Incident Communications Using CommsFlow™ in Blameless

Nick:

How's it going everyone? My name is Nick. I am a solutions engineer here at Blameless, and today we are going to take a look at Commsflow, a feature in the Blameless platform that allows you to automate both internal and external forms of communication. Communicating to the right stakeholders at the right time is one of the most important aspects of incident management as a whole. Properly communicating allows the broader internal team, customers, and stakeholders to get the right information at the right time, allowing the incident management team to focus on battling the incident, rather than answering status update questions from multiple sources. Let's take a look at how simple it is to set up. Simply start by clicking on "adding flow." If you want to send information collected by Blameless during incident management, or the retrospective process to a non out of the box integration source, Blameless offers an outbound web hook to get key value pairs to your desired destination.

The most common way, however, is to create a CommsFlow by clicking the "add CommsFlow button." It all starts by identifying when you want your communication to be triggered. A CommsFlow can be triggered based on elements of the incident or retrospective changing or staying the same. For example, anytime an incident status changes from investigating to identified, I want to trigger a communication. Moving over to the right side of the screen, you have the option to filter this particular flow by specified incident types, severity labels, retrospective states, or the presence of a specific tag. As we continue, this is where the magic happens. It's as simple as choosing your communication method of choice. Whether you need to send an email, SMS message, Slack or Microsoft Teams message or make a status update, CommsFlow has you covered.

For example, we can send a message to our executive channel on Slack, along with an update to the incident channel, and a direct message to our incident commander. Next, you'll create the template for your message body. Utilizing dynamic variables that Blameless offers allows you to set this flow up once and let us grab the right information for the incident you are working on at time. Finally, give it a name, a final review, hit the active toggle, and your flow is ready to be triggered.

Again, CommsFlow is a great way to provide context to the right stakeholders at the right time. In addition to that CommsFlow is also a great feature to help your team learn how to get up to speed with using Blameless and following your incident management process asap. Thank you so much for watching everyone, and if you have any additional questions on how you can utilize CommsFlow, please reach out to support@blameless.com.