Slack for Incident Management

Incident Response integration with Slack allows you to collaborate efficiently with your team while working on incidents.

Incident Response incident notifications are sent right to your Slack Channel. Here, you can perform actions on incidents using the buttons or the Slack commands provided in this document.

Prerequisites

• Only the Account Owner and Users with the Manage Extensions permission can enable, disable and manage Slack extension in Incident Response.

Integrate Incident Response with Slack

The users (with extension permission) can integrate Slack and select a default slack channel.

This will globally configure Slack for your Incident Response account. This means, that all the alerts for every service in Incident Response will be routed to the default Slack channel configured.

To integrate Incident Response with Slack:

1. Navigate to Settings -> Extensions.

2. Navigate to Slack -> click Integrate. A side panel will open, to authorize Slack integration with Incident Response, click Authorize.

3. You will be redirected to Slack to approve specific permissions that Incident Response would need for this integration. Click on the Slack Workspace that you wish to integrate with your Incident Response account and then, click Allow.





4. Next, you will be asked to select a default Slack channel for your organization.
   
   You can either select an existing channel from the dropdown or create a new channel in Slack. If you have added a new channel and don’t see the same in the dropdown, refresh the dropdown and it would appear.

You can also enter the channel ID if you don’t find the channel in the dropdown.

List of Slack channels displayed in the drop-down

By default, all the public Slack channels and the private Slack channels would be listed in the dropdown, in which the Incident Response Bot has been added.

If you do not find the desired channel from the list, then:

1. Navigate to your Slack Workspace

2. Open the desired channel you wish to integrate

3. In this channel, call the Incident Response Bot by using @squadcast

4. Next, navigate back to Incident Response, and click the Refresh button beside the Channel dropdown to refresh the list. Your Channel should be populated in the list now.

5. You can choose which notifications you want to receive from Incident Response. By default, all the incident-related notifications go to the thread of the main notification and also notify the channel

   If you don’t want to receive these further notification updates on the channel, you can toggle off the “Send incident updates to the main channel”.\

   1. Send notifications for all the updates
   2. Send custom notifications
      • Incident (Triggered, Acknowledged, Resolved, Suppressed)

      • Notes

      • Runbooks

      • Communication Channels

      • Tags

      • Postmortems

      • Task

      • SLO violating incident updates

6. Once you have configured the channel and selected the desired notification settings, click Save Slack Configuration.

This completes the integration of Slack with Incident Response.

Update the Slack channel at the global level

To update the default Slack channel:

1. Navigate to Settings -> Extensions.

2. Navigate to Slack -> Select Channel. Select the new default Slack channel for all your Incident Response Services using the drop-down.

3. Click Save.

Configure Slack for a Service

Additionally, you can configure one Slack channel per service to receive notifications for incidents affecting only that service in this Slack channel.

To configure Slack at the service level:

1. Navigate to Services -> Service Overview -> select or search for your desired service.

2. Click on the service to navigate to the Service Details page.

3. In the top right, select More -> Slack Channel.

4. Enter the specific Channel ID or Select a Channel from the drop-down.

5. Click Save.

And you’re done! All the incidents triggered by this service will be pinged on the selected channel.

Configure Slack channel for an Incident

Users can also create a dedicated Slack channel for an incident to receive only the incident-specific notifications in that channel.

You can create these dedicated Slack channels from Slack or the web app.

And you’re done! This will generate a dedicated Slack Channel for your Incident.

Using Slack as an Alert Source

To create incidents automatically in Incident Response from Slack, check out Slack as an alert source.