# Action Stations!

*August 23, 2021*

incident.io provides [actions](https://docs.incident.io/managing-incident-actions), our lightweight toolkit for tracking and assigning work during incidents.

After speaking with our community and collecting feedback, we spent the last week making a number of improvements to actions that we hope will better fit your incident workflows.

What are actions?

We believe there are two types of action you create during an incident – those that **need doing now**, and those that should be **followed-up** after an incident has been closed.

Actions that **need doing now** might be:

* Reboot that server!
* Failover to that region!

While **follow-ups** could be:

* Improve test coverage of ActionsService
* Degrade gracefully when Redis is down

We're shipping follow-ups

You can now mark actions as follow-ups, helping separate work that needs doing now from tasks that can be handled post-incident.

Create follow-ups in Slack like any other action (`/inc action  
Thing`) but with "When does it need to be done?" set to "After the incident":



![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/oqy5aexb/production/65e964958c607b6c35d6c33a2998de8112e7c229-1196x926.png)

Sometimes you'll create an action, then realise it's best handled as a follow-up. Moving actions into follow-ups (and out!) can be done from the `/inc  
actions` modal:



![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/oqy5aexb/production/436821d2910cf79a34ca29dbab31dc501977bb0a-1994x1006.gif)

Once created, follow-ups can be managed in your incident dashboard, where they are shown separately from your other incident actions:



![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/oqy5aexb/production/4d523f4837a0a46dc7ac27cfb7760a8ec911a0b2-1600x1005.png)

We expect people will review their actions as part of closing an incident, taking the opportunity to promote an action to a follow-up if it's still relevant.

If this is how you use them, we suggest exporting any follow-ups to your issue tracker (see the "Export to Linear" button) to link against your ticket, ensuring incident.io will sync the follow-up to your issue tracker.

Following this workflow will mean you can use the new "Actions" view to track outstanding follow-ups across all your incidents, giving you a picture of how your organization is doing on their post-incident work:



![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/oqy5aexb/production/c352718105df40b42fe3a3273b19e4a51dfabe7a-1266x1540.png)

That's not all!

While follow-ups are this weeks big news, we took the opportunity to improve actions more generally, too.

Expect some major quality-of-life improvements when working with actions from within Slack, such as:

* `/inc actions` defaults to showing outstanding actions only, assuming responders will want to clearly see what remains (rather than what they've already done!)
* Made tough decisions of which buttons to put in our Slack overflow menus- with a maximum of five quick-links, we've tried picking the most relevant buttons for the specific action
* Create an 'edit action' modal for making several changes at once

See it in action here:



![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/oqy5aexb/production/35e39149b6a4ace643e57cc68ca0564f552ff319-1854x1652.gif)

### What we shipped

Lots! Mostly covered above, but a few small tweaks

## New
* Follow-up actions to track work that happens after closing an incident
* New actions tab for viewing outstanding follow-ups across all your incidents
* Mark actions as not-doing, helping responders focus on what they need to do now

## Improvements
* Simplify the `/inc actions` modal and clearly separate actions by status (Slack)
* Provide an action edit modal for changing action details (Slack)
* Show quick-access buttons to transition actions between states (Slack)
* Separate follow-ups from in-incident actions (dashboard)
* Use consistent action status names (Open, Outstanding -> Open, etc)
* Filter incidents by "has outstanding actions" or "has post-mortem" (dashboard)
* Now display severity descriptions in the incident create modal (used to just be in the update modal, now its in both) - thanks Tiago!
* Bookmark your favourite incident filters, so you can share your search queries
* Custom fields now appear in the incident recap view

* 👷🏽‍ Continue porting API endpoints to goa, allowing us to type-check our frontend code against our backend implementation

## Bug fixes
* Clear create action modal inputs after successful create (dashboard)
* Notify incident channel whenever actions change in the dashboard
* Fixed attribution of timeline items when you pin another persons message