Six Must-Haves When Using Slack® for Incident Management

Best practices and tips from top IT and DevOps teams using ChatOps to manage alerts and incidents.ChatOps is likely a term you’ve seen peppered throughout countless whitepapers and blog posts on collaboration. For years now, when discussing IT Operations or Development you’d be negligent to leave out chat tools. An integral part of the “new” generation of Agile and DevOps, the ChatOps collaboration model is the process of connecting tools, people, processes, and automation into a single, transparent workflow. For example, during an IT incident, it’s a rapid way to connect the problem with the right people, bots, and related tools in a central place. This makes it easier for responders to share information quickly and reach resolution.

More and more businesses are adopting this model to get more done, efficiently. Many companies (including Atlassian), have shifted the daily back-and-forth, planning, and problem tackling from email to chat for all teams. From the perspective of Incident Management, Dev and IT Operations teams have been spinning up war rooms via chat for years. But just downloading Slack and connecting it to all the bots and apps in your tool chain doesn’t mean you’re doing it right—this alone doesn’t make the communication effective. You’ll still be causing alert fatigue, contacting the wrong people to fix a problem, and siloing information—just in a shinier space. The most successful teams elevate their incident response by being sure to follow some key principles including: providing and maintaining team spaces, requiring user authentication for security and logging purposes, using quick action buttons, leveraging slash commands, centralizing incident and alert management, and identifying learnings post incident.

Whether using Slack for alerts or incidents these tips will help your team to easily collaborate. We’ve compiled a list of tips based on the way that top-performing teams are using Slack. There’s even a handy checklist featured in each section to help keep you on track. Find a complete checklist at the end for reference.