Respond to an Incident

Centralizing incident management

Blameless leverages its highly versatile App for Slack and App for MS Teams to centralize incident management workflows. Our approach is designed to provide you with the tools you need to quickly triage and communicate with colleagues in a familiar communication platform.

When an incident response has started, the bot creates a dedicated incident management channel that:

• Provides communications updates to you and members of your response team;
• Automatically captures incident details for inclusion in an incident timeline; and,
• Centralizes all incident communications and data capture for subsequent analysis.

Let's learn how to create an incident response.

Start an incident response

1. In Slack, enter /blameless start incident
   1. The Start Incident modal appears.

Define the incident

2. In the Type field, select the type of incident, such as a Software Bug, Customer Incident, etc. ⎯ these are entirely customizable.
3. In the Severity field, select the expected severity level of the incident. These are also customizable.
4. In the Incident Title field, enter a short but descriptive incident title.
5. In the Incident Description field, enter an optional description of the nature of the incident given current available information.
6. Click Submit.
   1. The Blameless App for Slack displays the details of the new incident and also provides a link to its dedicated Slack channel.

What happens next?

When a new incident is started, Blameless creates the infrastructure needed to facilitate the successful triage of the incident.

This includes:

• Creation of a new incident channel in Slack (see below) that acts as a dedicated environment to triage incidents.
• A Jira or ServiceNow ticket, based on your integration.
• A video conference link, such as Zoom.
• Launch of customizable tasks.

Explore the incident channel

The newly-created Slack channel⎯specific to the incident you just created⎯is your dedicated space for triaging the incident, from initial recruitment of responders to understanding analytics post-resolution.

Some suggested first steps:

• Navigate to the incident channel
  • In the display message that appeared after incident creation, click the unique incident channel link under the Slack Channel header. 
• View tasks
  • The dedicated incident channel contains customizable Tasks designed to guide a responder along a required resolution workflow.
• View available commands
  • Learn how to manage your new incident in Slack by entering /blameless to see a list of available commands.

To learn more about incident management, please see the following topics.