Declaring incidents

Something has gone wrong, and we need to respond! 🧯

There are 3 ways to kick-off a real incident (you can create test incidents if you want to run experiments and do dry runs without affecting production incidents!).

1️⃣ Use /incident (or /inc)

From any channel in Slack, typing /inc or /incident and hitting Enter will pop up the incident creation form.

💡 Tooltips

• If you know your incident's title/summary, you can type extra text directly at the end of the /incident to pre-fill the incident form's "What's going on?" field (e.g. /inc Website is down)

• Using /incident in a dedicated incident channel (the #inc-... ones) won't declare an incident, but instead will open up a menu of actions on that specific incident (e.g. change the severity, update the Statuspage etc.).

2️⃣ Turn a message into an incident

You just need to hit the 3 built-in dots on a Slack message and click 'Create an incident' 👇🏼 (we explain how to do this in-depth)

3️⃣ Use inc.new in your browser to create a incident within the dashboard

Here you can create a new live or retrospective incident.

Just fill out all the details of the incident you're declaring, and it will be declared in Slack too!

Regardless of which method you choose, we'll trigger a form asking for some basic information about the incident - all totally customisable!

💡 In the heat of the moment, you don't even need to fill out the form before hitting Create: by default, we'll kick off a low-severity incident with a randomly generated name (both the name and severity are easy to change later via /inc rename and /inc update).

We'll also tell your team about the new incident via the incident announcements channel (#incidents by default, but you can change the announcement rules).

Ready to rumble! 🧑‍🚒