Solution validation: surface slack channel information in an incident issue
What’s this issue all about?
As part of earlier Incident Management research, we discovered that people utilize a number of communications channels during an active incident, for example Slack.
When an issue has been created for an incident, is it important to highlight those other communications channels within the issue? For example, if there is a slack channel where the incident is being discussed, is it important to highlight that slack channel within an issue. If so: how do we best do that?
Who is the target user of the feature?
SREs, Infrastructure Engineers, Dev-ops engineers
What questions are you trying to answer?
We have come up with a number of options for surfacing relevant comms links within an issue:
Current design | Pinned comment | Link block in description | Link block in sidebar |
---|---|---|---|
Design from gitlab-foss#55757 (comment 155166862) | Design from gitlab-foss#17580 (closed) | Variation on concept from gitlab#14744 (closed) | Following suggestion from gitlab-foss#66837 (comment 213182703) |
The questions we are hoping to answer:
- Which option best fits into the incident management workflow?
- Which option best fits into the Issue UI more seamlessly?
For reference, here is the larger workflow these designs would fit into:
- An alert is triggered
- Alertbot opens a GitLab issue and labels it "incident"
- We surface communications channels in the issue so people viewing the issue know where other conversations related to the incident are occurring.
Core questions
In the context of the incident management workflow, where is it most helpful for links to other communications platforms to be shown? (They can choose between the three options we've presented, or perhaps suggest an alternate option, if they have one.)
Additional questions
In the context of issues more generally, do users have a need for a "relevant links" section? Is it more useful to have this information under the issue description or in the sidebar?
Would users be concerned that this relevant links section would become a "dumping ground" for misc links, thus burying the comms links that are important during an incident?
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
- That surfacing the slack channel in an issue is useful.
- That the current approach, pinning the slack channel to the top of the issue, is over-emphasizing the slack channel link.
- That adding a relevant links section to the side-bar is the best current approach.
What decisions will you make based on the research findings?
To proceed with highlighting the slack channel information...or not. And, if we proceed with it, helping us to pin down which approach is best.
What's the latest milestone that the research will still be useful to you?
12.8