Audiences Delivers Role-Based Incident Comms, Learn and Configure FireHydrant Faster with Fire Academy

Hey there, firefighters 🧑‍🚒 Lots of share with you this week!

🎭 Introducing Audiences

The right message, to the right people, automatically.

When incidents happen, communication is everything — but not everyone needs the same details. Customer Support needs to know what users are experiencing and potential workarounds, executives need big-picture updates and timelines, and engineering teams need deep technical details.

With Audiences, every stakeholder gets exactly what they need — automatically and in a way that makes sense to them.

🔑 Key Features

• Customizable Audience Profiles: Get started fast with ready-to-go templates for Customer Support, Executives, Engineering teams, and more — and easily customize to fit your exact needs.
• Audiences in the Web UI: Switch between Audience views in the Incident Summary, and easily set your personal default view.
• Audiences in Slack: Get role-based Incident Summaries directly in Slack. Use /fh summary to switch views and /fh me to set your personal default.
• Automate Audience Updates: Automate Audience-specific messaging using liquid template variables in Runbooks, so you don’t have to craft manual updates.

🚀 Available Now: If you have AI features enabled, you can start using Audiences today! Organization owners can customize them in Settings.

Check out the blog to learn more.

🔥 Welcome to Fire Academy

Learn FireHydrant, your way.

New tools can feel overwhelming — that’s why we built Fire Academy, our new learning platform designed to get your team up to speed quickly.

📚 What’s Available Now

Incident Management Training

• Responders: How to navigate and manage incidents effectively
• Configuration: Set up FireHydrant quickly for your team

Signals Alerting Training

• Responders: Learn to make sense of alerts and prioritize what matters

Integrations Training

• Jira Cloud Integration: Set up and optimize your ticketing workflow

🎯 Access Fire Academy directly from the dropdown menu in right corner of the web UI — no extra login required! You can even assign specific training to team members to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

💬 Incident Settings in Slack Now More Intuitive and Customizable

We've rolled out major improvements to our Slack integration to make your incident notifications and updates more informative and customizable:

• Configurable Links: Control which links appear in non-incident channels (like #support) so teammates get exactly what they need.
• Incident Type Context: Notifications now include Incident Type with emoji (📛) for instant clarity.
• Improved Settings UI: We've completely reorganized the settings screen with clearer section headers and more functional layout.
• Custom Message Field Improvements: Now placed in a more intuitive spot, making setup smoother.

📝 Retrospectives Collaboration: Smoother Editing & Better Inactivity Handling

We've improved how FireHydrant handles inactive users in the collaborative editor in Retrospectives to prevent accidental overwrites and lost work — so your team can collaborate with confidence.

• Stale User Detection: Users inactive for 2 minutes (or 30+ seconds after switching back to a tab) now receive connection status warnings.
• View-Only Mode: Inactive users can’t edit but still see real-time updates from others.
• Seamless Reconnection: Restores collaboration without losing context or overwriting changes.

⛑️ New Integration Health Status Monitoring

A new global Integration Health Status indicator in the navigation bar allows Organization Owners to quickly see and diagnose connection issues across all integrations with color-coded tags.

📖 New Runbook Step: Create a Separate Comms Channel in Slack

We've added a new runbook step that lets you create a dedicated communications channel in Slack — without needing an incident channel. This gives teams more flexibility in managing incident comms, whether for internal coordination, customer updates, or other discussions separate from the main incident channel.

‼️ Status Pages Now Display Alerts

Status pages can now display related incident alerts, giving your stakeholders more context and visibility.

🛠️ Create Read-Only API Tokens

API tokens can now be created as read-only, with options to allow reading data about private incidents while restricting write permissions.

🔁 Improved Integrations UI

We resized the Connection Health section so the tabbed interface (Projects, Alert Routing, Alert Log, Uninstall) is easier to see and navigate.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Table Overflow Fix: Fixed long text overflowing when creating Alert Groups (now truncates with hover-to-view).
• API Token Display: Fixed an issue where regenerated API tokens weren’t displaying properly.
• Cleaned Up Trial Messages: Removed outdated trial messages so no one sees inaccurate “trial ending” alerts.