Menu Chapter 2

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Incident Response Communication Guide

Calling for Help

Channel Selection Guidelines

1. Private Group (for initial triage):
   • Single environment impact
   • Minor component affected
   • Limited scope (< 5 people)
   • Uncertain team ownership
2. Public Channel (mandatory for):
   • Multi-environment impact
   • Critical component affected
   • Multiple teams involved
   • Potential widespread impact
   • Escalated incidents

Team Engagement Protocol

1. Development Team Engagement:
   • Post in squad’s dev channel
   • Tag relevant subject matter experts
   • Include:
     • Error logs
     • Environment details
     • Recent changes
     • Impact assessment
2. Infrastructure Team Engagement:
   • Contact current on-call engineer first
   • Provide:
     • Infrastructure metrics
     • Alert screenshots
     • Access issues
     • System health indicators
3. Cross-team Collaboration:
   • Create war room if needed
   • Establish clear communication channel
   • Designate incident commander
   • Assign note-taker

Message Templates

1. Initial Alert:

🚨 Incident Alert
• Issue: [Brief description]
• Impact: [Affected services/users]
• Environment: [Dev/Staging/Prod]
• Current status: [Investigating/Identified/In Progress]
• Severity: [P1/P2/P3/P4]
• Started at: [Time]
CC: @oncall @teamlead

1. Assistance Request:

Need assistance with:
• Component: [System/Service name]
• Problem: [Specific issue]
• Attempted: [Actions taken so far]
• Logs: [Link to logs]
• Access needed: [Yes/No]
Priority: [Urgent/High/Medium/Low]

Incident Management Process

1. Detection & Triage:
   • Identify severity level
   • Determine immediate response team
   • Create incident channel if needed
   • Start incident documentation
2. Communication Flow:
   • Updates every 30 minutes for P1
   • Updates every hour for P2
   • Updates every 2 hours for P3
   • Final update post-resolution
3. Escalation Path:

   L1 Support (15 min) → L2 Engineer (30 min) → Team Lead (45 min) → Department Head (60 min)
   

Post-Incident Actions

1. Immediate Actions:
   • Post resolution update in all relevant channels:
     • Development
     • DevOps
     • Scrum
     • Status page
   • Create incident report ticket
   • Schedule immediate debrief if needed
2. Documentation Requirements:
   • Incident timeline
   • Root cause analysis
   • Resolution steps taken
   • Customer impact assessment
   • Prevention measures
3. Follow-up Tasks:
   • Create JIRA tickets for:
     • Incident documentation
     • Action items
     • System improvements
     • Process updates
   • Schedule post-mortem meeting
   • Update runbooks/documentation
   • Review monitoring/alerts

Communication Channels Matrix

Severity	Primary Channel	Secondary Channel	Update Frequency
P1	#incidents	Team Slack	30 min
P2	#team-channel	Email	60 min
P3	#team-channel	-	120 min
P4	Squad channel	-	Daily

Incident Severity Definitions

• P1: Service down, customer impact
• P2: Degraded service, workaround exists
• P3: Minor impact, non-critical
• P4: Minimal impact, can be scheduled

Best Practices

1. Do’s:
   • Keep communication clear and concise
   • Use thread discussions for details
   • Document all decisions
   • Follow escalation procedures
   • Update status regularly
2. Don’ts:
   • Spam multiple channels
   • Leave updates hanging
   • Make assumptions
   • Work in isolation
   • Forget to close the loop