Announcing Incident watchers: Subscribe to incidents and receive incident updates in real-time

October 6, 2022

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Table of Contents:

Introduction

Hey folks, We’re back with another feature update for all our customers! We have recently gone live with the Incident Watchers feature which nests within an Incident Details page. This blog will outline how you can access the feature, its primary functionalities and how we foresee it helping improve your Incident Management process.

Note: This feature will be available to pro, premium and enterprise plan users only. To know more, check out our pricing page.

Accessing Incident Watchers

To access incident watchers, click on any incident created on the Squadcast incident list view. This takes you to the incident details page where you can take various actions to achieve incident resolution.

Once within the incident page, there are two flows that help you use the feature. The first is subscribing to an incident yourself and the second is adding other team members as watchers to that particular incident. Both flows play a significant role in keeping you and your stakeholders updated on the incident lifecycle.

As shown below the first flow is done using the watch toggle next to the incident ID, you are now a subscriber to this particular incident.

The second flow can be done by mentioning a team member, stakeholder or yourself using the ‘@’ symbol in the notes section of the incident. This action automatically adds the user as a subscriber of an incident.

Options available to subscribe to an incident

There are three levels of watch options that a user can opt into with incident watchers, each with varying levels of detail on the incident lifecycle.

Incident lifecycle
Incident lifecycle + notes
All activity

Incident lifecycle: With this option, the subscriber will only receive email updates on the states of an incident i.e. acknowledgement and resolution.

Incident lifecycle + notes: It will add updates on any notes added during the incident, In addition to updates on the states of an incident.

All activity: It is the most comprehensive as it will result in sending updates for any action taken within an incident. These can include runbook activities, task additions, updates to status pages and the creation of postmortems among others. Choosing this option is recommended for high severity incidents which require information on a granular level to be passed on to yourself, team members or stakeholders.

For more information on this check out our incident watchers support documentation.

Benefits of Incident Watchers

On the face of it, subscribing to an incident to receive notifications is a straightforward and possibly an additional communication channel. We believe there are tangible and intangible benefits to using this feature.

Collaboration:
- A team lead or Squad lead can closely keep track of a severe incident and keep additional team members on the watch list apart from the first responders.
- The subscribers of the incident on the team can then contribute towards the resolution of the incident if a resolution of the event has not been reached by the incident assignees.
- Another benefit is that the incident responders can subscribe to important stakeholders in the organization such as the customer success team during an incident. By doing this, the incident responders can focus on resolving the incident instead of keeping stakeholders abreast of the incident lifecycle. Stakeholders can then keep either customers or other stakeholders updated based on the email updates received.
Non-Intrusive alerting: A user or team member can subscribe to an incident based on his/her choice and unsubscribe by using the watcher toggle. The same applies to users or stakeholders that have been added to the watchlist. The combination of the option to unsubscribe at any point and email as a notification channel ensures that it does not add to any further alert fatigue for the user.

Conclusion

As we move ahead with the evolution of Squadcast, we hope that being able to subscribe to an incident with this feature will further add to the ease of responding to, managing and collaborating on your incident management process. Keep watching this space as we have more, exciting product updates ahead!

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Squadcast is an incident management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.