AuditBoard Unifies the Full Incident Lifecycle and Enhances Developer Experience with FireHydrant

AuditBoard is the leading global platform for connected risk, helping organizations modernize how they manage audit, risk, and compliance. Their software powers essential business processes — and that means availability, resilience, and rapid response are non-negotiables.

When Neil Laughlin joined AuditBoard in summer 2023 as VP of Site Reliability Engineering, he brought decades of experience — and a clear belief that incident management should be structured, scalable, and sustainable. His mission: reduce operational toil and establish a high-performing, resilient incident management function that supported the entire engineering org.

As Neil described it: “There was no formal structure around incident management, and all the incident management was consolidated in a single DevOps team. We were using a legacy product for paging out, lacking integration with the other observability tooling. There was no chatbot-style support for incident management in place.”

Recognizing the need for a more modern, scalable approach, AuditBoard’s engineering leadership set out to level up their incident management practice. They needed a platform that could support team-based on-call, consistent workflows, and actionable retrospectives — without burdening engineers with homegrown tools or manual coordination.

That’s where FireHydrant came in.

Choosing the Right Foundation

At more than one prior company, Neil’s team had invested time in building their own Slack bot. This time, he wanted the immediate benefits that come from selecting a best-in-class, mature product. FireHydrant provided the structure, extensibility, and automation they needed out of the box, enabling the team to fully onboard and start running incidents within just three weeks.

Instead of building and maintaining internal tools, AuditBoard rolled out FireHydrant’s full suite: on-call and alerting with Signals, customizable incident workflows, and collaborative, AI-enhanced retrospectives.

The decision to adopt FireHydrant was easy: “Going to a much more mature, off-the-shelf, affordable product was very appealing.”

After evaluating multiple vendors, AuditBoard chose FireHydrant for its ease of integration, unified experience, and strategic roadmap.

“When we saw the demo and how easily it integrated with our systems, that tipped the staff engineers toward FireHydrant.”

One Platform for the Entire Incident Lifecycle

Today, FireHydrant powers the full incident lifecycle at AuditBoard — from alert to retrospective — helping the team standardize and accelerate how they manage reliability across the business.

To replace their legacy paging product, they adopted FireHydrant Signals — a modern on-call solution — alongside the full incident management platform. For the first time, alerting, response, and retrospectives were unified in a single, cohesive workflow.

“Paging functionality needed to be better and tightly integrated with the rest of the platform,” said Neil. “We were excited about the Signals roadmap during the evaluation process — and it’s been great to see it come in. It’s creating a unified product experience for on-call and incident management.”

Incidents kick off directly in Slack using /fh new, then flow through tailored runbooks based on type — whether it’s a production outage, internal IT issue, or security event. The right stakeholders are looped in immediately, and retrospectives are completed asynchronously — starting with AI-generated summaries that engineers can enhance with key insights and learnings.

“The workflow we’ve built means we have the right people engaged from the start. People know where to go to understand next steps,” Neil said.

Scaling Reliability, Intentionally

This transformation wasn’t just about tooling. It marked a broader cultural shift — one that aligned with AuditBoard’s commitment to operational excellence. Incident management wasn’t just improved — it was engineered for long-term success.

The impact is clear: in internal developer experience surveys, incident response and on-call now rank among the lowest pain points across the engineering org.

“The DX survey scores show it’s not just me feeling good about the tooling — others are benefiting from it.”

Why FireHydrant

AuditBoard chose FireHydrant because it aligned with their vision for scalable, team-centric reliability. The benefits have been significant — enabling their world-class engineering team to respond faster, collaborate more effectively, and continuously improve how they manage incidents.

• All-in-one platform: Manages every step — from alert to retrospective — in one connected workflow.
• Slack-native workflows: Slash commands, automated updates, and runbooks built directly into where teams work.
• Deep integrations and extensibility: Plugs seamlessly into existing systems and scales with evolving needs.
• Fast, consistent response: Standardized workflows and runbooks accelerate resolution and reduce ambiguity.
• AI-enhanced retrospectives: Streamlined post-incident analysis that lowers engineering overhead and reinforces learning.