Slack Blameless Bot
The Blameless Bot allows users to easily orchestrate incidents with less toil and provides a comprehensive framework to speed up incident resolution and data collection.
Getting Started
We recommend you first read through our quick start guide to learn some of the bot fundamentals.
Incidents through Slack
With the Blameless bot installed, users can start an Incident through Slack by running Blameless “slash” commands.
When the user runs /blameless start incident a modal will pop up asking the user to select an incident type, the severity level, and add a brief description of the incident. Any configurations made for Incident Types and Severity Namings will be populated in the Incident Creation modal as options.
Slack Incident Titles and Descriptions
Slack supports Incident Titles and Descriptiosn as separate field values. Refer to the Slack commands section for more information.
note
Blameless is limiting the Severity Label display length for Slack. The user can add more than 75 characters, but the Slack Label truncates at 75 characters in the dropdown.
Understanding Slackbot Actions
The Blameless Bot has undergone some updates to improve and clarify the actions involved.
Silent Mode
Silent Mode's replies are applied as threads to the incident in question.
Compact Mode
Blameless Bot Compact mode messaging focuses on useful information.
Tasks
Tasks are grouped by assigned user, with required tasks being tagged with an asterick, and if they have links, they are so displayed as containing a link.
Assigned User
The assigned user can now see all of their tasks grouped together at once.
Task Lists
The Task list will update as a task is completed or roles are assigned.
important
Marking non-assigned tasks as complete in Slack cannot be done (by design) (as expected), even though Slack allows anyone to “check” a check box item--implying the task has been completed.
Non-assigned tasks cannot be completed before first being assigned to a user/role. You must assign a user/role to the task first. After you assign a user/role to a task, the assignee can check the task to complete it. The task description changes to strikethrough in the window, which is the indication that the task is completed.
If you attempt to complete a non-assigned task in the Slack Incident Channel, you will be able to check it, however, it will be followed by an error message appearing at the bottom of the list of tasks.
You may need to scroll down the list of tasks to be able to see this error message and in the Task list, the task remains checked, but the description no longer has the strikethrough.
Note that the task check box will remain checked until you leave the channel and come back into the incident channel (refreshing the channel). If you do so, you will see that the task is actually still incomplete (unchecked).
Reminders
You can enable and disable reminders. When disabling the reminders, you can specify for how long (in days).
/blameless disable reminders for <*X*> days
If you do not include a number of days in the slash command, you will be prompted by the bot.
The number of days to disable retrospective reinders for. Zero disables indefinitely.
Click on the "Submit" button after entering a numeric value.
You will also be notified by the Bot that:
Reminders are currently disabled. If you want to enable reminders press the "Enable" button, referencing the "Enable Reminders" button to the right of the sentence.
Enter the following to reactivate reminders:
/blameless enable reminders.
note
If you wish to permanently disable reminders use the following:
/blameless disable reminders for 0 day
It is reversible using the Enable slash command however.
Follow up actions within Slack
The /blameless followup command allows users to choose the appropriate Jira project as opposed to a default project.
- Select a Jira Project
- Select a Jira Issue type
- Other required fields may appear depending on the select Jira Project and issue type
- Click Save
When unsupported fields are detected, a warning message is displayed listing the list of unsupported fields. In this case you should select a different Jira issue and/or Jira project which provides supported fields or contact your Jira administrator to make those fields not required.
- Close if you decide to not create a follow up action at this time. or
- Select a different issue type, or choose another project which has only supported fields.
Refer to the Slack commands section for more information.
Swimlanes
With the Blameless Slackbot swimlanes feature, you can minimize customer impact and get to resolution faster.
- When a complex incident hits, you can kick off parallel streams of investigation to get to the root cause faster
- Assign roles and create ad hoc tasks to delegate responsibilities and stay on top of critical incident progress
The Slack "/" Swimlane commands, along with the other available slash commands, appear in the following section.
Refer to the Slack Swimlanes Guide for more information.
