Incident types
How to add a new incident type
- In the left sidebar of the Blameless UI, select Settings.
- Expand Incident Workflows and select Incident Types.
- Select + New Type.
- In the Add Type panel, configure the new incident type and select Save:
- Incident Type Name: Enter a meaningful name for the new incident type.
- Group Name: Enter a Group name and associate this new Incident type with an existing group via group a Email address (below). Groups can be used to associate permissions for Blameless resources such as incidents and retrospectives and a collection of users.
- Email: Enter an email for the group.
- Description (optional): Enter a brief description of the incident type.
- To manage and configure settings for your new incident type, select the incident type name from the list of incident types.
Incident type settings
Incident type settings are organized into the following expandable/collapsible categories:
- Manage Incident Details: Incident channel naming and privacy, timestamp and video conferencing recording.
- Invite & Notify Team Members: Make incident announcements in your messaging channels and invite selected team members to join the dedicated incident channels.
- Trigger Alerts: Notify responders of the selected services via your alerting tools.
- Create Ticketing: Automatically create incidents for tickets and link follow-up actions for easier progress tracking.
- Assign Roles & Tasks: Assign team members with a role and the designated task checklist to help the team move forward faster and seamlessly collaborate.
- Create Retrospective Reports: Provide a retrospective template. Record and analyze what went wrong and how the team resolved the incident.
Manage incident details
Force incident creation via webhooks
This allows webhook requests from Integrations using webhooks (i.e., PagerDuty) to create a new incident even when existing incidents are in progress.
Incident naming scheme
As mentioned in the "Getting Started" section, when you click on the Incident naming scheme field, a dropdown of options appears. These include:
-
Numeric
-
Date
-
Issue Name
-
Pet Name
Create or update the Incident naming schemes as needed.
-
Numeric: This scheme follows INC-\<num>, i.e., INC-123.
-
Date format: The date takes on the YYMMDD format. If there are multiple Incidents, the date format will append “-1”,”-2”, etc. to the name.
-
Issue Name: This scheme uses \<project-Issue-ID>as the format.
-
Pet Name: You can create your own name to coincide with your product or naming conventions. Incident \<Adjective>\<Noun> is the format.
For example: _incident-dear-camel#_incident-glad-husky
Create a private Slack channel
Blameless allows you to create and map Incident(s) to both public (default value) and private Slack channels.
End of customer impact timestamp
By default, the “End of Customer Impact” date and time (timestamp) for an incident is initially automatically set when the incident status is changed to “Resolved”.
After it has been set, users have the option to manually change the end of customer impact date and time for an incident via the Blameless web UI
Optionally, you can have the end of customer impact date and time set automatically to an earlier incident status such as “Monitoring”.
Use the pull-down list to select one of the supported incident states (bullet list below), as the earliest state that will automatically set the end of customer impact date and time (timestamp) for an incident:
-
Identified
-
Investigating
-
Monitoring
-
Resolved (default)
Note: If an incident status goes directly to “Resolved”, without being set to the selected intermediate incident status, it will also automatically set the end of customer impact date and time. Blameless provides the flexibility to users to change the status of an incident back and forth without restrictions. If the incident status is changed again to the selected status, the end of customer impact date and time is not updated. It is only set the first time the incident status changes to the above selected status.
Auto-recording for Zoom meetings
Enable to automatically record all Zoom meetings launched from the incident-provided videoconferencing link.
Invite & notify team members
Invited Slack users or groups
You can identify which groups or users have been invited to monitor this particular Incident type.
To Add users or groups: Enter the "@user" / "@group name" and press Enter. For example: @Engineering
.
Make announcements in Slack channels
You can enter the invited channels here targeting specific Incidents. To Add Slack Channels: Enter the hashtag channel name and press ENTER. For example: #Announcements
.
Trigger alerts
PagerDuty auto-trigger incidents
Enable auto-trigger of PagerDuty incidents for this incident type via the slider, and then select a PagerDuty service for which to auto-trigger an alert. When a Blameless Incident gets triggered, by activating this feature, a PagerDuty event also occurs. Refer to the PagerDuty Integration Guide.
Create ticketing
Configure incident ticket settings
These fields are used to automatically create new Jira tickets for incidents.
- In the Jira Project field, enter text ⏤ any matching Jira projects immediately appear for selection.
- In the Jira Issue Type field, select the type of issue that should be created. Available options are based on your Jira configuration.
- In the Summary field, select which text should be used as a summary for the new ticket. Options include incident ID, title, or description.
Configure follow-up action ticket settings
These fields are used to automatically create a follow-up Jira ticket that is linked to the auto-created ticket above.
- In the Jira Project field, enter text ⏤ any matching Jira projects immediately appear for selection.
- In the Jira Issue Type field, select the type of issue that should be created. Available options are based on your Jira configuration.
