May backlog crush: Bug fixes, new updates, and lots more

The eagle-eyed among you might notice that “what else we’ve shipped” is longer than usual. That’s because, similarly to what we did in January, we’ve crushed our backlog. This manifests in many improvements across the platform - from nitty gritty performance fixes on certain API endpoints to new features that we didn’t have before.

You can find the whole list below - but here are some highlights…

New alert sources

We’ve shipped integrations with Uptime.com and Elasticsearch that’ll alert you when one of your sites goes down or a query you’ve written fires an alert.

New date format for incident channel name variables

Want more configurability on how we name your incident channels? No problem. We now support y/m/d formatting in channel name variables.

New Slack command: `/inc request update`

It was previously possible to request an update to an incident from within the dashboard, and now we’ve brought that experience to Slack with /inc request update.

Workflow step for assigning a follow-up owner

Finding time to work on follow-ups after the heat of the moment, when an incident is resolved, can be tricky at the best of times. Collective ownership makes that even harder, so we now let you assign follow-up owners using workflows. For example, you can assign all your follow-ups to the incident lead by default.

🚀 What else we’ve shipped

New

We now support rich text in the message used for resolving a status page incident when updating from a workflow
You can now use properties of a follow-up to decide which export template to use: for example, sending follow-ups that are assigned to someone in the INFRA team to the INFRA Jira board
Add country code drop-down to mobile phone number input in notification settings
Add deletion protection to policies that are still being reported on
You can now use the status category of an incident when setting a custom channel name for incidents

Improvements

When scheduling a status page maintenance, we'll now show what time zone is used for the dates
When configuring a status page with sub-pages, the URL is no longer truncated
Loading the post-incident tab is now significantly faster when you have a lot of tasks
The debug flag now shows HTTP requests being made by catalog-importer
On narrow screens, the sidebar on the incident homepage no longer overlaps with the main sidebar
We'll now show a nice Avatar if we can't load your profile picture from Slack
We'll now understand /inc test even when it's formatted differently, for example /inc test
/inc whoisoncall and /inc cover now works in all channels
You can now see the absolute timestamp for when we received an alert in the dashboard
You can see the full title of an alert by hovering
Improve how the schedule upcoming change marker looks when you are changing 2 rotations at the same time
Manual escalations will display who manually escalated in the dashboard
You can clearly see if an escalation was triggered by a workflow in the dashboard
You can now command+click incidents from the post-incident dashboard to open them in a new tab
When declaring using /inc, we now tidy up any URLs that are included in the incident name
We now explain why certain catalog-backed custom fields can't be grouped
Stop catalog type dropdown from overflowing
Display useful error message if editing follow up template for broken integration
Editing rich text in the catalog is now easier with a larger editor
We’ve improved the formatting of links within SMS messages for incident subscriptions
Datadog alert descriptions now support markdown, so you can see your Datadog monitor descriptions in lovely rich text
If a status page update is made where the timestamp is edited, we now show this next to the timestamp
Improved our side drawer to work better on smaller screen sizes
Add timezone information to the retrospective incident declare form if it includes timestamps
Add the ability to un-skip post-incident tasks
Clean up post-incident the table view to allow for long incident descriptions
Add a placeholder and link in Slack when you copy & paste an image into an incident summary or update from the dashboard
Remove unused column from the GitHub user catalog entry object

👷‍♀️ Improved the performance of our Incidents List endpoint, to keep things nice and speedy

Bug fixes

Changes to custom fields made while resolving an incident are now taken into account when deciding which post-incident flow to use
The configured time zone is now used for timestamps within custom sections, as well as the core timeline and summary sections.
If someone requests access to a private incident where the channel has been archived, the incident lead can accept that request from Slack
If someone creates a postmortem document destination, it will no longer be set as default automatically when a default destination already exist
Test incidents can not longer be announced via /inc announce
We now highlight when a postmortem failed to export
When failing to create a postmortem because one already exists, we'll now show you a helpful error message
We now only show the "You have unsaved changes" message when editing a postmortem template when you've actually made changes
We fixed a bug that was preventing you from clicking the Pause incident button on a nudge
We started correctly formatting the incident summary on a postmortem in Google Docs
Fixed a bug where you couldn't bulk-complete follow-ups if you require follow-ups to be assigned
Fixed a bug where we'd export a malformed CSV if a custom property had the same name as an in-built property
Fixed a bug where the variable selector would sometimes close unexpectedly
Stop duplicate calendar names showing up when there are Google Calendar connection issues
Fix the Slack message we send then there are no related incidents
Improved the way we handle errors when connecting to Salesforce
Fix a bug where update messages when resolving incidents with AI generated summaries would be lost
Remove "sentry is broken" warning banner upon reinstall
Ensure that update messages are always shared to slack for live incidents
Fix a bug where back button on incident overview page would default to incident list for internal redirects
Stop trying to parse mrkdwn from follow-up descriptions unless they are directly from slack
Debrief policies created from auto-invite conditions will only apply to currently open and future incidents
Fix fields in customise view not selecting when clicking on text
Pause incident slash command default times now correctly uses your local timezone
The expressions editor now enforces a fallback option for required fields
Fixed a UI bug where deleting and re-adding workflow conditions would retain the deleted values
Fix edge-case UI bug allowing severity updates to merged incidents
Fix UI bug causing the "Edit user" modal to close slowly after submit
Fix bug causing the "mark as resolved" option to be applied to post-incident tasks that hadn't yet been resolved