Improving our Slack Experience

Anyone who’s declared a FireHydrant incident has more than likely declared it from slack - in fact 80% of incidents created originate in Slack. The vast majority of interaction with FireHydrant comes through Slack, and many of our customers do everything from Slack, only touching the web app if there is a slack outage or incident. Today, we’re announcing some improvements to the slack experience to make interacting with FireHydrant through slack operate with the speed of the terminal and the ease of use of a fully functional user experience.

Modals for Help and for Command Launch

To support new or infrequent users using FireHydrant, we’ve made the FireHydrant help experience a modal where you can select any command to learn more about it. Not only will we help you understand the nuance of what certain commands will do, we’ll also give you an easy way to launch it as soon as you’re sure it’ll do what you want it to. We’re also shifting the /fh command to bring up the same modal, which gives direct access to a broader list of commands, making it easier to run the command you want, faster. To test this run /fh help or /fh in any slack instance connected to FireHydrant today.

New Incident Declaration and Edit Experience

In addition to the big changes we’re making to your Slack experience, we’re also giving you greater control over the fields that appear in your declare incident form, in order to help your team declare an incident more quickly. Administrators will now be able to designate fields as “required,” “visible,” and “additional” in field configuration, controlling whether they appear by default (required or visible) or require addition to the form by the person declaring the incident (additional). In parallel, we’ve changed the experience when editing the incident in slack to be more closely aligned to the declaration experience. Now, when running /fh edit the experience will mirror the /fh new experience with field behavior.

Updating Status Pages

Now that we have a command that helps us edit incident details, we’re taking the opportunity to focus the /fh update command on updating external communications - your status page. This will allow you to change the milestone, and update the information available on your status page, as well as select status templates directly through slack. As part of this, we will be moving the ability to move and add services, to directly within /fh service or /fh add service.

Adding Catalog Entries

And as the last change in our large slack UX update, we’ll be making it easier to add things to your service catalog using the /fh add {catalog entry} command. This will allow you to add services and functionalities in a single command, as well as search all items in a single grouped drop down.

We’re really excited for you folks to try these new commands out and see how much they speed up your incident workflow. To get a feel for the new behavior, just run /fh help from any slack channel connected to FireHydrant. Happy Firefighting!