New feature: Templates for Incident Management

At Spike.sh, we are obsessed with making incident management more accessible to dev teams everywhere. With this goal in mind, we are always looking for ways to reduce the friction while setting up the Spike.sh platform.

When we saw customers asking our advice for creating effective on-call schedules and escalations, we knew we had to do more than just good documentation - we needed a way to share best practices with our customers in the product itself.

We're very excited to announce Templates for on-call schedules, escalations and alert rules; and very proud to be the first incident management platform to add this useful feature. Let's dive in to take a better look.

On-call schedule templates

Creating effective on-call schedules which cover different scenarios involving your team members is an ongoing process. You have to juggle between achieving on-call coverage for your desired times and being mindful of team member health.

Starting a new on-call schedule from scratch can be daunting, which is where our readymade templates come in. Our on-call templates are personalised to your account and you will have find your team members added to the schedules. This way, you can get set up on-call in 2 clicks.  

Here is a peek into some on-call schedule templates -

• Daily rotation schedule which gives you 24x7 on-call coverage, with one day shifts for each team member
• After-hours schedule that divides non-working hours into shifts between your team members
• Weekly rotation schedule where one team member is on-call for a week

Escalation templates

The right escalation policy makes sure that the right team members are alerted on the right channel every time.  Too often, teams create just one escalation policy - but not every incident is the same, so this results in too many or too few people getting alerted for each incident.

Ideally, you should have different escalation policies to cater to different types of incidents. We provide a number of escalation templates that cover most possible scenarios. In addition, the templates are personalised - you will find members from your team in the escalation templates.

Here are some of the escalation templates that we've added for you -

• High severity escalation policy to alert all team members on phone call
• Email only policy for low urgency incidents
• Scaling policy involving Slack/email first and phone call later if no one acknowledges the incident

Alert Rule templates

Alert rules let you create simple automations in response to incoming incidents - they help reduce your busywork by automating common tasks. Because of the versatile nature of alert rules, we wanted to show you their power to handle different scenarios.

Here are a few of the Alert rule templates which you can start using right away -

• Mark incident as severe if it occurs too many times
• Assign the right escalation policy for critical incidents
• Suppress an incident based on incident alert keywords like “testing”

Get Started

Setting up an incident management process can take precious time away from your dev teams. By using our readymade templates, you can benefit from the best practices of incident management without spending days researching it.

See all the incident management templates or start using them by signing up at Spike.sh.