Admin Quickstart

This article outlines the steps for getting started quickly with FireHydrant. The intended audience is an administrator or anyone who will be configuring and/or test-driving FireHydrant on behalf of their organization.

Most of the items in this guide align with the Onboarding Checklist shown within the application, and we include Next Steps below for additional suggested configurations and setups.

Defaults

All new FireHydrant accounts come with various defaults to make it easy to get started:

• You'll have four default incident roles.
  • These include the Commander, Ops Lead, Communication, and Planning. These roles can be customized and changed.
• You'll have one default Task List.
  • Task Lists help responders keep track of their tasks during an incident. We include a basic list just to showcase how task management works in FireHydrant, and you can modify it later.
• You'll have a default Runbook.
  • As you work your way through the onboarding steps below and set up integrations, FireHydrant will automatically insert Runbook steps into the Default runbook, providing you stable baseline automation that you can customize and build on later.

There are many more defaults included with FireHydrant, but they are not important for this Quickstart guide.

1. Set up Slack integration

Slack and FireHydrant are a powerful duo: this integration enables you to manage the full incident lifecycle from declaration to resolution without ever leaving Slack. In addition, you'll also unlock several other functionalities like notifying other channels and automatically inviting service owners to the incident channel.

Learn more about the Slack integration and see the installation instructions here. Once you've configured the Slack integration, you will see two new steps within the Default runbook:

• Create incident Slack channel
• Archive incident Slack channel (when Retrospective is completed for the incident)

2. Connect video conferencing

In many organizations, incident responders will often gather together on a meeting bridge to talk through problems live. Visit documentation for the following video meeting providers that FireHydrant supports:

• Cisco WebEx
• Google Meet
• Zoom

Once you've configured a video meeting integration, you will see an additional Runbook step added to the Default Runbook to automatically create a meeting upon incident start.

3. Connect alerting tool

Similarly, many organizations will also have an alerting tool that both handles alerts from monitoring tools as well as manages rosters of on-call schedules.

Visit the documentation for the following alerting providers that FireHydrant supports:

• Atlassian Opsgenie
• PagerDuty
• Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps)

4. Invite your team members and configure teams

Once you've set up the basic integrations above, you can invite more team members and set up the teams in FireHydrant. Inviting your team members is easy and only takes a few steps.

See how to invite team members and then how to configure your teams.

Note: Make sure your team members accept your email invitation instead of registering directly on FireHydrant's website - that will create an entirely new organization!

5. Run a Game Day incident

You're all set to run your first mock incident! Visit our Fire Drill guide to see the basics of running through a FireHydrant incident.

Next Steps

By now, you should have done a basic walkthrough of FireHydrant including setting up a few integrations and conducting a rudimentary test incident. The world is your oyster!

To experience the full power of FireHydrant's incident management platform, we recommend the following next steps:

• Take a peek at the rest of our integrations.
  • FireHydrant only suggested configuring a few core integrations during onboarding, but there are numerous others to help your team get the most out of its incident management in FireHydrant. Visit the docs link above for an overview of all available integrations on FireHydrant and what value they bring to your team.
• Begin customizing your FireHydrant instance.
  • Above, we mentioned several more defaults - from incident roles, to task lists, severities, and even incident types, you can make FireHydrant work for your organization and meet you where you're at.
• Make use of your alerting integration.
  • From paging whoever is on-call to conditionally responding to incoming alerts, FireHydrant makes it easy to seamlessly transition from alert to incident to assembly and beyond.
• Start conditionalizing runbooks and experimenting with the numerous available steps and conditions.
  • Runbooks can be tailored to meet a large variety of different situations and use cases. For example, some customers will have different Runbooks for different severity incidents. Others will have different Runbooks for different product areas.
  • Runbooks can even be layered together, with a general shared Runbook that attaches to all incidents and more specific ones that only apply under certain conditions.
• Configure the Catalog.
  • FireHydrant's Catalog is how teams efficiency find the right people for the right problems and dramatically improve Mean Time to Assembly.
  • You can automatically assign responding teams for a service when it's impacted in an incident, or associate and automatically add technical services related to an overall business functionality.

At any time if there are questions, you're welcome to reach out to our Support team or an Account team that is working with you if relevant.