Major incidents can have hundreds of responders, and even more following updates along the way. In incidents like these there are lots of moving parts:
Teams like engineering, communications, legal...
Different impacts across products, services or regions with different groups working on mitigations
Groups exploring independent approaches towards resolution, or investigations on root causes
Manage the complexity by breaking large scale incidents into 'Streams', each of which will have it's own Slack channel, Zoom/Meet call, and distinct leads and participants.
🎏 Creating a stream
To create a stream, simply type /incident stream in an incident channel.
You'll be presented with a modal to:
Set a name for the stream
Assign someone as the stream lead - this will usually be a different person to the main incident lead to avoid splitting their focus
Invite anyone else who should collaborate on the stream
You can also create streams from the incident dashboard.
We'll create a new Slack channel for the stream, and invite the stream lead and any participants.
💡 If you've configured automatic call links we'll also create one for your stream. If not, you can also manually link a video call from the stream channel, just like in an incident channel.
📢 Updating a stream
To create an update, simply type /incident update in a stream channel, just like you would in an incident channel.
You'll be presented with a modal that:
Allows you to provide a short message to update people with what's going on ('Can you share any more details')
Lets you set a reminder for your next update: no need to remind yourself manually! We will come back and remind you when an update is due.
Alternatively, you can share an update from the stream in the dashboard.
Any updates shared here will be posted in the stream channel, and also announced in the incident channel for anyone following along there.
✅ Closing a stream
Once a stream of work is complete, type /incident close in the stream channel.
You'll be presented with a modal that asks you to provide a final update on the stream.
The stream will be marked as as closed, and the final update will be posted in the incident channel to keep everyone up to speed.
You can also close a stream from the dashboard the same way you provide an update.
👩🚒 Roles in streams
Just like incidents, you should nominate a person to lead each stream. We recommend you have a separate lead for each stream to the incident, as they cover different areas of work in different Slack channels.
If you have set up custom incident roles, we’ll also make those available in streams. Any role available in the parent will be available in its streams.
From within the stream channel you can use commands such as /inc lead and /inc handover just as you would in an incident to reassign the roles in that stream.
🗺 Streams in your incident timeline
Activity that occurred in a stream will be included in your incident timeline in both the dashboard, and your exported postmortem. We’ll highlight which stream each item occurred in.
We’ll detect the same types of events automatically as incidents, for example updates and role changes within a stream. You can also pin messages in a stream channel and these will be pinned to the incident timeline.
🔒 Restricting access to streams
This can be done by making a private stream from a public incident. Read more about that here.
⚡️ Streams shortcuts cheatsheet
If you've learnt just one command you can use it in streams too!
/inc while in a stream's Slack channel will pop up a menu of all the actions you can run in a stream.
Emojis
From an stream's Slack channel, you can react to messages with:
📌 | Pins the message from the stream to the incident's timeline |
📣 | Turns the message into an Update |
Slack Commands
ROLES |
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| Make someone the stream lead
💡
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| View, assign and unassign roles in the stream |
| Hand over responsibilities in a stream to another user. |
COMMUNICATION |
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| Provide an internal status update to your team about the stream |
| Provide a closing update, and mark the stream as closed |
| Request an internal status update from the stream lead |
| Pull in other teammates for help
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| Set a call link
💡 |