Incident channels

Connect a Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat channel to an incident in ilert for real-time coordination.

An incident channel is a dedicated chat channel connected to an incident for real-time coordination. It gives your responders one place to talk through the response while the incident keeps the structured record.

For a live call rather than a written conversation, attach a conference bridge—an incident can have both.

Before you start

Incident channels rely on a connected chat integration. Make sure one of the following is set up for your account:

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Google Chat

See the ChatOps overview for how to connect a chat tool to ilert.

Create an incident channel

You can connect a channel in two ways:

• While declaring an incident — select Create incident channel in the Declare incident dialog.
• From an existing incident — in the incident view, use the Incident channel section to create one.

If more than one chat platform is connected to your account, you choose which one to use when the channel is created.

An incident can have one incident channel. The platform is fixed once the channel is created—you can disconnect a channel, but you cannot switch it to a different platform.

What reaches the channel, and what does not

A comment written on the incident is posted into the channel as a threaded reply, so people watching there see it without switching windows. It does not work the other way round: what is said in the channel stays in the channel and never appears on the timeline.

The channel is not lost for it. When you generate a postmortem, the ilert bot can read the channel and pull the parts that mattered into the document — which is where the conversation ends up on the record.