Year-to-Date Product Updates

We've had a jam-packed year and it's only September. Here are some of the product releases we’ve had to date, from new features to updates for incidents, integrations, Runbooks, and more. Keep reading to see what’s new and improved with FireHydrant and what you can leverage for your team. 

Incidents

Streamlined Incident Header view

The new Incident Header streamlines the incident response process by giving you access to multiple important functions from one central location on the overview page of an Incident. The header now includes “Elapsed Time” under the incident title, an Edit button to view and edit important incident details, and the ability to update incident milestones, severity, and more.

Incident Tags

Have you ever tried pulling a report, only to come out of it with more questions than answers? We have, and that’s why, at FireHydrant, we can’t emphasize the importance of clean, reliable metadata enough. Metadata is the foundation for effectively defining the scope of your search and easily getting answers, and that starts with tags.

We’ve added Incident Tags to empower you to store more metadata on your incidents. This makes it easier to query and get actionable insights compared to traditional labels. Now, with Incident Tags, you can tag incidents, filter by tags, and even automate Runbooks based on tag conditions. Some incident tag examples include: cause codes, customer impact conditions, types of incidents.

Learn about all of the ways you can add tags to incidents in FireHydrant, how to query by tags in the API and Incidents List, and how to set Runbook conditions using tags in our Help Center. 

Templatize your incident types

Do you consistently have similar types of incidents? Do you wish that the correct infrastructure was always attached to the incidents that you consistently spin up? 

Using incident types you can now template all of the details, including runbooks, to include on an incident with only one selection. Learn more about how to implement types and get your team to open incidents faster and more reliably.

Customer Impact Incident Field

Let's face it: incidents are most painful when your customers are impacted. We've decided to prioritize customer impact in FireHydrant. Now you can include customer impact in your incident state, reference it in Runbook steps, and put it on your retrospectives.

Other Incident features include: 

• Using incident updates will now always post to the internal status page for an incident whether on Slack or the UI

• Added ability to reopen incidents from the web UI

• Display active incidents on individual service pages

Runbooks

Runbook templates

An easier way to automate your processes. Starting out with Runbooks can be daunting, we've built a way to implement our best practices into a Runbook that can be implemented in a single click. On top of this, there are now even more ways to attach Runbooks to your incidents and a much easier way to test out the Runbook that you're currently working on.

Assign a role from a Runbook step

We've expanded the assignment functionality, so you can now assign a role based on a Runbook step, instead of just a team. Leveraging our automation platform, you can assign roles to your users, current on-calls synced from alerting schedules, AND the person who opened the incident. Now you can ensure the incident opener is the initial incident commander! Learn more here

Other Runbook features include: 

• Ability to take the same conditional evaluation from Runbookks and filter your analytics based on that. 

• Use additional variables in Runbooks for more customization. incident.last_update gives you the last note that was posted to the incident, and incident.report_id gives you the id of the retrospective that is created so you can link to our generated pdf from any Runbook step that takes template variables

• Add Tiers to services and Runbook conditions

• Added the ability to search in all Runbook step configuration dropdowns

Data & Analytics

The MTTR that matters: Mean Time to Retrospective

Improve your team's understanding of incidents and their severities with our new Retrospectives metrics card. The Retrospectives metrics card highlights impactful data, focusing on Mean Time to Retrospective aka Mean Retro Gap, capturing insights on how quickly your team is reaching the retrospective phase.

 From a high level, you can assess your operational maturity by looking at percentages of retros completed per incident, minimum time to complete a retro, maximum time to complete a retro, and average time to completing a retro.

Other data and analytics features include: 

• Update graphs on the overview page and improve analytics algorithms

• Ability to export incident data based on the current filter view as a CSV

• Ability to search/filter for projects in the FireHydrant UI

• Display better user meta-information on teams page

Integrations

Declare incidents from Opsgenie, VictorOps, and Checkly

FireHydrant can automatically associate incidents to alerts, assign team members to on-call schedules, open incidents in Slack in a single click from new alerts, and more. Customers who’ve leveraged our alerting integrations have seen their mean time to respond drop by 75%! 

Not only do we support Opsgenie, we also support VictorOps and Checkly as well! Enjoy the ability to manage your response in FireHydrant no matter which alerting provider you use. 

Integrate VictorOps

Integrate Opsgenie

Integrate Checkly

Create Google Meet incident bridges automatically

Using the power of FireHydrant Runbooks, a Google Meet can be added with fully customizable titles and agendas based on your incident details. With the FireHydrant and Google Meet integration, you can:

1. Set a Runbook step that spins up a Google Meet

2. Spin up multiple Google Meet per incident

3. Automatically post the Google Meet link in all incident messages that get posted in Slack

4. Use it as a Runbook Template variable

5. View the Google Meet link in the incident header and table

Integrate Google Meet

Other Integration features include: 

• Option to configure multiple connections for the same integration

• Ability to associate reporter of FireHydrant action item to Jira Cloud reporter

Slack 

Customizable Slack modals

At FireHydrant, we want to give you the option to customize how incidents get declared to fit your current workflow. The new customizable Slack incident modal enables you to easily configure which fields you would like to appear in your modal if you have requirements that differ from the default settings. Learn more and find various modal recipes in the Help Center to start customizing your new incident workflow in FireHydrant today. 

Use /fh and /incident

Let’s face it, typing out /firehydrant in Slack every time you want to run a command takes too long. We have introduced two new commands that behave in the exact same way as /firehydrant but shorter! Now you can use /fh or /incident in Slack to interact with the bot.

Other Slack features include: 

• Display initial incident message to a user joining Slack channel for the first time

• New Slack scope available for pinning an initial incident message

• Ability to configure what emoji causes a message to be starred in the FireHydrant timeline

• Ability to add a response emoji when FireHydrant has successfully starred a timeline event in Slack (defaults to :fire: but can be changed)

• Added buttons to run commands from Slack help menu

• Allow for star reactions in Slack to work when the incident is already resolved

• Invite all users to a channel in Slack if they already are assigned a role

• Using incident updates will now always post to the internal status page for an incident whether on Slack or the UI

Other features to check out:

API

• New ConnectionStatuses API endpoint provides connection statuses about integrations

Roles and Ownership Assignments

• Added assigned roles to incident messages posted by FireHydrant

• Added the ability to properly assign service ownership from the "Teams" page

• Allow associating owning team to a service

Status pages

• Allow for internal status pages to be turned off