Incident setup runbook
Release notes
Problem to solve
When there is an ongoing incident, companies need to organize themselves in order to respond to it. Some of these activities may include but are not limited to paging the on-call engineer if not done already, assigning specific incident roles, capturing initial known information regarding the incident, starting an incident issue, starting a slack channel, starting a zoom meeting, kicking off other types of automation, creating a freeze window, putting up a broadcast message to all of the developers, etc.
The exact set of activities can differ by organization, teams within the same organization, severity of the incident, the type of incident etc.
We should enable an easy way to automate as many of these manual tasks as possible while enabling teams the flexibility to choose the automation that's actually required.
Proposal
Iteration 1
The MVC to solve this problem may already exist. Incident issues can take advantage of templates and quick actions to automate some tasks.
Iteration 2
Ship GitLab with (a few?) templates that take advantage of existing functionalities. Even if people don't use them, it serves as good documentation in the product. Default to the most common template.
Iteration 3
Allow custom quick actions that aggregate other quick actions. This becomes "runbooks"
Iteration 4 & beyond
- Add UI, people can point, click, drag to create these custom quick actions
- API access, so we can enable things like slack integration and other integrations
Intended users
Incident responders
Though I am guessing this has utility outside of incidents
Feature Usage Metrics
Based on the proposal, we could measure the following:
- Incidents created with templates
- Incidents using quick actions
- Number of custom quick actions created
- Users creating custom quick actions
- Users using custom quick actions
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