- In the Incident/Follow-up Jira Ticket Link Type field, select the link type for the follow-up ticket:
- none
- blocks
- clones
- duplicates
- Incident Follow Up
- causes
- relates to
Assign Roles & Tasks
Assign a role to incident creator
When an incident is launched, this auto assigns a role to the creator of a blameless incident.
Role with full task permissions
Checklist tasks
The Checklist Tasks section contains the default and customizable list of tasks to be executed at each stage of the incident for the selected incident type:
- Investigating
- Identified
- Monitoring
- Resolved
Each task can be assigned to a default incident role, which are defined and customizable at the Organization level (See[Organization Settings]). If no incident role is assigned to a task, the incident role can be assigned by users during the resolution of an incident, directly in the incident channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Tasks can be marked as completed (or uncompleted) only by a Slack user or Microsoft Teams user which has been assigned this incident role.
In Slack or Microsoft Teams, only tasks corresponding to the current status of an incident are displayed. Therefore, the list of tasks will automatically change to the list of tasks corresponding to the status the incident is changed to, unless you have required tasks which have not been marked as completed. If you change the incident to a status which has previously been selected for this incident, the list of tasks is updated and the tasks previously completed remain completed.
Note: The double stack of six dots allows the user to drag and drop the order of the Tasks.
Customizing Tasks
Each task can be customized as followed:
- Title (text field)
- Incident role (dropdown menu)
- Required (Asterisk)
- URL link (Ellipse)
- Recurrent frequency (Ellipse)
Selecting the asterisk flags this subtask as a required event. If selected, the asterisk changes color to red.
Note: A Required Task must be marked as completed before the status of an Incident can be changed to a different status.
Adding a Task
Click the "+Add Task" at the bottom of each task section (incident status) to add a new task. You can then next move the task up and down the list by dragging the double stack of six dots in front of the task.
Deleting a Task
Select the "Trash can" icon at the end of each task to delete the task.
Create retrospective reports
Analysis template
This feature allows the user to create a structured, standard template to document the results and to suggest improvements.
Note: The Analysis template is built in the Settings > Incident Types section. The end product appears in the Retrospective.
Custom questions
Allows creation of custom question sets using JSON Schema format as part of the Retrospective section. The upper left corner of the JSON window has three tools for editing the JSON code.
-
Displaying the JSON Data
-
Displaying a compact version of the JSON Data
-
Repairing the JSON data
Note: You can click on the “Example” button to see a sample FAQ using JSON.
The JSON-based custom questions are built in the Incident Type settings window, but displayed in the Retrospective window.
Completion SLA
Allows the user to set up completion alerts per SLA rules regarding when the Incident and Retrospective must be completed by.
Require retrospective
Setting the slider to active forces the Incident team to complete a Retrospective of the incident.
Require resolved incident
Optionally, you can prevent users from changing the status of a retrospective from beingPublished
,Not Required
,Approved
orRejected
, before the incident status is changed toResolved
.
Note: This setting is disabled by default.
If this setting is disabled, a retrospective can be marked asPublished
,Not required
,Approved
orRejected
before the incident is resolved, otherwise these retrospective states will be disabled in a retrospective.
For more Information, refer to the Retrospective Changing State.
Enable reminders to complete retrospective
The reminder to complete the Retrospective will default to the Incident Commander ONLY if no Retrospective Owner is assigned at the time of resolution or the time of the first SLA reminder.
Note: The Retrospective Owner does not default to the Incident Commander as part of the Blameless Incident process.
Finalize Incident Type
When done, select Save.
Impacted services
Configure the default services.
ServiceNow Auto-assign Service
Enable auto-assign ServiceNow services to incidents via the slider. When a Blameless Incident gets triggered, by activating this feature, a ServiceNow event also occurs. Refer to the ServiceNow Integration Guide.
ServiceNow Services
If activating auto-assign above, selecting the ServiceNow services (appearing in the drop down) will assign those services to incidents of this type.
Opsgenie auto triggers
Enable auto-trigger of Opsgenie alerts for this incident type via the slider. When a Blameless Incident gets started, an Opsgenie alert is triggered for each preselected Opsgenie service. Refer to the Opsgenie Integration Guide.
Opsgenie Services
If activating auto-triggers above, selecting the Opsgenie services (appearing in the drop down) will trigger the alerts to the preselected services.
Microsoft Teams Settings
Team for Incident Announcements
-
Select the Teams within which to select channels for incident announcements upon incident creation.
-
Start typing; Blameless will provide a list of recognized teams, refining the list as you type.
Note:
- Notification can be sent only to channels/users which have the Blameless app installed
- Teams settings which only show up when Blameless is integrated with Microsoft Teams
Note: All fields are mandatory.
Channel(s) for Incident Announcements
-
Select the channel(s) for Blameless to post a message announcing each new incident upon creation.
-
Start typing; Blameless will provide a list, refining the list as you type.
Invited Microsoft Teams Users
-
Select the channel(s) for Blameless to post a message announcing each new incident upon creation.
-
Start typing; Blameless will provide a list, refining the list as you type.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.