First look: behind the scenes building an AI incident responder.
Slash. Saviour of the universe
April 27, 2021
When we started incident.io, we felt passionately that we should replicate the feel of human communication during an incident. Need to escalate to someone? Just talk to us with @incident escalate and we'll guide you through it. The drawback? We made a lot of noise in your incident channel 🙉
We've listened to your feedback, and today we're making the move to Slack's slash commands. Whilst it's just a single character, moving from '@' to '/' has a big impact. When you /incident escalate it makes no noise in a channel, and as an added bonus we can take you straight to the right place. It's a win-win!
As if that's not enough, we're also introducing the Incident Home. Can't remember the command for the status page? Just type /incident (or /inc if you're in a hurry) and we'll help you get to the right place.
What we shipped
New
- When you pin images in an incident channel, we'll add them to the timeline. Worth a thousand words.
- We added lots of new customer logos to our homepage. Hello, new friends! 👋🏼
Improvements
- When you export actions to your issue tracker, we'll now show the link within the actions modal in Slack.
- We've added tooltips to the participants on the dashboard. Now you can see exactly what we mean by a 'Key Contact'.
- We've stopped sending incident action updates to the channel after the incident is closed. These updates aren't super helpful, and draw attention the channel when it's not needed.
Bug fixes
- If you split your severity definitions over multiple lines, we didn't display the text nicely in Slack. Now we do! Thanks Duffel!
- We found an incident in the future on the Insights page. We can't predict future incidents (yet) — it was just a timezone issue.
- If you swapped the names of your incident severities, we didn't always update them when you hit save. If it's not DNS, it's overly zealous database constraints.