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Prerequisites
For this guide, we assume:
Your basic integrations (Jira, Zoom, MS Teams, etc.) have already been set up by an admin
You have a user account on FireHydrant within your Organization*
If the above is not met, we recommend contacting your FireHydrant Owner to invite you to the organization and set up the required integrations. Reading the introduction will give you an idea of the many moving parts of the FireHydrant platform.
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*Note
If your organization already exists on FireHydrant, do not register for an account directly on FireHydrant's website—this will create a new, separate organization. Instead, ask an admin from your organization to invite you or provision an SSO seat for the existing organization.
Basic FireHydrant concepts
Incident: Any declared situation. Can range in severity from UNSET (unknown severity) to SEV1 or whatever you customize. Each incident has its own home page and timeline.
Milestone: The current status of an incident. As you mitigate, you will want to keep this up-to-date, and FireHydrant will automatically log the timestamps of these transitions to generate our Analytics.
Runbook: FireHydrant's automation engine. Traditionally, "runbooks" describe instructions and steps for responders to execute, but on FireHydrant, these steps will execute automatically.
Service Catalog: FireHydrant's catalog for your system's components. It helps tie together teams, users, and the components they own, making it easy to recruit the right people for the right jobs.
Retrospective: A review of an incident. FireHydrant's Retrospectives contextualize and gather all incident information to make your reviews focused and productive.
For a deeper view of all parts of FireHydrant and the incident lifecycle, visit the Incidents section of the documentation on the left.
Incident Response
With the above concepts covered, let's dive into conducting incidents.
FireHydrant supports driving incidents end-to-end from both MS Teams and the user interface. If MS Teams is ever unavailable or degraded, you can still count on FireHydrant to support your incident management. Visit the Web UI Responder Guide to see how to conduct incidents via the web UI.
This guide covers most of the actions you can take in an incident and links to documentation pages that provide additional detail.
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Note
How to get to the Tab
The FireHydrant Tab is available in Microsoft Teams as an additional interface for conducting incidents. This tab closely mirrors our web app UI, nicknamed the "Command Center."
While some of the actions outlined below are in the Tab that is automatically attached to each incident channel, others are available via chat commands, and some are available via both.
For users to interact with FireHydrant, you will need to log in. There are two separate logins:
Bot Command Login - You will need to run @FireHydrant login as a bot command. This authorizes you with the bot and connects your MS Teams account with your FireHydrant account. This login persists across all devices and instances of MS Teams.
Tab Login - The Tab application is essentially a mounted iFrame hosting a web application that is an additional window to FireHydrant. Those logins are local sessions and subsequently you'll need to do a Tab login on each device you use the Tabs.
Once you're logged into your FireHydrant Bot and Tab, you'll be able to perform the actions and commands listed in the rest of this guide.
Starting incidents
Creating an incident from MS Teams with new command
Available as Chat Command: ✅
Available in Tab UI: -
@FireHydrant new
This returns a chat card asking for additional information to kick off the incident. This form can be customized by Owners and Members of your organization.
Currently, only users with FireHydrant licenses can declare incidents from Microsoft Teams.
Task management can help streamline the response and ensure responders know what to do. You may create and assign tasks ad-hoc or predefine lists of tasks to assign during incidents.
Adding a Task via chat command
Available as Chat Command: ✅ (adding a new, ad-hoc Task)
Available in Tab UI: ✅ (all Task-related actions)
In MS Teams, you can add a new task and assign it using a command:
@FireHydrant add task
Otherwise, you will want to switch to the FireHydrant Tab and check the Tasks tab within the application to update Tasks and add Task Lists to the incident.
On FireHydrant, we distinguish between editing vs. posting updates on an incident. An Edit modifies incident details, such as the severity, name, description, or other fields.
For Microsoft Teams, there are no specific commands to edit Incident details - you should switch to the FireHydrant tab to edit incident details fields in the right-side details panel.
Posting an update
Posting an update via Command in MS Teams
Available as Chat Command: ✅
Available in Tab UI: ✅
An Update is a more formal status message from a responder regarding the overall progress of an incident. Updates also include potential changes to the Milestone and impacted components.
