Announcing Announcements

Starting today, you can use the incident.io dashboard to create Announcement Rules, allowing you to subscribe a collection of Slack channels to announcements for incidents matching specific conditions.

What are announcements?

incident.io has always shipped with a default #incidents announcement channel, which receives a post whenever an incident is created.

While our users often say how much they love this channel, with the increase in visibility it brings, not everyone wants to hear about every incident.

Perhaps your exec team only want to hear about incidents where the severity is greater than Major?

Or maybe Compliance need notifying whenever an incident of type Data Breach has been created?

Announcement Rules

That's where Announcement Rules come in.

Up until now, we'd announce each one of your created incidents in one channel - #incidents. Now, you can choose additional channels to post certain types of incident into - and define exactly what those criteria are.

From the incident.io dashboard, create rules that match against incident dimensions such as:

• Incident severity is greater than Major
• Incident status is either Investigating or Fixed
• Custom field Affected Teams includes Data

Whenever incidents are created that match these conditions, we'll send an announcement post to the channels configured on the rule.

Once the rule is created, we'll notify the channels involved to let them know they've been subscribed.

And as a final sweetener, an often requested feature is the ability to change the default #incidents announcement channel.

This behaviour is now controlled by the default announcement rule, which - just like other rules - you can configure from the settings dashboard:

That's all folks! It's worth noting that announcement rules are the first of a few features powered by our underlying workflows engine, which we're hoping to expose as a first class product feature over the next month.

Watch this space!

What we shipped

And in the typical weekly round-up:

• 🆕 You can decide to announce certain incidents in different channels, depending on properties of the incident.
• 💅 You can change your default announcement channel in the announcement settings page.

We've been working hard to stay focussed so the team has been deep in announcements, but we've picked up a few other bits along the way:

• 🐛 We fixed a bug where you couldn't unassign an action from the dashboard. Sorry about that!
• 🐛 When you update custom fields in the dashboard, we'll now refresh the page to show your changes straight away.
• 👷 We've started using LaunchDarkly so we can release changes in a more controlled way, and so far we are loving it!
• 👷 We're looking to expand our team, and have launched a new jobs page with a few open roles. Watch this space for more 🔜.
• 👷 We are working to make our dashboard more accessible, and have made a few small tweaks to make incident.io work for everyone.
• 👷 Katie joined the team as our first non-engineering hire! She's going to be working on a wide range of stuff from strategy to SOC2, and she'll introduce herself soon.