First look: behind the scenes building an AI incident responder.
A quick(er) update
June 21, 2021
Good incident response is about good communication. In incidents, it's particularly helpful to provide a small, structured update to the organization on a regular basis. This keeps everyone on the same page, and helps resolve worries about when the next update will be coming, too.
We're always looking for ways to make good communication easier, and a few customers have mentioned that using seperate commands to udpate the severity, status and summary often felt a bit harder than it needed to be. You might not remember to update the status, or forget to update the summary after new information came to light — we certainly did!
We think all these fields work better together, so last week we set to work on incident updates!.
Updates are an easy way to provide a small, structured update to the rest of the organization on a regular basis. We tie together existing fields like Status and Severity, with a new field allowing you to share any other context. Additionally, if you set a reminder for when you're expecting to send the next one, we'll remind you at just the right time ⏰
Hopefully this makes internal communications a lot easier, and reduces some of the burden when it comes to communicating regularly. Give updates a spin in your next incident, and let us know what you think!
What we shipped
New
- We added grouping to the /incident command, to make it easier to understand what you need to do in the middle of an incident. You can now Communicate, Coordinate, Review and Help to your heart's content.
Improvements
- We changed the text when asking for feedback to make it clear that the feedback is for your organization to improve at incident response, not feedback about incident.io. As much as we would love that feedback, we think it's more important for you to share it amongst your team.
- Adding a postmortem document from the web will now update the incident channel.
- Statuspage updates are now asynchronous when you post them. This means that we're more resilient to failure if Statuspage is down, or a little slow.
- 👷🏽♀️ We spent a bunch of time improving the reliability and correctness of our Statuspage integration. It's now much faster, and more failure-tolerant. Thanks for the feedback, Render!
- 👷🏽♀️ Announcing and updating the incident in your #incidents channel now happens asynchronously. This allows us to be more resilient to failure, and provides a 300ms speed up for every command 🚀
- 🐛 When you created an incident from a message, we weren't attaching the name of the channel you created it from in our response to you in certain circumstances. That was silly, and we're sorry. It's now fixed.