Starting a new incident

There are two main methods to for declaring incidents with FireHydrant: through the UI and through our Slack integration.

If your admin has integrated your alerting tool with FireHydrant, you can send those alerts to Slack and declare an incident from there. Refer to declaring an incident from an alert for more information.

Declaring an incident in the FireHydrant UI

To open a new incident from the FireHydrant the UI:

1. Click Incidents in the left nav panel.

2. From the next page, click Declare incident. 
   

3. This takes you to the Declare an incident page. Fill out the fields provided to associate the correct information with the incident. 

4. Provide the Incident Name to declare an incident. A name for the incident is required. All of the additional details on this page are optional. (Short descriptions for each of these fields appear on the UI; read these descriptions, or click the ? icon for details on what information to provide in each field.) 
   

After you fill out the fields and click you click Declare incident , you've kicked off your incident and the severity for it will be automatically set. If you know that this incident needs to be a specific severity, you can set it manually. If you have PagerDuty integrated, you can also link against active PagerDuty alerts, so your PagerDuty and FireHydrant incidents synchronize.

Declaring an incident through Slack

While you need to have a FireHydrant account to open an incident through the UI, when your organization has the slack integration set up anyone can kick off an incident through Slack. By typing /firehydrant new, anyone in your Slack workspace can start a new incident. 

This form is purposefully simple, so that anyone in your organization feels comfortable kicking off a new incident with the severity automatically set for them. However, the form can be customized by your admin to include additional fields or remove some of the fields.