🗨️ Incident Timeline Comments: Add Context and Move from Conversation to Action Seamlessly

During an incident, new information is constantly coming to light and impacting our response, and we want to make it as easy as possible to capture information wherever you need it. That's why we're excited to introduce the ability to leave comments on timeline items when viewing incidents in Rootly's web platform! This is helpful for situations like:

• Adding context or information to a specific timeline event
• Attaching a conversation or task to a specific timeline event
• Including images like screenshots in the incident timeline
• Making notes when reviewing the incident's timeline in preparation for your Retrospective

This isn’t just your typical basic commenting feature—here’s what you can do with timeline comments in Rootly:

🧑‍🎨 Format your comments using markdown for added clarity, readability, and flair.
✏️ Made a typo? No problem. You can edit comments after posting.
🤳 A picture is worth a thousand words. You can attach files or images to your comments and they’ll be displayed inline right in the incident’s timeline.
✅ Surfaced a new to-do in a timeline conversation? You can quickly create a task or follow-up from a timeline comment.
🙉 Resolve comment threads to mark the close of a conversation (with the option to re-open if needed).

Check out this quick video of timeline comments in action!

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Introduced new and simpler Slack commands for creating tasks and follow-ups. See the Rootly Slack Commands doc for an updated list of commands.
🆕 Teams API has been updated to be able to retrieve and update team membership.
💅 Streamlined onboarding experience for users provisioned through Okta. Users no longer have to re-enter their names and phone numbers. Rootly will match the values stored in Okta
💅 Follow-ups can now be created directly from the Retrospective tab. Users no longer need to navigate to the Follow-Ups tab to create action items when completing retrospectives.
🐛 Fixed display order on dashboard when sorting by severity.
🐛 Fixed issue with default custom field values not displaying on retrospectives.
🐛 Fixed inability to save phone numbers on Send SMS workflow action

👯 Introducing: Rootly x ClickUp! Our New Integration for Seamless Collaboration and Task-Tracking

We’re excited to introduce a brand new integration with ClickUp! ClickUp is a game-changing productivity tool that allows teams to centralize communications and tasks in one place, brainstorm ideas with Whiteboards, and draft plans together with collaborative Docs. Our integration makes it easy to pull tasks identified during incidents (or retrospectives!) into ClickUp where they can be prioritized and tracked to keep everyone on the same page.

When an incident is identified, Rootly automatically creates corresponding tasks or subtasks within ClickUp. The details of these tasks (like priority level and owner) can be automatically mapped to the severity and category of the incident, streamlining the response process and ensuring that critical incidents are prioritized and addressed efficiently.

You can connect ClickUp to Rootly from your Rootly web portal. Select “Integrations” in the left-hand navigation menu, then search ClickUp and click “setup”

Full instructions to link ClickUp to Rootly can be found here in our Help docs.

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Action Item workflows can now be triggered by changes to the attached incident. Previously, only updates to an action item could trigger an Action Item workflow.
🆕 Custom fields can now be hidden on incident details. This means you can now use custom fields as condition flags for workflow logic!
💅 Incident search capabilities have been enhanced to allow searching by incident sequence number.
💅 Status pages can now be disabled via new web UI. Teams no longer have to delete a status page in order to take it offline.
🐛 Fixed text wrapping display issue on Custom Forms page.
🐛 Fixed timeline display issue for incidents in the In Triage status. Now, when an incident gets placed in the In Triage status, the incident timeline will correctly display that event.
🐛 Fixed incorrect date display for scheduled maintenances.

🏡The New and Improved Home Dashboard

Since rolling out our new web UI, we’ve been continuously listening to customer feedback and fine-tuning the web experience to make it even better, simpler, and more intuitive to use! The latest iteration of this is our newly redesigned home dashboard. We’ve introduced several thoughtful design elements and usability features—let’s break them down below:

• Active incidents are displayed right at the top of the page in color-coded tiles corresponding to the incident’s severity. These can be sorted by recency or severity.
• You can now switch between viewing all active incidents and just the ones you are involved in with a single click right from the home page with the “My Incidents” button.
• The Incident Insights section provides a quick overview of key trends from your incidents, like your busiest incident days and average resolution time, and how they compare month over month.
  
