This section provides instructions on how use the Blameless app in Microsoft Team to start incidents from any channels from within a team and how run an incident from within a dedicated group chat, created automatically by Blameless when starting a new incident.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Prerequisites
• Getting Started
• Starting an incident
• Running an incident
  • Joining the incident group chat
  • Adding users to the group chat
  • Using Blameless commands
  • Overview Tab
  • Help Tab

Prerequisites

Working in Microsoft Teams​

When Blameless is integrated with Microsoft Teams, incidents can be started in different ways:

• From Microsoft Teams (described in this section)
• From the Blameless web UI
• From an alert triggered from PagerDuty or Opsgenie, when integrated with Blameless using webhooks configured in PagerDuty or Opsgenie. 

To start and work on a Blameless incident from within Microsoft Teams, you interact with the Blameless app in the following ways:

• Using the @blameless command in either a team channel or a group chat
• Using the Overview tab, added automatically to each incident group chat

When the @blameless command is used in a team channel, you have access to the following actions as suggestions and as buttons:

Suggestions	Card

When the @blameless command is used in a group chat, you have access to the following suggested actions and list of Blameless commands:

Suggestions	Card

Tips

• To see the suggestions: @blameless + hit ENTER + click one of the suggestions

Starting an Incident​

Start a Blameless incident in Microsoft Teams by mentioning the app @blameless from any channel (e.g. General channel if present) from within the team where the Blameless app has been installed:

Upon mentioning the Blameless app, it will provide you a list of command options, including starting an incident and showing recent incidents:

Alternatively, you can directly autocomplete the @blameless mention with the suggestion to start the incident as follows.

1. Type @blameless, then type “Enter” once to see the following suggestions:

2. Type “Enter” two more times to enter and immediately execute the Start incident command

After you click "Start Incident" or posted the command @blameless Start incident, the app prompts you to specify a type, severity and title as required fields to complete:

Additional dropdown options may be present in the Start Incident card, if Blameless is integrated with any of the following service catalogs:

Services selected at the start of the incident are added to the list of impacted services for the newly created incident.

Once the incident starts, the app will display the following announcement (aka incident summary) and create a dedicated group chat.

Click on the link to the newly created group chat (under Group Chat) to start working on the incident:

Note: You can also open and log in to the Blameless web platform and view the incident from there. Click on the link at the top of the announcement card.

Running an Incident

After creating an incident from a team channel, it's time to work through the incident and manage it with the help of the Blameless app, which offers the following built-in capabilities:

• Invite (add) users to the group chat, which automatically adds users to the incident team
• Assign roles to delegate tasks to users
• Complete and add tasks based on assigned roles
• View and add tags to capture context about the incident 
• Trigger alerts (if the integration with PagerDuty or Opsgenie is enabled) to recruit and automatically invite users to the group chat
• Collect data posted in the chat by adding messages, files and images to the incident timeline
• Update the status, severity or type of the incident from the Overview tab
• Consult the Help tab and online documentation for any help regarding those Blameless capabilities

Joining the incident group chat

The dedicated group chat is populated with the incident summary to provide immediate context.

Note: You can also open and log in to the Blameless web platform and view the incident from there as well. Click on the link at the top of the announcement card.

As a first step, the incident creator will be prompted with some suggested actions to start managing the incident.

In addition to the initial suggestions, the App provides several commands to facilitate workflows during the incident after invoking the @blameless app:

The following table lists available app commands to help manage the various aspects of an incident. 

Adding users to the group chat

Users can be added manually and automatically to the incident group chat:

Users added automatically

• Creator of the incident
• Users paged via Opsgenie and PagerDuty
• Users listed as automatically invited users in the incident type settings

Users added manually

• Users added using the Blameless “Invite Users” command
• Users added using Microsoft Teams group chat native capabilities

Using Blameless Commands

Invite Users

Users can be invited using Blameless command. 

Assign Roles

Users can assign roles by selecting a role/user combination from the drop-downs. 

Upon role assignment, the app shows a success message and displays the tasks list for the current incident status. 

Incident Tasks

The Blameless app facilitates managing tasks during an incident via several commands designed to allow for ease when adding, assigning, and completing your incident tasks. Tasks provide a mechanism by which you can ensure that certain items are completed or suggested during an incident lifecycle. These tasks can be assigned to each phase of the incident, as well as to a specific role or owner. 

As the incident progresses through each subsequent phase, the tasks for that phase will become available. If a task was marked as required, the incident cannot move to another incident status until that task is completed.

Interacting with Tasks

1. To mark a task as complete or incomplete, simply select the "View Tasks" command.
2. Toggle the task checkboxes accordingly. 
3. Click "Update Task(s)".

