How LaunchDarkly uses FireHydrant to automate incident response for scalable consistency

Overview

LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that empowers all teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, LaunchDarkly enables teams to deploy faster, reduce risk, and iterate continuously. Thousands of organizations use LaunchDarkly to build, operate, and learn from their software.

Challenge

Arun Bhalla has managed the backend engineering team at LaunchDarkly since 2017 and reached out to us when he had a need to streamline incident management, gain more meaningful reporting, and centralize tooling. While evaluating technology, Arun was driven by three key business challenges outlined below.

In looking to increase efficiencies, LaunchDarkly was seeking a way to reduce the manual work during an incident - especially for the communications role. The communicator acted as a scribe and was also responsible for outward communication to customers and other internal teams. This was a cumbersome role for whomever received it and things were frequently missed and not transferred from Slack to their Post Incident Review (PIR).

Solution

With FireHydrant, LaunchDarkly was able to fully automate their communications role. The integration with Statuspage.io and internally built public status pages can have communication (or update reminders) automated through Runbooks and can be updated without ever leaving Slack. The Slack bot also acts as a fly on the wall tracking each engagement and encouraging team collaboration to indicate which messages were critical to the incident’s resolution.

Results

FireHydrant Runbooks gave LaunchDarkly the advanced ability to save time through automatic tracking of each engagement, which encouraged team collaboration to indicate which messages were critical to the incident’s resolution. Each piece of information can be automatically pulled into the PIR with the result being 70% of the PIR being completed so that a great emphasis is placed on learning and growth from incidents.

You just got paged. Now what?

FireHydrant helps every team master incident response with straightforward processes that build trust and make communication easy.

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