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Managing Incident Follow-Ups

During an incident or its retrospective, responders may identify important action items that, while important, aren't urgent and will need to be prioritized later. On FireHydrant, we call these Follow-Ups, and they are distinct from Tasks, which we think of as mid-incident items.

With FireHydrant, you can track all of your outstanding and completed Follow-Ups as well as prioritize them to ensure your systems more resilient for the future. In addition, FireHydrant can sync Follow-Ups with apps that you have integrated, enabling your project managers to track work seamlessly.

For example, FireHydrant can automatically create corresponding tickets in Jira or story in Shortcut for each Follow-Up created.

Create and Manage Follow-Ups

You can add Follow-Ups from the incident's Command Center, from Slack, and from the Retrospective page. When you create Follow-Ups, FireHydrant will link them to the incident ticket or story for the incident (if one was created).

Creating a Follow-Up in Command Center
Creating a Follow-Up in Command Center
Creating a Follow-Up in Slack with `/fh add follow-up`
Creating a Follow-Up in Slack with `/fh add follow-up`
Creating a Follow-Up in Retrospective
Creating a Follow-Up in Retrospective

Using Emojis from Slack

Creating a follow-up from a Slack message with an emoji
Creating a follow-up from a Slack message with an emoji

Just like with Tasks, you create Follow-Ups from the incident Slack channel by responding with an emoji. The default :clipboard: but this can be modified in your Settings > Integrations list > Slack settings.

Note: You must be in an incident channel to use this feature.

Available Fields

These are the fields available for Follow-Ups:

  • Summary - Basically the title for the Follow-Up
  • Description - More descriptive details for the Follow-Up if desired
    • Due to Slack limitations, the Description field is limited to 2900 characters if creating from Slack.
    • To view a description that is longer than 2900 characters, open the Follow-Up in the incident Command Center or directly in your ticketing provider (Jira, etc.).
  • State - The status of the Follow-Up (Open, In Progress, Done, or Cancelled)
  • Priority - The priority of the Follow-Up (FireHydrant Priorities can be configured in Settings > Incidents > Priorities).
    • To map FireHydrant priorities to Jira priorities, you will need to configure custom field mapping. See the next section.
  • Assignee - Who the ticket should be assigned to.
    • The user's email address in the ticketing tool must match their email address in FireHydrant for us to assign them.
  • Project - Which Project in external ticketing tool(s) to create a corresponding ticket in.
    • For some ticketing providers (e.g. Shortcut), you will automatically be able to select from the list of available projects. For other providers like Jira, you will need to configure project mappings.

To view and manage Follow-Ups in the UI, the same Tasks tab can be used in the Command Center. In Slack, you can view all outstanding Follow-Ups by running /fh action-items.

Note: Historically, FireHydrant used to categorize both Tasks and Follow-Ups as subcategories of "Action Items" but decided to move away from that terminology. We will eventually deprecate /fh action-items in favor of separate /fh tasks (already exists) and /fh follow-ups (still in development).

Viewing action items in Slack with `/fh action-items`
Viewing action items in Slack with `/fh action-items`

Project Mapping

Note: This only applies to the Jira Cloud and Jira Server ticketing integrations.

For Jira, you will need to configure a project mapping for each Jira project you want to create Follow-Up tickets in. For more information now how to do this, visit Configuring Jira Multi-Project.

Priority Mapping

Note: This only applies to the Jira Cloud and Jira Server ticketing integrations.

In order for FireHydrant to know how to pass priorities to Jira when creating tickets, you will need to configure a field mapping.

You will not be able to directly pass FireHydrant's priorities over to Jira, even if they have the same name. For example, even if Priorities in FireHydrant are P1 - P5 and your Priorities in Jira are also P1 - P5, the following mapping will not work:

A direct mapping of FireHydrant Ticket Priority to Jira Priority will not work
A direct mapping of FireHydrant Ticket Priority to Jira Priority will not work

This is because in Jira, Priorities are passed in as objects with special IDs. If you attempt the above, FireHydrant will try to pass e.g. "P1" as a direct parameter when Jira was expecting an object.

Instead, you will need to configure a logic mapping with cases for each Priority you want to map. For example:

This allows FireHydrant to pass the values Jira expects
This allows FireHydrant to pass the values Jira expects

Next Steps

Last updated on 9/29/2023