Upon successfully toggling task states, the app responds with a summary of the task changes.

Add Task

1. To create a new task, first select a task assignee type: 

• a role specific task or 
• a user specific task 

2. Next, based on your assignee type selection, select either a role to assign the new task to. 

3. Finally, enter a task description and add the task.

Upon successfully creating a new task, the Blameless app will present the task list which includes the newly created task:

Incident Tags

The Blameless app allows you to add tags to incidents as additional standardized context to help incident responders with the investigation, during the production of retrospective post-incidents and for reporting purposes using Reliability Insights in Blameless.

With the following Blameless commands, you can add, view and delete tags for one or more tag categories which are configurable in the main settings of your Blameless account (see Tag Management settings).

Manage Tags To add or remove tags, select the "Manage Tags" command (Show All Commands > Tags > Manage Tags)	View Tags You can view your tags at any time via the "View Tags" command (Show All Commands > Tags > Show Tags)
After you apply tags to one or more tag categories, click on “Manage Tags” to apply your changes and the app responds confirming the newly added or removed tags:

On-call 

The Blameless app allows you to streamline your on-call workflow during an incident, including the following capabilities, depending on the paging services your Blameless account is integrated with:

Note the on-call commands are not visible in the “Show All commands” if the integration with PagerDuty nor Opsgenie is enabled.

Trigger Alerts

There are multiple ways to triggers alerts from the group chat:

• Click on the “Triggers Alert” button present in the Welcome Message posted in the group chat right after its creation
• Mention the Blameless app with @blameless to display the card providing access to the list of Blameless commands, and select the “Trigger Alert” command in the on-call dropdown list.
• Click on the “Trigger Alert” button from the response from the “Show on-call” card for given service

If the integration with PagerDuty is enabled:

Mention @blameless in the group chat thread and select the “Trigger Alert” in the “On-call” dropdown list to display the following card:

The following confirmation is posted after selecting a given service and clicking on the “Trigger Alert” button: 

If the integration with Opsgenie is enabled:

Show on-call

Mention @blameless in the group chat thread and select the “Show on-call” in the “On-call” dropdown list to display the following card:

After selecting a service and click “Show On-call”, the app responds with the name of the user that is on call for the selected service

Optionally, you can view the corresponding escalation policy or trigger an alert for this service.

Click on “Trigger Alert” to trigger an alert for the selected service:

Show escalation policy

Mention @blameless in the group chat thread and select the “Show escalation policy” in the “On-call” dropdown list to display the following card:

Upon selecting a service and clicking on “Show Escalation Policy”, the app responds with the following information about the escalation policy for the given service:

Capturing messages and images into the incident timeline

During an incident, you can also capture important messages, files, and images as highlights to the incident timeline via the messages action menu.

In the top right of a message box, click on the ellipse (...) to bring up the “More actions” menu and select “Capture highlight” to automatically capture the text as a new timeline event.

The application confirms the successfully capture of the message, image or file in the incident timeline with the following message:

Click on the “Overview” tab in the incident group chat to see the incident timeline update with the capture message or image.

Overview Tab

Click on the Overview tab to easily view a high level summary of the incident and take the following actions:

• Change incident status
• Change incident severity
• Change Incident type
• View the incident timeline
• View the team members
• Access links to external tickets (Jira and/or ServiceNow)
• Access the link to the associated video conference (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc)

Authenticating to Blameless

After clicking on the Overview tab, you may need to sign in to Blameless if you have not done so before. 

You may need to log in using one of the following two ways:

1. Use your Microsoft Teams credentials to login to Blameless, if Blameless SSO has been integrated with your Microsoft Active Directory authentication service (recommended).
2. Otherwise, use the Blameless credentials (email and password) you used when you signed up directly with Blameless (see SIGN UP). The domain name of your email address still needs to match the domain name that your Blameless account accepts.

Contact your Blameless administrator for more information about the status of your integration with your Microsoft Active Directory authentication service.

Click on “Sign In”:

After you click on “Sign In”, Blameless ask you to log in with your credentials (Microsoft Teams credentials if SSO has been enabled with Blameless and your Microsoft Active Directory or your Blameless credentials):

If Blameless has been integrated with your Microsoft Active Directory authentication service for single-sign-on, you will just need to enter the email address you used to login to Microsoft Teams, otherwise you will be asked to enter a password, if you signed up directly with Blameless:

After you successfully signed in to Blameless using your Microsoft Teams credentials (highly recommended), the Overview tab will be updated as followed:

Help Tab

Users are able to view what Blameless commands are available in an Incident.