Workflow Expressions

Σ Workflow expressions

Workflows are a powerful part of incident.io that allow you to automate certain actions and behaviours based on specific triggers. They allow you to do things like:

• Automatically page someone based on the incident type
• Prompt someone to write comms when your impacted product is customer facing
• (Our current favourite): Offer to, and then run, a rollback when a database migration goes wrong

Expressions are our latest addition to workflows. With an expression, you can set a value based on a set of conditions. You can then use that value throughout your workflow to vary its behaviour. Previously, to achieve the same effect, you would have had to create multiple, almost identical workflows and manually keep them in sync.

For example, you can define things like:

• When the 'Affected Service' custom field is 'Payments', set 'Affected PagerDuty Service' to 'Payments'. When it's ' Social', set it to 'Social', and so on...
• When the 'Incident Type' is 'security', set the 'Support Slack Channel' to '#security-updates', when it's ' engineering', set it to '#engineering-updates'

How can I create an expression?

To get started with expressions, head over to Workflows in the web dashboard, create or edit a Workflow, and click on the new Add new expression button.

Clicking 'Add new expression' will prompt you to choose what type of thing the expression returns, and the conditions that determine that value.

Once configured, you can use your expression anywhere that expects a value of that type.

To read more about how to use expressions, check out our Help Center article.

What else we shipped

• 🆕 We've added a new workflow step that will prompt you to assign a role to someone.
• 🆕 You can now have a GitHub repo as an externally synced custom field.
• 💅 We've made it clearer when we cannot make an incident private if your Slack settings don't allow us to do so.
• 💅 The warning for when you're closing an incident, but its status page is still open, is now more prominent.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where users were receiving multiple welcome messages - we really wanted you to feel welcome!
• 🐛 We've improved the performance of loading Slack channels in dropdowns across the product.
• 🐛 We've fixed an issue where typing a space in an 'invite user' search field would result in all users being returned.