July 15, 2023

Feature Releases

ServiceNow

Integrating retrospectives with ServiceNow problems

Blameless further integrates with ServiceNow with the following enhancements:

• Auto-creating a ServiceNow Problem for each Retrospective
• Auto-saving customizable Retrospective data to Service Problems
• Reporting the customizable Retrospective data via Reliability Insights

Blameless extends its integration with ServiceNow to Problem Management in addition to Incident Management, synchronizing Blameless Retrospectives deeply with ServiceNow Problems, enabling Enterprise organizations to continue relying on ServiceNow for data governance and compliance.

Blameless Retrospectives now work tightly with ServiceNow’s highly customizable Problem forms, mapping and auto-synching retrospective data to ServiceNow Problem custom fields, providing full freedom to capture retrospective data that is unique to each organization type and to continuously improve upon it.

Finally, with this wealth of historical information gathered into Retrospectives, Blameless provides a powerful framework to Engineering organizations to further learn and improve upon incidents by extracting key insights using Reliability Insights, Blameless’s embedded data analytics and reporting tool.

For a detailed overview of these new enhancements, have a look at our blog article, Share highly customizable Blameless Retrospectives as ServiceNow Problems, as well as its step-by-step embedded demos.

For more detailed information check our online documentation:

• ServiceNow custom field integration
• ServiceNow integration
• Retrospectives

Slack

Multi-bot support for Slack

Delivering Slack incident management workflows that serve many teams with many different incident types is challenging. You have a host of conditions to support at the team and organizational levels:

Team

• Teams need to customize their own Slack workflows.
• Admins must control who can access incident channels and run what commands.

Organizational

• All teams must be able to work out of the same Slack workspace.
• Sensitive incident type data needs to be isolated (e.g., Security breaches).
• Organizations need to bring their unique tech stacks.

In the first half of 2023, between Slack type settings and access control enhancements, we’ve addressed team workflow conditions. And now, for the second layer of workflow enablement, we’re focused on supporting these organizational conditions. To this aim, we’re proud to unveil Multi-bot!

Multi-bot allows companies, within the same Slack workspace, to divide their workforce across multiple different Blameless Slack bots with dedicated instances of Blameless.

How it works:

1. Each bot (3) maps to a single, isolated instance of Blameless.
2. Slack command control is based on the RBAC of the instance mapped to that bot.
3. Interaction via Slack commands with each bot is triggered by a distinct bot name:
   • /Blameless (original)
   • /Blresponse (new)
   • /Blsecurity (new)
4. Multiple bots can occupy a single Slack channel at a time, but not a single incident thread.

Create a new instance and select a new bot to pair it with, or reach out to a member of Blameless for a demo to get started. Remember, each bot connects to one instance. If you pair an in-use bot with a new instance, it will disconnect the old instance from Slack and you will have to re-authenticate it.

Retrospectives

New configurable custom tab for retrospectives

Blameless Retrospectives now include a new custom tab configurable from the Settings section under Retrospectives, making it easier for organizations to deliver higher quality Retrospectives at a faster pace with all the mandatory data needed to measure, learn, and improve your incident response operations.

The new custom tab can be enabled only for selected Retrospectives based on the incident type. It can be configured with an unlimited number of custom fields to capture data of various types, such as short-text, a multiline paragraph, a configurable single choice from a dropdown list, or a multiple choice data entry (checkboxes).

As retrospectives are all about learning, the custom tab can grow (or shrink) and be updated over time to help you capture more and more compelling data from retrospective users and better meet your reporting standards. For example, if a custom field is no longer applicable to your retrospective workflow, you can simply disable it or even delete it without losing the data that your retrospective users have captured until that point, whether the retrospective is still being completed or has already been published.

Here are the main properties of the new custom tab for Retrospectives:

• Activate and deactivate the custom tab.
• Customize the tab name.
• Display the custom tab in Retrospectives only matching a selected list of incident types.
• Customize the list of custom fields, with name and description.
• Pick one of the supported field types: Short-text, paragraph, dropdown (single choice) and Multiple choice.
• Keep custom fields disabled until ready to be displayed and used in retrospectives.
• Rename custom fields later at any time (requires users to refresh the retrospective page if open).
• Synchronize each individual custom field to a ServiceNow Problem field.

Check the following step-by-step walkthrough demo to quickly learn about the potential of this new configurable Retrospective tab. For detailed documentation, please see Custom Tab.