• The new “Ask our Reliability Advocates” tile gives you a quick form to book time with our team for hands-on support with any incident management challenges you’re facing. We go beyond standard technical and product support, diving deep into your unique incident needs and helping you find creative solutions to put into practice!
• You still have quick access to our resources like the blog and changelog right from the home page.
• We’ve created a beginner-optimized version of the home dashboard for Trial accounts, which focuses on setup and support.

Check out this recording for a guided tour of the new home dashboard!

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Incident Cancellation form has been added to the list of configurable forms. Teams can now modify what fields to display when canceling an incident.
🆕 Added the ability to search for incidents on the home dashboard. You no longer have to have to navigate to the incidents page to view specific incidents!
💅 Incident filters will now persist even when users navigate away from and back to the page. This will save users the need to re-filter.
💅 Custom field options are now color-coded on the incident details page. The color of each option will match the color configured in the Edit Form Fields page.
💅 Improved navigation across all resource configuration pages. For example: when a Team is edited and saved, users will remain on the same page that contains that particular Team - instead of being navigated back to the first page of the Teams list.
🐛 Fixed isolated issue with some customers not being able to post to status page via Slack.
🐛 Fixed intermittent error when attempting to sort incidents by severity.
🐛 Cleaned up display issues in various edit form screens to remove persisting hover help messages.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Guided Onboarding Flow for New Rootly Users

Adopting a new tool into an organization full of people can be daunting! It’s important to us that we make the experience of onboarding Rootly as easy as possible. We’re always here to guide and support our customers through using Rootly, and now we’re making the onboarding process even smoother with an in-product onboarding flow that walks new users through setting up Rootly with guided steps, explainer videos, and a pre-built Slack tutorial. Coupled with our new user interface, this makes for a clean and simple first introduction to Rootly.

Here’s what new users will see when they first set up Rootly!

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Incident acknowledgement and detection times can now be set to values that are not restricted by Rootly’s default timestamp order.
💅 Due dates can now be set on Asana tasks through Rootly workflows.
💅 Test incidents will be automatically hidden from the home dashboard in the web portal, but you can still access them in the Incidents tab.
💅 Simplified workflow configuration for assigning users that acknowledged PD incidents to incident roles in Rootly.
💅 Added search function for emoji selection on workflow folder setup
🐛 Fixed inability to filter by Teams in metrics dashboards
🐛 Fixed inability to save Liquid syntax in the User field in Add Incident Role workflow action
🐛 Fixed text formatting issue on custom form titles

🏋️ Fields List View and More UX Improvements for Forms & Form Fields

Last month we introduced Custom Forms, a game changer for streamlining incident management and data collection processes. Since then, we’ve continued to iterate and improve the user experience around form creation to make it even easier to manage and edit your forms.

Here’s what’s new:

• You can now view and edit all of your fields in a list display under the new Fields tab, instead of needing to click into individual forms.
• Fields are organized alphabetically and searchable via keyword so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for without scrolling or searching through forms.
• Enable/disable form fields with a single click using the toggle option in the Fields tab
• Specify whether or not a form field is displayed in the Incident Details page

Here’s a video tour of the new and improved Forms & Fields Configuration:

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Rootly status pages can now be configured with a customer-facing message to inform audience on the intended use of the page.
💅 Enhanced Shortcut integration to be able to auto set due date and assignee fields on stories and tasks.
💅 Incidents can now be moved back to triage state through both Slack and web UI.
💅 Improved human readability of scheduled maintenance durations message on Rootly status pages.
🐛 Fixed display error on playbook run conditions to display OR, instead of AND.
🐛 Fixed issue with mitigation and resolution messages not being editable.

