Incident Management
Master the art of coordinated incident communication. Create, execute, track, and resolve incidents with clear, consistent messaging across your entire organization.
What is an Incident?
An incident in CommHero is a coordinated communication response to a specific event. It's not just about the technical problem—it's about who needs to know, what they need to know, and how fast we can tell them.
Example:
Your API service goes down at 3 PM on a Tuesday. In CommHero, you:
- • Create an incident called "API Service Outage - May 14"
- • Select the "API Degradation" template (pre-approved messaging)
- • Choose channels: Slack (internal teams), Email (customers), SMS (critical alerts)
- • Fill in: severity, ETA, and specific API endpoints affected
- • Hit "Execute" and everyone gets notified instantly
- • Update the status as you work on the fix
- • Close the incident once resolved
The Incident Lifecycle
Every incident goes through these phases:
1. Create
Give your incident a clear title and select which templates you'll use. You can have multiple templates in one incident to reach different audiences with the right message.
2. Configure
Select which channels to use (Slack for internal, Email for customers, SMS for critical alerts). Choose audiences. If required, request approvals from leadership or compliance.
3. Execute
Fill in template variables (severity, ETA, impact). Hit "Execute" and CommHero sends coordinated messages across all selected channels simultaneously.
4. Track
Every execution is logged. See timestamps, who sent the message, to which channels, with what content. This audit trail is critical for compliance and post-mortems.
5. Update
As you learn more, update the incident status. Execute the "update" template to notify stakeholders of progress. Re-execute with new information as the situation evolves.
6. Close
Once resolved, send a final "all clear" message. CommHero lets you close the incident and archive the full communication record for post-mortems and compliance.
Best Practices
Speed Over Perfection
Don't wait for perfect wording. Send an initial notification fast to let people know something is happening. Updates can follow. Silence during a crisis is worse than an imperfect message.
Audience-Specific Templates
Create different templates for different audiences. Internal teams need technical details. Customers need business impact. Vendors need specific context about the outage. Use multiple templates in one incident.
Set Expectations
Always include an ETA in your incident messages. Even "investigating" is better than silence. People want to know how long it will take and what the impact is.
Avoid Template Overload
Start with 3-5 core incident templates. Common ones: database outage, API degradation, scheduled maintenance, data issue, infrastructure problem. You can always add more later.
Incident Priority Levels
CommHero supports four incident priority levels to help categorize severity:
Critical
Complete service outage affecting all users. Immediate notification required.
High
Significant service degradation or data issue affecting a subset of users.
Medium
Partial degradation or minor issue with workaround available.
Low
Scheduled maintenance or cosmetic issues with no user impact.
Working with Variables
Templates use variables so you can customize messages for each incident without rewriting them. Common variables:
// Template variables you can use
{
"incident_id": "INC-2024-001",
"title": "API Service Outage",
"severity": "Critical",
"start_time": "2024-01-15T15:00:00Z",
"eta_resolution": "16:30",
"affected_systems": "Auth API, User API",
"impact": "Users unable to log in",
"status": "Investigating",
"update_timestamp": "2024-01-15T15:15:00Z"
}When you execute an incident, CommHero replaces these variables with your actual values. So a template with "ETA: {eta_resolution}" becomes "ETA: 16:30" in the sent message.
Incident History
Every incident maintains a complete timeline of all executions, updates, and closures. This is invaluable for:
- • Post-mortems — See exactly what was communicated when
- • Compliance — Audit trail of all incident notifications
- • Learning — Reference past incidents when creating new ones
- • Metrics — Analyze response time, update frequency, resolution time