Create an Incident Channel in your Chatops tool

Organizing your communication is critical during an incident. FireHydrant gives you control over if and when a centralized channel is opened for your incident.

Slack

Create or Rename Incident Channel

This Runbook step creates or renames the incident channel in Slack:

• If channel does not exist, this step will create a new incident channel per your configurations.
• If channel already exists, or this step has been run previously either in the same runbook or a different runbook, then any subsequent runs will rename the channel.

Note: Subsequent runs of this step will not convert your channel from Public to Private, or vice-versa.

Microsoft Teams

Create Incident Channel

This Runbook step creates an incident channel in Microsoft Teams.

Note: We currently cannot create private channels in Microsoft Teams or rename them like Slack.

Channel Name Formatting

The default naming pattern for incident channel names is "incident-123", but this is configurable to allow other formats as well. To see the list of available parameters you can use, see the docs for Template Variables.

Some examples of channel naming conventions our customers use:

• incident-{{ number }} will become incident-42
• -inc-{{ date }} will become -inc-2019-10-22
• {{ incident.severity }}-incident-{{ name }}-{{ date }} will become sev1-incident-bobbys-big-spill-2019-10-22
• -inc-{{ date | replace: '-', '' }} will become -inc-20191022

Note: Slack has a limit of 80 characters for channel names, and MS Teams has a character limit of 50. FireHydrant will do its best to always create a channel, so this means if there is a collision on the name or if its too long, we might make modifications. For example, long names will be truncated, or we will add a 4-character hash to the end to "unique-ify" the name.