ephemeral message to all new channel joiners.
• Contextual buttons - The status and new incident messages are now milestone aware to help responders take actions quickly based on the state of the incident.
• Updated Milestones - First Action is gone, replaced with a much easier to understand Investigating milestone. Additionally, we’ve added IDentified between Investigating and Mitigated.
• Slack Link reminders - Whenever unlinked users join an incident channel, FIreHydrant will send them a reminder to link their accounts
• Not and empty conditions for runbooks - Ensure process adherence by running runbook steps when roles, impact, and other incident metadata is missing.
• Incident Update Runbook step - Enforce incident state with Automatic escalations, milestone changes, and description updates are now all possible through runbooks to allow for even more flexibility for our power users.
• Notify channel step actions - Ensure consistent process, Incident messages now can prompt users to take actions through buttons, making it easier for custom process during the course of an incident.
• Slack Bookmarks - Reduce Noise with Bookmarks. Bookmarks allow for custom links and FH created information to be added to an incident channel, reducing noise in the channel.

Slack commands are more powerful and straightforward

• Start retro command - /fh start retro - Users can start the retro preparation immediately after resolving and can start the retro with proper information while the incident is still fresh.
• Updated Resolve incident command - /fh resolve - Post resolution updates to status pages and ensure that accidental resolutions happen less
• Updated assign team command - /fh assign team - Understand who you’re bringing into an incident when assigning a team
• Contextual Help menu - /fh help - Improving the design of this menu should make it easier for new responders to be less overwhelmed by the breadth of functionality in FireHydrant.

Simplified design to eliminate noise

• Reduced message noisiness - Shortening FH messages allows the most important information, the chat between responders to be more prominently displayed
• Threaded updates - By including updates to an incident in a single place, Slack users can scroll back on incident updates without having to scroll through the whole incident channel.

A redesigned Command Center adds Incident Response redundancy

• Command Center V2 - A completely redesigned incident command center in the web to allow users to respond to incidents in both the FireHydrant application and in Slack. Protect against Slack outages with chatops functionality and give your responders the ability to work wherever they are comfortable.

See more at our blog post at firehydrant.com/blog/redesigned-and-redundant-incident-response/