Blameless Bot Commands
note
At any point, if you are unsure of what the slash command is, typing /blameless and pressing ENTER, will show the user various options that they can run.
Incident Management
| Action | Slash Command |
|---|---|
| General command to open the UI shell which contains other categorized commands | /blameless |
| Starts an incident of a specific severity and type | /blameless start <severity> <type> incident <incident summary> |
| Permanently deletes this incident | /blameless delete incident |
| Sets the incident severity | /blameless set severity to <severities_label> or /blameless severity |
| Sets the incident type. Note: Changing the incident type will not affect the tasks created for the incident based on the previous incident type.) | /blameless set incident type to <incident type> or /blameless type |
| Sets the incident status | /blameless set status to <Investigating/Identified/Monitoring/Resolved> or /blameless status |
| Sets the incident description | /blameless set description to <incident description> or /blameless description |
| Sets the status of the incident to Resolved | /blameless resolve |
| Shows the incident details | /blameless show incident |
| Creates a follow-up action | /blameless followup or by including #todo in a message |
| Shows the latest incidents | /blameless show incidents |
| Shows tags associated with the incident | /blameless show tags |
| Add tags to a category for the incident | /blameless add tag(s) <tag names> to <tag category> or /blameless add tag |
| Removes tags from a category for the incident | /blameless remove tag(s) <tag names> from <tag category> or /blameless remove tag |
| Displays pending and/or completed tasks assigned to you or to anyone | /blameless <show/get/list> [my/all][pending/completed] tasks |
| Displays pending and completed tasks assigned for the given incident status. | /blameless <show/get/list> all <Investigating/Identified/Monitoring/Resolved> tasks or /blameless tasks by status |
| Marks an incident or swimlane task as completed | /blameless complete task <number> |
| Marks an incident task as pending | /blameless mark pending <number> |
| Creates a new task for the incident or swimlane associated with the channel | /blameless create task <description> or /blameless add task |
| Displays key events from the incident timeline | /blameless show <events/timeline> |
| Invites user to the incident channel | /blameless invite <user> or /blameless invite |
| Assigns user to the specified incident role | /blameless assign <user> as <available role> or /blameless assign |
| Unmutes bot notifications for the current incident channel | /blameless unmute |
| Marks incident as a duplicate of another incident | /blameless duplicate of <incident_number> |
| View the "on call" engineer for a specific PagerDuty service | /blameless show oncall |
| Triggering the Escalation feature | /blameless escalate |
| Viewing the Escalation Policy | /blameless view escalation |
| Trigger a blameless alert | /blameless trigger alert |
| Set the Incident Title | /blameless title or /blameless set title to <incident title> |
note
Use the incident title command (/blameless title or /blameless set title to <incident title>) to update the incident title. Use the /blameless set description to <incident description> or /blameless description for the Incident Description. The Description is a field separate from the title.
Retrospective
| Action | Slash Command |
|---|---|
| Assign a user to a Retrospective role | /blameless assign <Retrospective/pm> <user> as <available Retrospective role> or /blameless assign pm |
| Sends Retrospective as an email. Note: Multiple email addresses can be specified by using spaces as the separator | /blameless send Retrospective as email to <email> or /blameless send rs as email |
Disable the reminders for x days | /blameless disable reminders for X days |
| Enable or Re-enable reminders | /blameless enable reminders |
note
If you set the reminders disable "time" value to zero (0), the reminders will stay disabled until you use the re-enable reminders slash command.
Swimlanes
| Action | Slash Command |
|---|---|
| Creates a swimlane for the incident | /blameless add swimlane |
| Close the swimlane | /blameless close swimlane |
| Edit the working theory for a swimlane | /blameless edit swimlane theory |
| Update the owner of the swimlane | /blameless edit swimlane owner |
| Reopen a previously closed incident swimlane | /blameless reopen swimlane |
| Shows the swimlanes for the incident | /blameless show swimlanes |
| Shows details for the selected swimlane | /blameless show swimlane |