Introducing Simpler Paging

Minutes matter when it comes to incidents, and getting the right people in the room (or, let’s be honest, Slack channel) is essential to a seamless incident management experience.

So today, we're rolling out a new command to our Slack integration to make paging teams and individuals dead simple. While FireHydrant has supported service and functionality based paging for a long time, we’ve heard from customers that they also need a simpler paging mechanism for getting the right people into the incident response. The new /fh page command allows teams to do just that: you can now send a new page to any user, team, or escalation policy or even add responders to an existing page for the incident.

This simplified approach to paging allows you to send a page to any user or team-like entity in your 3rd party alerting tool. In Pagerduty, you can reach out to users or escalation policies, and in Opsgenie, you can reach out to users or teams. Splunk On-call currently only supports paging escalation policies.

When sending a page, you can craft a specific message and description to help the responders know what kind of help you’re looking for. FireHydrant will also send along the Slack channel where the page was initiated so that responders can quickly jump into the channel for more context.

If an alert or page has already been connected to the current incident, you’ll also have a chance to add new responders to an existing page so that you don’t need to duplicate alerts or incidents in your 3rd party tool.

Along with this new command, we’re also introducing a new in-channel alert message that tracks connected alerts or pages. This new message tracks the state of the alert– triggered, acknowledged, resolved, etc.–as well other details like who has been notified and who originally sent the page. This new message helps you stay in the incident channel instead of hunting down the stage of the page in another system. Additionally, this new message works across all connected alerts in an incident, including the new page command, pages created from /fh page service and /fh page functionality, as well as any manually connected alerts.

To learn more about paging in FireHydrant, try it out by running /fh page or read our updated docs.