Incident Milestones

Milestones are used to describe the active state of the incident. They communicate to stakeholders the team's progress in resolving the issue.

In FireHydrant, milestones are also important for holistic incident metrics that we capture out-of-the-box, such as Impacted Infrastructure, Responder Impact, MTT*, and so on.

Incident milestones can be adjusted during the incident either in Slack (using /fh update) or within the FireHydrant UI. These milestones can also be adjusted after an incident during the retrospective.

Here are the milestones FireHydrant currently tracks for each incident:

• Started : When the affected system began having problems.
  • By default, this is set to the time an incident is opened in FireHydrant. We use this timestamp to calculate the time difference to the rest of the milestones.
  • You can modify this timestamp at any time if the incident actually started prior to opening a FireHydrant incident.
• Detected : When a monitoring system (or human) noticed that a system was having problems.
  • If you open a FireHydrant incident directly from an alert in Slack or attach the alert when starting an incident in the UI, this milestone will be set to the timestamp of the alert. When this happens, the Started milestone will also be set to the same timestamp.
  • If you open an incident without an attached alert, this milestone will remain unpopulated.
• Acknowledged : When the person responsible for responding to incidents within the affected system acknowledged the monitoring system's alert.
  • If you manually kick off a FireHydrant incident, the incident starts in this state and the Started milestone’s time will match it.
• Investigating : When the first concrete step toward identifying a fix (or resolving the problems with the affected system) occurred.
  • If you manually kick off a FireHydrant incident, then the Investigating timestamp will be automatically set as soon as the first human event occurs (e.g., team assignment, task completion, Slack message, or UI message).
• Identified : When the problem was identified and actions began to start mitigating the incident.
  • You must transition to this milestone manually.
• Mitigated : When the system is no longer exhibiting problems to users, but the team is still monitoring the situation. There may still be temporary fixes in place, disabled jobs, hotfix changes, etc.
  • You must transition to this milestone manually.
• Resolved : When the system is confirmed to be working again with no relapse. This is also the time when temporary fixes to mitigate the issue are removed, and the system is behaving as expected.
  • You must transition to this milestone manually.
• Retrospective Started : When the team has begun the retrospective for an incident.
  • The incident will transition to this milestone when you click "Start Retrospective" in the Command Center.
  • This milestone is tracked but not shown/modifiable in the user interface.
• Retrospective Completed : When the team has finished the retrospective for an incident and published it.
  • The incident will transition to this milestone when you click "Publish Retrospective" in the Retrospective page.
  • This milestone is tracked but not shown/modifiable in the user interface.

Note: The milestones must be chronologically equal to or greater than the previous. For example, the Acknowledged milestone cannot have happened before the Started milestone.