Design: Slack integration for Incident Management

Problem to solve

Please reference the parent epic for a more detailed explanation of the problems to solve. Here is a summary

  1. Slack is frequently used throughout companies for communication and within DevOps/SRE teams for ChatOps. Our current Slack integration allows you to send issues to pre-configured slack channels where teams collaborate in the fire fight. We need to make this integration bi-directional so that as an incident progresses, the issue in GitLab remains updated with the most recent findings, discussion, status, etc.
  2. If majority of the discussion is happening in Slack, we need to provide users a way to review the discussion/chain of events after the fact in a Post-Incident Review. This information (discussion, events, actions, etc) needs to be part of a GitLab issue.

Intended users

Sasha the Software Developer
Devon the DevOps Engineer
Sidney the Systems Administrator

Further details

This works supports the vision for Incident Management

There is a native Slack application that allows users to change things in GitLab from Slack using slash commands without setting up a webhook or configuring specific slash commands. This is currently unavailable to self-managed users. If self-managed users want to send events from GitLab to Slack, they must manually configure Slack slash commands through a custom Slack app. @danielgruesso is working on extending it to self-managed users in 12.4 - here is the issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/60706.

Both .com and self-managed users need to set up the Slack Notifications service to send GitLab events to Slack

Steps

  1. User Journey for how a user will leverage Slack + GitLab during a fire fight utilizing our existing webhook integration
  2. Review User Journey with engineering and incorporate their feedback
  3. Review updated User journey with @sarahwaldner and @awhite-gl and refine User Journey for Viable
  4. Create designs for Viable User Journey
  5. Create feature issues for 12.4 and 12.5 milestones that complete that scope

Outcome/Deliverable

  • User journey for Slack experience for Incident Management viable

Screen_Shot_2019-08-15_at_12.11.02_PM

  • Designs supporting issues for 12.4 and 12.5

To be completed as part of follow-up issues (linked in related issues)

Link to Murals:

Full Incident Management User Journey
Slack + GitLab User Journey
Link to design files - INSERT LINK

Edited by Amelia Bauerly