🏎️ Bulk Actions for Incidents and Workflows

We recently announced our new bulk editing ability for tasks and follow-up items. Since then, we've expanded our bulk actions feature even further to cover editing incidents and workflows. This enhancement comes from our continuous effort to minimize repetitive tasks and streamline your management process. Here’s a breakdown of what you can easily accomplish using bulk actions:

Incidents Bulk Actions:
✔️ Quickly delete multiple incidents with ease
✔️ Set the status for multiple incidents at once
✔️ Adjust the severity level for multiple incidents simultaneously

Workflows Bulk Actions:
✔️ Delete workflows in bulk
✔️ Organize your workflows better by adding them to folders collectively
✔️ Enable or Disable multiple workflows at a time

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Introduced the ability to filter by roles in the Members page.
🆕 Raw email addresses can now be entered directly into the Attendees field in the Create a Google Calendar Event workflow task
💅 Improved backend logic for exporting action items to Jira by not setting the Reporter value. This will help avoid potential conflicts with individual Jira project setups.
💅 Enhanced status page publishing logic to only allow private incidents to be published to private status pages.
🐛 Fixed issue with the previous attribute value being set to the new attribute value when updating an incident attribute to the same value.
🐛 Fixed issue with preset attendees not being able to be deleted from the Create a Google Calendar Event workflow task

✉️ Share and Set Permissions for Rootly Metrics Dashboards

Incident data provides valuable insights into business health and opportunities to improve response practices, but exactly what data is most beneficial varies from team to team. By introducing a “Share” option within incident dashboards, we’re making it easier to make sure the right data is accessed by the right people. In the Metrics tab of our new user interface, you can create custom internal, public, or private dashboards to display a wide variety of incident metrics. Now, you can click “Share” to easily share dashboards with individuals inside or outside of your organization and set a specific permission level.

When you click the “Share” button from within one of your dashboards, you’ll have the option to enable a public link so anyone with the link can access the dashboard, or to set specific permissions for individual access (View, Edit, or Manage). This benefits use cases such as:

• Security-related incident metrics you only want accessed by certain teams
• Executive-facing dashboards
• Team-specific incident metrics (e.g. health of specific products or services)

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Introduced ability to select whether if subsequent PagerDuty escalations are created as separate incidents or adds selected on-call as a responder to the original PagerDuty incident.
💅Added support for directing Slack message to the creator of an incident via workflow. Now teams can automate messages to specific incident roles, creators, and specific users.
💅 Optimized loading logic for better UI response.
🐛 Fixed inability to upload image for email header in Send Email workflow action.
🐛 Fixed inability to display Severity field description on form fields.
🐛 Fixed incorrect values returned in the Integrations dropdown in the Create Jira Issue workflow action. This only impacted customers that had multiple Jira instances integrated.

✅ Bulk Edit Task and Follow-up Action Items

Our new user interface is much more than a shiny coat of purple paint. As we roll it out to users, you’ll notice small but impactful changes across the web portal. This week we’re highlighting the ability to edit action items (both tasks and follow-ups) in bulk, eliminating the tedious process of editing them one-by-one. To check it out, head to the Action Items tab in the web portal. Select the “Incidents with tasks” check box to select all tasks, or the check box at the top of each incident to select all tasks for a specific incident. You can do so under both the tasks tab (referring to action items to be completed during the incident) and the follow-ups tab (referring to action items to be completed after the incident resolves. The bulk editor allows you to perform any of the following actions:

• Reassign action items to a different user
• Mark action items as “open”, “in progress”, “canceled”, or “done”
• Set or change the priority level
• Set or change the due date
• Delete tasks

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Introduced additional uptime evaluation periods of 180 and 360 days for Rootly status pages
🆕 Incident labels are now displayed on the incident details header on web UI
💅 Improved section alignment on status page display to ensure the most important contents are correctly centered.
💅 Optimized workflow loading sequence to improve response time when quick-viewing workflows.
🐛 Fixed inability to export filtered incident data.
🐛 Fixed inability to save SCIM group assignment on the SSO configurations page.

