Incidents · Guides
Tell your team
Each step of an incident is a notice: by email to the project's people, and to the Telegram chats and Slack channels you choose.
When people are told
Incidents sends four kinds of notice:
| Notice | Sent when |
|---|---|
| An incident declared (urgent) | Declared by hand or opened through the API. |
| Severity raised (urgent) | Its severity is made worse while it is open. Lowering it tells nobody. |
| Status changed | It moves to another status, is declined, or is reopened. |
| Resolved | It is resolved, with how long it lasted. |
An update posted on its own, a new lead, a follow-up and the write-up are on the incident's page and send nothing. An internal note never goes into a notice, not even with a status change.
Your project's people
Until you change it, every notice goes by email to the project's people: each person who opens the project in Incidents, as their roles at id say. Someone added to the project at id is told from then on; someone taken off is not.
Add a chat or a list
The project's other destinations are set once for every My Beast product, by its admins, on Settings → Notices (services.my-beast.com/<workspace>/<project>/settings/notices). Under Destinations, add:
- An e-mail list: up to ten addresses, separated by commas, such as an on-call address.
- A Telegram chat: the chat id (a number, a group's starts with
-100, or a channel's@name) and the token of a bot you have added to the chat, as @BotFather gave it. Where the field says it is optional, an empty one means My Beast's own bot sends. - A Slack channel: the channel's incoming webhook, which starts with
https://hooks.slack.com/services/.
A bot token and a webhook are kept encrypted and never shown again. Each destination shows when it was last sent to, and the last error if one failed. Remove one behind its “⋯”.
Choose what goes where
A new destination gets nothing until you say which notices go there. Under What goes where, choose Change beside Incidents. Each kind of notice is a line: tick Its people and the destinations it goes to, then save. A kind with nothing ticked goes nowhere.
For example, send all four to Its people and the on-call list, and only “An incident declared” and “Severity raised” to the team's Slack channel.
Send a test
Before an outage needs them, check that notices arrive. There are two tests:
- In Incidents, open Settings in the sidebar and choose Send a test under Notices. A test notice goes to every destination of the project, ticked for Incidents or not, and by email to you. The page then says how each went: “E-mail: sent · Telegram: sent · Slack: failed - …”.
- On Settings → Notices, Send a test beside a destination tests that one alone.
Both need Admin in the project. Incidents' test can be sent 6 times a minute, and its Notices card lists what went to Telegram and Slack lately.
What a notice says
A notice is written for a lock screen. Its first line answers how bad it is and what happened to it, the next ones what it is and where it stands, then the message posted with the change and a link to the incident:
🚨 SEV1 Critical · INC-12 declared
Checkout fails for card payments
Shop · SEV1 Critical · Investigating · Lead: Anna Berg
Card payments answer 502 since 09:07. PayPal still works.
Open: https://services.my-beast.com/acme/shop/incidents/incidents/12The first line for each kind:
🚨 SEV1 Critical · INC-12 declared⚠️ INC-12 raised to SEV2 Major (was SEV3 Minor)🛠 INC-12 is Identified (was Investigating)✅ INC-12 resolved after 41 minutes 31 seconds
The email's subject is [SEV1] INC-12 declared: Checkout fails for card payments · Shop. In Telegram the link is a button, Open INC-12; in Slack the title links to the incident.
See what was sent
Notices go out within moments of the change. Notices sent, on the incident's page, lists each one: when, which kind, where (email with the address, Telegram or Slack) and whether it was sent, or the error if not.
A failed notice isn't sent again