FireHydrant is now more powerful across the entire incident lifecycle

FireHydrant has partnered with incredible companies to transform incident response inside their organizations, but our goal has always been to support the full incident lifecycle. That’s because we know that investing in good incident management can kickstart your reliability efforts when it includes both a streamlined incident response process that helps you recover faster and the ability to learn from incidents and then feed those insights back into your system.

Today we’re releasing sweeping, platform-wide improvements that give you a clear path to leveraging full-cycle incident management as the lynchpin of your reliability strategy. These new releases include

• Powerful visualizations in incident Analytics that help you identify weaknesses, track toward goals, and drive real improvement, 

• A new guided Retrospectives experience that will make it easier for your team to accelerate learnings,

• And fully redesigned and customizable public and private Status Pages to boost incident communication efforts

Let’s take a closer look. 

Set and track reliability goals with out-of-the-box analytics 

We’re just gonna say it out loud: incidents – and what you learn from them – can be a powerful weapon in your organization’s reliability strategy. But all the learnings in the world won't drive reliability forward if you're not putting them into action. Our upgraded Analytics dashboard makes it easier to see at a glance what areas of your system need more work, allowing you to set and track goals and drive toward true reliability improvements. 

FireHydrant has always automatically captured during your incidents, but now we’re putting that data to work and surfacing the insights in a beautiful, easy-to-scan dashboard. In addition to visual data on incidents by functionality and severity, you can now measure everyone’s favorite incident-related DORA metric, time to restore service, straight out of the box.  New Analytics functionality is available now in private beta. Reach out to your account manager for access. 

Learn from every incident, every time with easier retrospectives

The true power of incidents is what you learn from them and how you recycle those learnings back into your system. But the barrier to entry for learning from incidents through retrospectives is still too high. For many companies, the process is different each time, it’s cumbersome to gather data, and it’s really challenging to look at multiple retros and find trends. We want to make it so simple, predictable, and consistent for you to run retros that you run them for every incident. Today’s release brings that possibility to light. 

Guided retrospective workflow 

A new guided workflow delivers a consistent, predictable process for every retrospective. Make the most of your post-incident discussion with out-of-the-box prompts for each phase of the retrospective to eliminate that “what are we supposed to be figuring out here, again?” overhead. 

Incident participation stats 

Knowledge silos make it harder for teams to successfully resolve incidents and keep the learnings trapped in one person’s head. Around here, we call that the Shaq effect. It’s time to democratize incident participation and break down those silos. 

New incident participation stats give you a look at the people and teams represented in your incidents. This helps you identify knowledge silos and over-reliance on any one team or person — ultimately ensuring that learning from incidents is an everyone thing. You’ll be able to see how long people were involved and how frequently they communicated. These stats can be useful to discuss during your retrospectives and help you identify where siloed knowledge might be lurking in your organization. 

Inspire confidence with customizable status pages

Keeping stakeholders and customers informed during an incident builds trust and buys grace. And status pages are often the first place those folks go for information, so it’s important that they give your users the right confidence-boosting signals from the get-go. 

Fully-redesigned FireHydrant Status Pages are now better organized and easier to read. Plus, they can now be customized to suit your brand – right down to the favicon. These design updates come complete with massive performance improvements, so you can confidently post your updates knowing they’ll be live in an average of ~100ms. 

Put the incident lifecycle to work for your organization 

Today’s releases are designed to help you unlock the next phase of incident management. It’s time to push beyond simply resolving incidents faster and take real steps forward on your reliability journey. And we’re right here to help with that. 

If you’re looking for guidance or support as you think about how to build trust with customers and stakeholders and use every part of the full incident lifecycle to drive improvements in your processes and systems, I’d love to talk. And if you’re as reliability obsessed as I am, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you, too. You can always reach me at Dylan [at] firehydant [dot] com to share your perspective and help inform what we’re building.