Incident Types

Many different kinds of incidents can happen on any given day. Categorizing incidents by type saves you a lot of time as you declare and work through them. With incident types in FireHydrant, can you quickly declare an incident in Slack by doing nothing more than adding a name and selecting a type.

Creating a new incident type

Under Incident Response in the FireHydrant UI, click Incident Types. Click New in the top right corner of the page to create a new incident type.

A good incident type name helps a responder quickly understand what's happening. For example: "Database disk usage is nearly 100%".

The only required data for a new incident type is a name, but adding other details is a best practice. Here are some tips on adding details to an incident type:

1. Impact. When you add impacted services, functionalities, and environments, it greatly speeds up the process of declaring an incident. Additionally, your analytics in FireHydrant will be more consistent, since templates provide a guarantee that the impact will always be added.
2. Summary and Description. When describing an incident type, it may be helpful to include a summary and description on the incident itself with useful context. For example: _"_Here's a guide on how to resize a volume for a database."
3. Labels. Key/value pairs can go a long way when you're trying to unearth incidents in your FireHydrant history. Annotating incidents with a label in an incident type is a great way to improve your filtering options later on.
4. Runbooks. If you want a specific Runbook to be attached to an incident for a given type, select it on the bottom of the template section. This ensures that certain workflow is kicked off using the powerful FireHydrant Runbooks engine.

Using an incident type

FireHydrant supports using an incident type at the creation of an incident in Slack and in the web interface. To enable incident types in Slack:

1. Go to Integrations > Connected & Available.
2. Confirm that Slack integration is installed
3. Click Configure Integration for Slack.
4. Under the New Incident Modal Type dropdown, select Multi-step.
5. Click Update Configuration.

After saving your integration with Slack, go into Slack and use the /firehydrant new command to launch the incident declaration view.

Your new incident types are now available when declaring an incident.

Going to the next screen from here will show you a preview of the incident that you are about to open.

To use incidents types in the web interface, just create a type and click the "Declare Incident" button. Incident types, if there are any, will appear as the first item in the Declare Incident form.