Design: Introduce incident management workflow to GitLab Slack App

Release notes

Background

In Design discovery: Slack integration for incidents (#364422 - closed), we investigated some initial ideas for porting over some of the existing Woodhouse Slack app functionality into the newly updated GitLab Slack App. The goal of this would be to enable a more robust Slack-to-GitLab integration for incident responders.

As part of this work, we plan to introduce the following:

1. A place to define Slack notification settings for incidents
2. A way to declare an incident from Slack, and include options to
   • Add relevant information to the incident from Slack at the time of incident creation (following Woodhouse).
   • Add appropriate additional resources to the incident at the time of incident creation (zoom link, create new Slack channel, again following Woodhouse).
   • Post a notification of incident creation in the appropriate Slack channel, with links to the relevant resources (following Woodhouse).
   • Post relevant resources that have been added to the incident issue (following Woodhouse).
3. A way to keep content synced up between Slack and GitLab

Our goal would be to build on the improved GitLab Slack app the Ecosystem is building. However, if the notifications haven't yet been ported over to the GitLab Slack app yet, we may need to build on the current GitLab Slack notification integration. More details in this thread.

Proposal

As part of the discovery issue, we created rough sketches for how introducing these features could look:

Create a space to define incident notification settings	Allow people to create an incident from Slack	Allow for adding data to incidents at the time of incident creation	Post a notification linking to relevant resources in Slack when an incident has been created	Add relevant details from Slack directly to the incident	Find a way to send updates to Slack from GitLab	Refine process for adding Slack comments to incidents	Introduce a way to add items to the timeline from Slack

The goal of this issue, though, is to more fully flesh out these designs, and break down this work into implementation issues.

WIP Designs

Introduce incident-specific item to notification settings	New slash command for creating an incident	Slack modal for adding context to incident at the time of incident creation	New incident notification	Incident automatically populated with the content added from Slack	Allow people to send specific comments to Slack from GitLab	Make commenting on incidents from Slack easier	Allow people to add to the timeline from Slack
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Clickable prototype

Figma file

Slack Block Kit Builder

Intended users

Feature Usage Metrics

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