Automate incident creation with Alerts

Alerts

Automatically creating incidents has been a tremendously helpful feature for incident responders, removing the need to manually create incidents every time there is a page or ensuring there is an incident channel home to quickly take action when there is a legitimate issue.

However, up until recently, customers have only been able to automatically create incidents from their paging solutions (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie) or via the API.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve had requests for organizations to auto-create incidents from other sources as well. So, we are excited to share our latest feature: Alerts!

Alerts will allow organizations to connect your alert sources to incident.io to automatically create incidents. This new feature will also provide additional customization so we can better route alerts into incidents and build more sophisticated automations (ie. workflows) off the back of those alerts.

Alert sources

To get started using Alerts, you will need to set up the connection between incident.io and your alert source(s). We connect with a variety of alert sources:

• Paging tools such as Opsgenie or PagerDuty
• Monitoring tools such as Datadog or Prometheus
• Service management tools like Zendesk

If we don’t have an integration in place for your preferred source, you can simply connect via HTTP, which will work with most solutions that use webhooks.

Once you have selected the source you’d like to connect, we provide easy-to-follow instructions on how to start receiving alerts into incident.io.

Custom alert attributes

When connecting your alert sources to incident.io, you can add custom attributes to provide more context to your alerts. Examples include: team, affected customer, affected feature or environment. This allows you to pull values from your alert payload into rich data on your incidents.

These can provide helpful clues for responders when digging into the alert issue. Plus, it will be a helpful way of grouping and filtering your alerts into incidents via alert routes.

Alert routes

Once you have connected your alert sources, to automatically create incidents, you’ll need to set up your alert routes. With alert routes you can:

• Select one (or multiple!) alert sources to auto-create incidents
• Filter any alerts you do not want to auto-create incidents for (i.e. low priority alerts)
• Group alerts, so when an alert fires, we find active incidents with similar alerts and give responders the ability to attach the alert to an incident or create a new incident from that alert (ie. grouping alerts by the team that owns the alert)
• Configure how incidents are created (ie. populating custom fields from alert data)

After your alert routes are set and your alert source is firing, you will start to see auto-creation in action! This should relieve stress on your responders, reducing need to manually create incidents and providing additional information to help mitigate issues quickly.

There are plenty of new bells and whistles with the new Alerts feature, so please refer to our handy help docs (here and here) for more support as you dig in!

New ways to generate incident summary

Previously, we would only suggest you a new summary whenever you provide an incident update. Now, there’s a shiny Generate button on the /inc summary and /inc resolve modals which will create a new summary for you!

Additionally, you will see a Generate button on the Do you want to add a summary? nudge.

🚀 What else we’ve shipped