Suggested follow-ups

Follow-ups are an essential part of learning from your incidents. They help to keep track of any improvements, fixes, process changes, or anything else that might need doing to help ensure you can respond your best in the future.

But in the middle of an incident, when it all gets a bit frantic, it can be easy to lose track of a discussion, or forget who was handling what, and you definitely remembered to do that thing later on right? … Right?

This is where suggested follow-ups come in!

Now, the moment an incident resolves, we will look back through the channel and spot anywhere follow-ups were discussed. We then match these against actions and follow-ups that are already created.

If we spot any that we think are missing we’ll bring them up as suggestions within the channel. You can then easily create follow-ups of the back of these suggestion. You can find a 2 minute video of this feature in action here.

We believe that this feature will help ensure that you never forget to update, write, change, fix, or delete that thing ever again. Keep an eye out for suggestions in your next incident 👀

🍪 Christmas cookies

At incident, we have a Linear project called the Cookie jar for pieces of work that are about 1-2 days long - smaller than a project but too big to be shipped as part of Product Responder. To finish up the year, we spent some time shipping (and eating) a few “Christmas cookies” for you to enjoy.

🔓 Making private incidents public

A few months ago, Slack released the ability to convert a private channel into a public one. When this happens from now on, we'll also convert the incident to be public, meaning that:

📣 It gets announced

🤖 More workflows might run

👀 It's visible to anyone in the dashboard

✍️ You can now edit previous update messages

If you edit an update, we’ll update it in Slack wherever we can (in the incident channel, and in announcements and subscriptions).

This might be useful if you have written a typo, or accidentally included some sensitive data in an incident update.

🤖 Sending workflow messages to private Slack channels

Workflow steps that post messages to Slack channels (sending a message to a channel, posting an incident announcement etc) now support selecting a private Slack channel.

That means you can notify private Slack channels just as easily as public ones!

⏱️ Setting timestamps from Slack

You can now update incident timestamps from inside Slack, using our new /inc timestamps command.

🚀 What else we’ve shipped

• 🆕 You can now edit an incident’s status via the public API (if it’s active)
• 🆕 We have added the incident’s external issue reference as an option in text editors with “Insert variable”. This will resolve to the reference (e.g.: ENG-123) of the Jira ticket created for that incident.
• 🆕 You can now choose the separator (Comma, Pipe and Semicolon) when exporting incidents to CSV.
• 🆕 Follow-ups’ priorities are now included when exporting follow-ups to CSV.
• 💅 We have rejigged the “Create Post-mortem” modal to make attaching a document link more obvious to do so.
• 💅 Pasting a link to a PagerDuty alert will not auto-invite the user who ack’ed the alert in retrospective incidents.
• 💅 We now truncate the summary of the related incident when posting in the incident channel. Don’t worry, the rest of the summary will be threaded off the same message.
• 💅 Fixed the vertical alignment of the Google connected user name in the “Configure Google” modals
• 💅 Workflow editor is now wider, giving you more real estate while creating and editing your workflows.
• 💅 Expressions with long names now truncate in the Workflow editor so they don’t run off the screen.
• 💅 The incident status bar in the dashboard now handles smaller screens better by reducing the number of statuses being displayed and truncating the status names are too long.
• 🐛 Notion post-mortem exports were failing as we could be exceeding maximum character limit for content in a table. We now correctly truncate the content.
• 🐛 We’ve fixed the post-mortem exports with a timeline item for an empty incident update.
• 🐛 We fixed a regression where our Confluence post-mortem exports were missing newlines after headings.
• 🐛 Our form validation in the Workflow editor was incorrectly marking fields as required even when you have inputted a value.
• 🐛 For workflow steps that send messages, we were incorrectly modifying the text when it has ‘%s’ in the text. We now correctly send these messages unmodified.
• 🐛 We now don’t send incident update reminders if an incident has been merged.
• 🐛 Auto-archiving incident channels will now not attempt to archive a retrospective incident
• 🐛 We now don’t suggest summaries for declined incidents
• 🐛 When you updated the summary using the “Save and notify Slack” option in the dashboard, we now create a new message in the channel.
• 🐛 We fixed the case where we incorrectly asked if the auto-created call for an incident was a debrief meeting.
• 🐛 We now correctly attach links that were created from a variable in Slack messages.
• 🐛 Marking a Google event as not a debrief will now not notify the channel that a Google event was attached (even when it didn’t attach).
• 🐛 Fixed a regression by Google’s API update, where debrief placeholders and events now will have a Google Meet automatically created as before.
• 👷 We have improved the resilience of Slack channel creation, specifically for the situation where multiple channels are being created at the same time with the same name.