Introduction​

Why is Slack becoming so popular in incident management?

Slack is one of the most popular communication tools used in companies. If you're part of a remote team, your team is probably on Slack or something similar like MS Teams. Although IM tools lack the communication nuances that are taken for granted in face to face interactions, they provide many other advantages:

• Access to historical data
• Asynchronous communication
• The ability to share links and documents easily
• Adding anybody in the organization to a conversation

Slack in Incident Management​

One of the trends I've noticed in incident management is the growing rise of Slack in incident response and management tools. I think this is tied to the increase in remote work after COVID-19.

COVID-19 saw a tremendous increase in the usage of Zoom, Slack, Google Meet and similar tools. Remote work increased post COVID-19, and the tools evolved to support this. A natural consequence of a bigger remote workforce was more workflows moving to remote communication tools. The tools themselves evolved as platforms and there were other tools built on top of them. Incident Management is one such workflow that has benefited.

Benefits of Using Slack in Incident Management​

• Incident lifecycle events are easier to share and analyze on such a platform. Sharing a dashboard URL, PagerDuty event link, Git commit link, link to a log file from your observability stack - these are all easy to paste in your collaboration tool.
• Communication is more streamlined. You can create dedicated incident channels and use threads to organize discussions.
• Integration with incident management tools - Slack has an extensive ecosystem of popular incident management platforms that integrate with it. These also include ticketing systems like Zendesk.
• Improved visibility - It's easier to post status updates, share the results of Root Cause Analyses (RCA), share debug logs and screenshots - because everyone in your org is on Slack (or whichever tool it is). Anyone can check progress without having to be rebriefed.
• Faster response times from on-call folks.

This explains why so many incident response and management tools are either being built using Slack as a foundation, or have tight integration with Slack.

Tools That Use Slack for Incident Management​

A non-exhaustive list of such tools and their features:

• Pagerly - Manage on-call, ticket creation, incident lifecycle all within Slack
• Incident - Lets you setup a dedicated channel per incident using a single command and manage it from there
• FireHydrant - Integrates with Slack and lets you manage incidents from there
• OpsLane - Operates directly in Slack channels, provides additional info and debugging resources
• PagerDuty - You can trigger/ack/resolve incidents directly in Slack and create on-demand Slack channels for incidents
• OpsGenie - Bidirectional integration allowing you to manage incidents
• BetterStack - The entire incident lifecycle management in a dedicated Slack channel
• Rootly - Create dedicated Slack channels, manage incident lifecycle events and on-call schedules
• Zenduty - Fetch alerts, create and assign incidents based on on-call schedules

Features of Such Tooling​

These tools are not limited to lifecycle management. They also add context to the incident:

• Links to runbooks
• Pulling in data from your infra and service catalogs
• Relevant log entries from your observability systems
• Key metrics that might be related to the incident
• On-call information including schedules and escalation policies
• Related incidents in other services
• Related incidents in third-party services

This is an evolution of the ChatOps model which created chat tooling used for devops collaboration and automation tasks.

The next level of incident management is AI-driven incident response agents, where the AI agent takes the first shot at figuring out the root cause of the incident, and proposes mitigation steps. There are already a few of those - but it will be a while before they are mature enough.

Conclusion​

Slack and other IM-based communication tools are playing an increasingly important role in the incident management process. Popular incident management platforms have tightly integrated with Slack, and some of them are built entirely using Slack as a base. The future will likely see the maturing of AI-powered incident response tools.

Photo credits: Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

Introduction​

Maintaining transparent communication about service availability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Status pages are an important part of your communication strategy during times of outages and maintenance events.

You can choose to go with a fully managed status page provider, or host an open-source one yourself.

Open source status page providers offer a cost-effective and customizable solution. However, then can come with their own drawbacks. This guide explores open source status page providers in 2024 to help you choose the right tool for your needs.

• Introduction
• List of Open Source Status Page Providers
  • 1. Cachet
  • 2. Statping-ng
  • 3. Cstate
  • 4. Upptime
  • 5. Staytus
  • 6. Vigil
  • 7. Gatus
  • 8. Statuspal
  • 9. Uptime Kuma
  • 10. OneUptime
  • 11. Kener
  • 12. OpenStatus
• Choosing the Right Open Source Status Page Provider
• Conclusion

List of Open Source Status Page Providers​

1. Cachet​

Cachet is a popular open source status page system built with PHP and Laravel. It offers a clean, minimalist design and a robust feature set.

Introduction​

Downtime is inevitable but what sets successful businesses apart is how they handle it. A key part of incident management is incident communication with both internal and external stakeholders. A status page is a crucial tool for maintaining clear communication with users during outages or service interruptions. There are numerous status page providers available with different features. This article will guide you through best practices for selecting a provider that suits your needs.

The Importance of a Status Page​

An internal status page provider your colleagues and stakeholders in your organization to get a snapshot of of the current status. It can help reduce unnecessary back and forth between teams, and help people to prioritize their work better. It also creates internal transparency and trust between teams.

An external status page is crucial if you say you are committed to open communication with your end users or customers. Whether you are B2B or B2C, a public status page would be the first thing people would check if they face issues. Being open about incidents and your efforts to mitigate them build user trust. They can also decrease support ticket volume during incidents.