📝 Create Fully Custom Slack Forms Using Our New Form Builder

Introducing: our new Custom Form Builder! This feature allows you to create and customize forms tailored to your specific needs, streamlining incident management and data collection processes. With the ability to logically group fields together, you can mix native Rootly fields with your own custom fields on a single form. Some key features of the form builder include:

• Trigger via Slack or Web: You can initiate these forms through Slack using a slash command (which can also be customized!) or via the web from the Incident page.
• Logical Grouping of Fields: Combine native Rootly fields and custom fields in a structured manner.
• Customized Data Collection: Design forms specifically for roles like "Communications Lead" that only display communication-related fields.
• Workflow Triggers: The ability to initiate workflows based on the fields in the form.

This opens up a world of use cases to make collecting data during incidents easy and consistent. For example:

💬 Incident Communication: Create a form specifically for the incident communications team, which only displays fields related to communication. This ensures that the team focuses only on relevant information, streamlining the communication process during an incident.
📊 Data Collection for Analysis: Design a form to collect specific data points during an incident for post-incident analysis. This can help in identifying patterns and areas of improvement.
🤖 Workflow Automation: When a form field, like "High" severity, is filled, it can trigger workflows. This can auto-alert senior management via email, Slack, SMS, etc. Our platform excels in multi-channel messaging.
📣 Incident Team Updates: Incidents involve cross-functional collaboration between teams. Creating custom forms for status updates from each Incident Team/Role makes it clear what information should be shared with the channel, so important info isn’t left out of updates.

To start creating your own custom forms, navigate to Configuration > Forms and Custom Fields in your Rootly web portal and scroll down to Custom Forms. Click “Create Form” to start configuring your form by adding the desired fields and input types. Once the form is configured, it can be launched via a custom Slack command defined by the user or directly from the web UI.

Here’s a demo showing how easy it is to create custom form in just two minutes:

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Expanded RBAC to allow teams to enforce that their users can only see private incident.action items that they are assigned or subscribed to and only edit ones they are assigned to.
🆕 Upgraded Rootly Terraform provider to v1.1.6 to allow setting of custom field updates as workflow triggers.
💅 Improved workflow sorting capabilities to allow sorting by name within a folder.
💅 Added the ability to enable custom datetime and date fields to display on the timestamp dialog along with Rootly-native timestamps.
🐛 Fixed inability to save values to the Confluence Template field in the Create a Confluence Page workflow task.
🐛 Fixed issue with sending notifications to WhatsApp.

💅 Specify Public vs Internal Incident Titles on Your Rootly Status Pages

Many organizations use status pages internally and externally to keep stakeholders and customers informed during incidents. External incident communications demand a higher level of polish than their internal counterparts, and given the risk that can be associated with incidents, it’s crucial that teams can clearly differentiate which communications will be visible where.

That’s why we’ve updated our status page configuration to allow users to set a specific Public Title for incidents visible on your status page. This Public Title can be updated independently from the incident’s title used internally, both when posting the initial status page update from Slack, and at any time from the web portal. This way, you don’t need to worry about internal language or naming conventions from your incident titles being displayed to customers on your external status page.

To update your status page during an incident, navigate to the Slack channel specific to that incident, and type the command /rootly statuspage.

You’ll have the option to select the status page of your choice and specify a Public Title for the incident. You can also publish an incident to your status page in the web portal by heading into your incidents tab, selecting the incident of your choice, clicking the Status Page tab, and clicking “Publish Incident”. A form will pop up which allows you to input the information you want on your status page (either manually or from an existing template), including the Public Title.

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Google Analytics 4 tracking on Rootly status pages is now supported
🆕 Upgraded Rootly Terraform provider to v1.1.5 to address unexpected run failures
💅 Improved user input experience when publishing to Statuspage-io via Slack
💅 Create and Update Incident forms now will dynamically adjust the fields and field options displayed based on the end-user’s incident permissions.
🐛 Fixed unexpected system error when integrating with multiple Jira instances
🐛 Fixed custom field display issue on retrospectives
🐛 Fixed issue with checkbox fields auto resetting during form completion