Configuration quick start guide
By now, you probably already understand what FireHydrant can do for you. For a refresher, check out What is FireHydrant?
This article outlines the most critical things you should do to improve your incident response process with FireHydrant. We recommend keeping it simple to start--for example, configuring one integration and creating one Runbook--and then scaling from there.
1. Set up Slack integration
Slack and FireHydrant are a powerful duo. The Slack integration unlocks a lot of powerful workflows for your incident response team, making those previous steps more efficient. You can use FireHyrant without Slack, but you'll miss out on a lot of the value and capabilities we offer. Learn more about Slack integration.
2. Create your first Runbook
Runbooks are our bread and butter. They remove the stress and toil from incident response processes by automating the manual tasks your team usually handles. Runbooks can do things like create a dedicated Slack channel for your incidents, spin up a Zoom bridge, send emails, generate customized Slack messages, and more. Learn more about Runbooks.
3. Invite your teammates
A good incident response process involves a team. Bring any key players into FireHydrant to help manage incidents. Remember, anyone can declare an incident from Slack--without being a FireHydrant user--but to have access to all other actions in Slack, you must be a FireHydrant user. Invite on-call engineers, SREs, DevOps teams, and anyone else close to the incident management process. Learn more about building teams.
4. Configure basic integrations
Now that Slack is integrated, you're off to a great start! Next, we recommend setting up the Zoom or Google Meet integration so that your Runbooks can automatically spin up a video conference bridge for you and your team during incidents.
- Identity and access management (e.g. Google SSO, Okta SSO, SCIM)
- Alert routing providers (e.g. PagerDuty and OpsGenie)
- Support and project management ticketing (e.g. Zendesk and Jira)
- Collaborative document editing tools for retrospectives (e.g. Google Docs and Confluence)
- Change event streams (e.g. Kubernetes, GitHub)
Learn more about integration options.
5. Add your Infrastructure properties to FireHydrant
In FireHydrant, when we refer to "Infrastructure," we're referring to your Services, Functionalities, and Environments. By adding these pieces of infrastructure to FireHydrant, you can automatically assign incidents to a team based on the Infrastructure that's impacted, set incident severity based on Infrastructure, and much more. You can import your infrastructure from PagerDuty or Opsgenie, using our API or our Terraform provider. Learn more about infrastructure management.
6. Create teams
Teams help you get the right people involved in an incident quickly. Depending on the type of incident, you may want to assign a specific team. You can automatically assign teams based on impacted infrastructure, or you can dynamically assign teams based on the current on-call schedules from your alerting provider. Learn more about teams.
7. Prepare for a FireDrill
FireDrills are a great way to practice your incident response process. We recommend running FireDrills often to make sure you have everything in place for your incident response process to go smoothly. Before running your first FireDrill, make sure you've configured some of the more critical pieces of FireHydrant. Learn more about preparing for FireDrills.
8. Run your first FireDrill
Now that your FireHydrant implementation is in good condition, it's time to run your first FireDrill. Remember, these are practice scenarios. Your first FireDrill will probably uncover a lot of new information, and maybe raise some questions about how you can improve your FireHydrant implementation. Remember that you can reach out us using our contact form; we're always here to help! Learn more about running FireDrills.