Assemble the Right Team to Resolve Incidents Fast by Integrating Alerting and Service Catalog Functions

SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 01, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Blameless, the incident management workflow solution for DevOps and SRE teams, today announces the integration of Opsgenie, Atlassian’s popular alerting solution for incident responders. Integrating with Opsgenie allows Blameless users to quickly and intelligently assemble the right team members at the outset of an incident by accessing data from Opsgenie’s service catalog.

Importance of Assembling the Right Team to Manage the Incident

Blameless users can select and notify responders based on both specific service ownership and team responsibility on-call. This depth of integration into Opsgenie is unique among Incident Management tools on the market and gives users of both tools more flexibility than any other combined solution.

When an incident is acknowledged, it’s important to both alert the right service owners and recruit the full roster of relevant people to the incident channel. This is the best approach to get triage underway quickly. For organizations with multiple teams and different levels of ownership, it’s important to have flexibility in how you assemble the incident response group. For organizations of any scale, this can be complex. Trying to manage this process manually has been shown to significantly slow time to resolution. Automating this workflow step is critical for any modern engineering team.

Making the integration between Opsgenie and Blameless both service-aware and team-aware helps users adapt to situations where the scope of responsibilities per team is unclear or changes. It also allows users to more quickly identify the origin of a potential incident by assembling based on the service affected. This has the benefit of bringing engineers with service-specific expertise directly to the incident rather than relying on first determining which broader team owns that part of the infrastructure.

How the Integration Works

Opsgenie is connected to Blameless via the service catalog and alerting functions, both of which are embedded within the Blameless Slackbot interface. Blameless users responding to or managing an incident, can escalate to any teams defined in Opsgenie. Users can do this directly by team name if known or by selecting the related services and, next the teams responsible for that service. When a service is selected via the bot command via Slack, those team members are automatically notified. Like every other action taken within Blameless, the service catalog and alerting data generated throughout the lifecycle of an incident is automatically captured and stored on the Blameless Incident Timeline.

Important benefits:

• Simplicity and speed. Users of both Opsgenie and Blameless now quickly and intuitively assemble the right, relevant people, which is a critical first step during an incident. With this powerful integration, Blameless has made it simple to identify appropriate service owners as well as follow the defined escalation protocol. Blameless can also display the actual user name of each responder notified per the escalation policy to help with team member identification and downstream reporting.
• Alert Automation. When using Blameless via Slack or Microsoft Teams, Opsgenie alerts are automated when the incident channel is created, and the pre-selection of relevant services takes place. Alerts can also be manually triggered using commands from the Blameless chatbot for those who prefer to trigger alerts from within Slack or Teams.
• Track Every Event for Learning. All triggered alerts can now be tracked as an event in the Blameless Incident Timeline, with the name of the user who started the alert, the name and link to the service, and the team which has been notified. This is ultimately included in the retrospective report and also downstream analytics, so you know exactly what happened and when.
  

"Our customers and the market have been asking for this level of integration with Opsgenie, which is a popular and growing solution for responders, and I’m delighted we’ve delivered on those requests. This depth of integration makes it much easier for teams to codify their incident playbook and streamline the entire end-to-end workflow,” said Jim Gochee, CEO of Blameless. “Blameless integrations are a key engineering tenet for our product, and we’re happy to expand those to make engineering teams more productive and happier.”

“The speed with which ops teams respond to an initial alert has a significant impact on the overall time to resolve the incident,” stated Paul Nashawaty, Principal Analyst for Application Modernization, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Being able to move quickly from acknowledging an alert to working on a resolution is made more difficult when services ownership is unclear, or the assembly process is manual. Blameless integrating with Opsgenie can eliminate lag time between acknowledging and addressing the incident by automating team assembly based on the users' escalation protocol.”

Additional Resources:
Announcing: Blameless + Opsgenie Integration Blog Post
What is Site Reliability Engineering?
The Blameless Blog

About Blameless
Blameless is an incident workflow solution that carries teams through a codified playbook from start to finish in one fluid motion. DevOps, SRE and on-call teams command, communicate, and complete incidents faster than ever before. Everyone learns through retrospectives and data-based insights. Leading brands such as Procore, Under Armour, Citrix, Mercari, Fox, and Home Depot, rely on Blameless to embrace a culture of continuous improvement, do more with less, and protect their customers.

Blameless is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Third Point Ventures, and Decibel. For more information, please visit www.blameless.com and LinkedIn or Twitter.

Media Contacts
Elena Lopez | Audree Hernandez
Jmac PR for Blameless
blameless@jmacpr.com