You can choose an open source status page provider, or one that is managed. This guide focuses on the factors to look at while evaluating managed providers.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Status Page Provider​

1. Reliability​

Your status page needs to be accessible especially when your main services are down. Your provider should be able to guarantee a reasonable amount of

• Uptime SLA
• Globally distributed infrastructure for high availabilty
• Redundant systems to ensure failover and availability
• Scalability to handle increased traffic during major incidents

Introduction​

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. Like many modern teams, Slack might be your communication tool of choice. You can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Slack channel.

There are different ways of pushing incident events to Slack. In this article we will explore how to integrate IncidentHub incident lifecycle events using an incoming webhook. An incoming webhook can be used to send incident trigger, update, and resolve events to a specific Slack channel.

Note that IncidentHub also has an option to integrate with custom webhooks, which is different from Slack's webhooks. If you are using Slack, choose the Slack option. For a custom webhook server, choose the Webhook option. The format of the Slack webhook payload is different from that of the Slack webhook.

Slack Incoming Webhook Configuration​

You must have the correct permissions on your Slack workspace to be able to do this.

Follow these steps to configure an incoming webhook in your Slack workspace.

Introduction​

Incident updates on the public status pages of your cloud providers are often the first indication that they might have an outage. Providers also post updates about upcoming and ongoing maintenance on their status pages. Thus, monitoring your cloud status pages becomes crucial to your business operations. This article will guide you through the process of effectively monitoring such status pages.

• Introduction
• Identify Your Cloud Providers
• Locate Their Public Status Pages
• Understand the Status Page Structure
• Configure Notifications
  • Notification Challenges
• Best Practices
  • Filtering Your Monitors
  • Do Periodic Reviews
  • Have a Single View Across All Providers
• Include in Your Incident Response Plan
• Use a Monitoring Tool
  • The Benefits of Using a Monitoring Tool
• Conclusion
• FAQ

Identify Your Cloud Providers​

Work with your Dev/Ops/SRE and IT teams to come up with a comprehensive list of your cloud providers. Any service that is not managed by your teams is by definition a cloud service. Although we focus on Cloud providers - i.e. providers that let you deploy your services on their infrastructure - this article is equally applicable to any of your external SaaS vendors.

Introduction​

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. If Discord is your communication tool of choice, you can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Discord channel.

Discord webhooks allow external applications to send messages to specific channels within a Discord server. This article describes how to integrate Discord as a channel in your IncidentHub account using webhooks.

Note that IncidentHub also has an option to integrate with custom webhooks, which is different from Discord's webhooks. If you are using Discord, choose the Discord option. For a custom webhook server, choose the Webhook option.

Discord Server Webhook Configuration​

You must have the correct permissions on your Discord server to be able to do this.

Introduction​

Modern businesses depend heavily on Software as a Service (SaaS). Almost all aspects of business operations - accounting, HR, payroll, marketing, IT, sales, support - depend on one or more SaaS applications. SaaS is not limited to being used by software development teams. Given this dependency on SaaS applications, their uptime becomes tightly tied to a business's uptime. Any SaaS downtime can affect both a business's daily operations as well as the user experience.

How to check if a SaaS is experiencing downtime? Follow the steps below:

1. Visit the SaaS Provider's Status Page
2. Use External Monitoring Services
3. Check Social Media
4. Run Manual Tests
5. Incident Communication
6. Conclusion
7. FAQ
8. Popular SaaS Service Statuses

Visit the SaaS Provider's Status Page​

The SaaS provider's status page will have first-hand information about ongoing issues.

Introduction​

A recent question in an SRE forum triggered this train of thought.

How do I deal with alerts that are triggered by internal patching/release activities but don't actually cause a downtime? If we react to these alerts we might not have time to react to actual alerts that are affecting customers.

I've paraphrased the question to reflect its essence. There is plenty to unravel here.

My first reaction to this question was that the SRE who posted this is in a difficult place with systemic issues.

Systemic Issues​

Without knowing more about the org and their alerting policies, let's look at what we can dig out based on this question alone

A few weeks ago we released a feature on IncidentHub which gives you a historical view of your monitored services' availability.

Why Was This Needed?​

On the dashboard where you can add services and channels, there is an overview panel that shows total incidents in the last 24 hours. You can get into a more detailed view by clicking on the button next to it. This opens up a popup where you can see active and resolved incidents - in the last 24 hours - and filter them by service.

This panel is good enough for a quick view on what's affecting your dependent services. However, sometimes there is a need to look back further. This is what the Availability page gives you - an overview of service health over the last 30 days.

Let's look at a few examples:

Chances are, most of your third-party cloud and SaaS dependencies are globally distributed and have many regions of operation. Chances are, your applications use a subset of a cloud or SaaS service. If you are monitoring such a service, why should you receive alerts for all regions or every single component in the service?

E.g. if you use Digital Ocean, you might be using Kubernetes in their US locations (NYC and SFO). You would want to know only when there is an outage in one of these locations. Digital Ocean's status page gives you the option to subscribe to outages across the board - it’s all or nothing. This is the case with most services with a few exceptions.

Choosing Specific Components to Monitor​

You can now choose which components/regions you wish to monitor in IncidentHub. Let us continue with our Digital Ocean example.

You can choose to monitor all components: