You can create Incidents either directly in Jira or from Slack. We encourage you and your team to use whichever method is most convenient. However, best practices suggest your teams should put as much information as possible in Incidents to help the engineering team resolve the issue as fast as possible.
Typically, this means you need to:
Have a clear summary about what is not working as expected
To the best of your ability select the primary Product being affected (Select the Impacted Product field).
Add a clear description of how to replicate the issue you found.
Add screenshots if applicable.
If your organization uses multiple Severity levels, use your best effort to choose the correct level.
📝 Create an Incident in Jira
To create an incident in Jira, simply click the Create button in Jira as you would for any work item:
Select the Incident project your company uses: typically this will be Incidents or Phoenix Incidents.
Enter in as many details as you can in Summary and Description. Add screenshots.
Impacted Product, Select the primary/main product that is impacted by this incident. If there are multiple products affected, choose the common denominator (we recommend all companies to have broad products like "Platform" or similar for wide-ranging Incidents). This will affect which team will get paged in your paging system.
Severity. If your company has set up multiple Severity levels, use your best effort to select the correct Severity level.
Optional: If you know when the outage actually began, you can select the Incident Start date and time. If you don't the current time will be automatically set for you.
Press Create.
💬 Incident Creation from Slack
To create an Incident from Slack, in any channel, simply type the slash command:
/phoenix create
This will bring up a modal for you to enter:
Impacted Product. Select the primary product that is affected. If there are multiple products affected, choose the common denominator (we recommend all companies to have broad products like "Platform" or similar for wide-ranging Incidents). This will affect which team will get paged in your paging system.
Incident Severity. If your company uses multiple Severity levels, you will need to select the Severity of this incident.
Summary. Enter a summary of the issue - it is recommended to be as clear as possible.
Description. Enter a clear description of what the incident is and how to reproduce it.
🎯 Recommendation
Since there are limited options in Slack, we recommend you goto Jira afterwards and add in screenshots and more details into the newly created Incident to help the engineering.
📆 How We Handle Dates
Incident Start. If you know when the incident/outage actually started from you can select the correct date/time when you create the incident in Jira. If you don't the system automatically sets the current time for you.
Incident End. The system automatically sets this to the time when the Incident is Resolved.
Both Incident Start and Incident End dates can be modified during the RCA, once you have collected more information. It is important to be as accurate as possible with both, as these times are used to generate several metrics for the Incident and RCA.