Incident Timeline

As you work through incidents, a common pain point is tracking what happens and when.

This often means teams will have a "scribe" or "note taker" who follows along and manually notes the events of the incident. Or, more painstakingly, someone must manually comb through chat channels, transcripts, or other documents to cobble together the timeline after the incident.

With FireHydrant, all events that unfold during an incident—such as Runbook steps execution, user actions, task completions, chat messages, and more—are automatically recorded in the timeline.

This feature liberates team members from the stress of manual event tracking, allowing them to focus on resolving the incident.

Using the Timeline

You don't need to do anything other than set up the initial integrations with your chat provider(s) and use a Runbook step to create an incident channel. FireHydrant will only scribe messages from the incident channels it creates - it cannot do this with arbitrary channels in your workspace.

• Slack
  • Slack Setup
  • Create or rename Incident Slack channel
• Microsoft Teams
  • Microsoft Teams Setup
  • Create Microsoft Teams Incident Channel

As mentioned above, all events in FireHydrant, including messages, images, and actions from your chat application, are logged automatically.

Messages posted into incident channels are automatically scribed to the FireHydrant timeline. This includes numerous file types uploaded:

• Images
  • image/apng
  • image/bmp
  • image/gif
  • image/jpeg
  • image/pjpeg
  • image/png
  • image/svg+xml
  • image/tiff
  • image/webp
  • image/x-icon
• Other File Types
  • application/zip
  • application/pdf
  • application/msword
  • application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
  • application/vnd.ms-excel
  • application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
  • application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
  • application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
  • application/rtf
  • text/csv
  • text/plain

The timeline can be filtered to specific events. You can also save these filters as Saved Views, enabling more accessible selection and filtering when revisiting this incident and other incidents.

Certain types of timeline events, such as messages posted directly in the UI, allow users to edit or copy the message. These action buttons are on the right side next to the star.

Starring Events

You can Star events from both your chat app and the app UI. Starring an event marks it as "important" and allows you to comment on it, and it also becomes a primary highlight during the Retrospective phase of an incident.

In Slack, events can be starred by reacting to a message in the incident channel with a Star emoji. The Slack integration settings allow you to change this emoji.

In Microsoft Teams, a message can be starred by selecting the contextual action in the dropdown next to each message.

Next Steps

Now that you know everything is tracked automatically by FireHydrant, check out more of what FireHydrant has to offer:

• Adding Responders
• Posting Updates
• Managing Tasks
• Slack Responder Guide
• UI Responder Guide