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Getting on the same page
April 6, 2021
In 2021, most companies have a status page set up to make it easier to publicly communicate the real-time status of their service to their customers.
However, when you're in the heat of an incident, it can be challenging to remember to update it. Where did we put the login, who has the right permissions, where do I go to update it? These are things we've been asked about time and time again by customers.
To help make things easier, we've brought one of the most popular status page providers out there - statuspage.io - right into your incident channels. Type /incident statuspage to notify customers of new incidents, provide updates to ongoing ones, and to let them know when the impact is over.
To get started using this for your incidents, head over to our shiny new documentation which takes you through how to install and use it.
Statuspage has a great feature inbuilt that allows you to pre-fill the impact, update text, and affected components. This makes it less stressful when figuring out what to write. We don't currently support this, but we hope to have it out in a couple of weeks. If this is something you'd like to see, let us know!.
What we shipped
New
- We built a beautiful Help Centre. You can now learn all about what incident.io is, and how to use it.
- We created the incident.io Community - a Slack workspace for us, and our lovely customers to hang out in. We'll use this to share early work, get feedback, and discuss interesting topics as a group.
Improvements
- When you close an incident, we'll ask you to assign an owner to the postmortem. Every little nudge helps (thanks to Bud for this one!).
- You can hide a PagerDuty escalation policy or service from appearing in incident.io by adding the #incident-io-ignore tag anywhere in the description. This helps if you have test rotations, or a list of Very Important People that you'd never like to page (Bud again 🙌)
- We were a little short-termist when showing you your insights, defaulting to the last 7 days. We now show you 30! What will you do with your extra 23 days? (thanks for the feedback Upvest!)
- 👷🏽♀️ We're prototyping using slash commands to interact with the bot. This provides us with a lot more powers out of the box. We're seeing what it feels like first, before rolling it out more widely. Watch this space! 👀
- 👷🏽♀️ On the very rare occassion that we crashed, we'd return the default Heroku 'app crashed' page. We now return something more beautiful, and witty. We hope you never see it 🙈.
- 🐛 When adding an Opsgenie integration, we weren't as thorough as we liked with checking that you were on the right tier to have API access enabled (grumble, grumble). We now check that at integration time - sorry for the hassle, Ravelin!