Slack Incident Management Blueprint

An example of managing incidents via Slack

Workflow

Incidents can be a busy and stressful time. You can alleviate some of this stress by automating it via your Slack workspace.

Incident Declarations

1. Users declare an incident using a /incident-declare command in Slack
2. IncidentBot takes this and

• Creates a channel with the naming format of #incd-YYYY-MM-DD-1234, where 1234 is a number identifying the incident
• Notifies the Incidents channel (see Environment variables used below)
• Notifies the incident responders

Incident Reporting

1. Users file reports in an incident channel using a /incident-can-report command in Slack
2. IncidentBot takes this and

• Posts a formatted message to the channel containing the report
• Pins the formatted message

Environment variables used

• BOT_TOKEN : The xoxb token for your app
• SIGNING_SECRET : The signing secret from your app configuration
• INCIDENTS_CHANNEL : A channel which recieves messages for all declared incidents

Known limitations

This is really just a proof of concept, so some shortcuts have been taken for the sake of brevity

• Incident numbers are actually just a random integer. For a production deployment, we'd recommend using a unique number with some actual significance
• Nothing is persisted to a data store. For running historical analytics etc, it would probably be useful to log all incidents to a DB
• Incident responders are hardcoded into the tool. This would probably be better served via configuration