If you have an External Status Page configured and attached to the incident, you can also post this update to the status page(s) using the same action, reducing the need to context-switch.
The chat command for this is:
@FireHydrant update
In the FireHydrant Tab, you can find the "Update Incident" button on the right just below "Resolve Incident." It opens a modal that is similar in layout and content to the card shown above.
Where to find the "Update Incident" button on the Tab
Marking important events
"Starring" a message
Available as Chat Command: ✅
Available in Tab UI: -
You can flag specific messages or timeline events as important. These "Starred events" are shown first in the Retrospective and exported as part of the timeline to PDF, Google Docs, and Confluence.
On Microsoft Teams, you can mark a chat message or other post in the channel as important by clicking Ellipses > More actions > Star message.
The same can be done to unstar a message if you decide it is no longer important to include in the review. Note that FireHydrant always tracks messages and events by default. Starring/unstarring determines whether items in the timeline are included in the post-incident review.
While Tasks are ephemeral items to handle during an incident, Follow-Ups are action items that should be prioritized for work later. When creating Follow-Ups, you can additionally select an external ticketing project, which creates a corresponding ticket in a third-party tool (like Jira).
@FireHydrant add follow-uo
In the Tab UI, there is a dedicated sub-tab for managing Follow-Ups, seen below.
Follow-ups sub-tab within the FireHydrant application tab
Typically, users will first transition an incident to the Mitigated Milestone and observe the situation for a while to ensure stability. Once engineers have confirmed or feel confident that things are fully resolved, they may close the incident on FireHydrant.
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Note:
Resolving an incident will halt all current Runbook steps, resolve the incident on any attached status pages, and update all notification messages (in e.g., chat tools) to reflect the new state.
@FireHydrant resolve
In the Tab UI, a button to resolve the incident will always be present, just like in the Command Center UI.
A retrospective is your team's opportunity to learn from the incident. Although you can initiate the Retrospective from Microsoft Teams, you'll need to head over to the FireHydrant Web UI to fully conduct this final stage of the incident.
Starting the retro
@FireHydrant start retro
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Note
Starting the retro will transition the milestone to Retrospective Started, which also resolves the incident. You can start the retro from any other state/milestone.
Conducting the retro
Incident Retrospective
Like the Command Center, the Retrospective has two sections: the main section and the timeline. The timeline is to the right and shows Starred Events by default. You can adjust the filters to show other events.
The main section contains the core content of the retrospective, separated into multiple tabs. You can work your way through all the details and tabs individually.
Summary (requires AI) - Like the Command Center, the Summary tab functions as your AI dashboard. Here, you can get a head start on filling out your retrospective by having the AI copilot attempt to fill in all your details and fields using context from the incident.
Incident Overview - Provides a summary of key information like milestones, description, customer impact, impacted components, responders, and more.
Contributing Factors - These items are seen as having led to the incident or the "causes." Many of our customers do their "5 Whys" analysis here and also note any other factors that could have contributed to starting this incident.
Lessons Learned - These are the review questions. FireHydrant ships with default questions, customized according to your organization's needs.
Tasks - This is the same Tasks tab shown in the Command Center. Here, you can review all open/closed Tasks and Follow-Ups.
Change Events- FireHydrant can ingest change events in your repositories or infrastructure and automatically associate them with incidents based on which components were impacted. You can then mark them as the cause of an incident or dismiss them.
Once you've completed the Retrospective, click Publish at the top right, which will transition the incident to the final milestone: Retrospective Completed. This will also generate a PDF report of the retrospective, and if your organization has these Runbook steps configured, will also export the report to Google Docs and Confluence.
Once you've completed the retrospective, head over to the analytics section of the FireHydrant UI to see what types of metrics we track. All of the graphs can be exported to CSV or PNG formats for easy insertion into a report, and all data is accessible via API as well.
Now that you've seen how to conduct incidents in Microsoft Teams, check out the Web UI Responder Guide to see how you can continue to reliably manage your incidents even if your chat app is not available
These guides only cover the basics of conducting incidents on FireHydrant. For more guides, see the docs sections on the left:
Incidents section has in-depth guides for every piece of incident management and platform configuration
Runbooks section contains details about Runbooks and how to automate and tailor your processes
