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 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 through the onboarding steps below and set up integrations, FireHydrant will automatically insert Runbook steps into the Default runbook, providing you stable baseline automation to customize and build on later.

Many more defaults are included with FireHydrant, but they are not crucial for this Quickstart guide.

1. Set up Slack integration

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

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

• Create Incident Channel
• Archive Incident Channel (when Retrospective is completed for the incident)

2. Connect video conferencing

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

• Google Meet
• Webex
• Zoom

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

3. Connect alerting tool

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

You can use FireHydrant's built-in alerting and on-call management - we built Signals to mitigate the pain points of other alerting providers and also couple alerting and incident management into a single, cohesive platform.

To learn more, visit Getting Started w/ Signals.

Alternatively, visit the documentation for the following 3rd-party alerting providers that FireHydrant supports:

• Opsgenie
• PagerDuty
• Splunk On-Call (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 team members is easy and only takes a few steps.

Learn how to invite and configure your teams.

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Note

Make sure your team members accept your email invitation instead of registering directly on FireHydrant's website, which will create an entirely separate organization.

5. Visit the Responder Guide and conduct your first test incident

Now that you've configured the basic integrations, visit either the Slack Responder Guide or Web UI Responder Guide to get a basic walkthrough of conducting incidents in FireHydrant.

Then, conduct an incident! The best way to learn is by doing.

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Note:

When you have finished the onboarding, FireHydrant will stop automatically adding steps to your Default Runbook. From that point forward, you have full control over your automation.

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 an overview of all our integrations.
  • FireHydrant only suggested configuring a few core integrations during onboarding, but numerous others help your team get the most out of 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.
  • From Incident Roles to Managing Tasks, Severities and Priorities, Incident Types, and more, you can tailor FireHydrant to your organization's needs.
• Make use of your alerting integration.
  • From On-Call Paging and Lookup to Alert Routing, FireHydrant makes it easy to transition from alert to incident response seamlessly.
• Learn about FireHydrant's automation engine, Runbooks, and experiment 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 your Service Catalog.
  • FireHydrant's Catalog is how teams efficiently find the right people for the right problems and dramatically improve Mean Time to Assembly.
  • You can automatically pull in a service's owning teams when it's impacted in an incident or automatically add services related to a business functionality on an incident.

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