It's been too long since our last product update. Since Y Combinator ended, we've been heads down working on some awesome features. A few of these features will be released in November, but in the meantime, we've redesigned the incident update flow, incident update notifications, and postmortem creation.
Incident Updates
Creating a new update
Instead of the typical modal that we've used in the past for updating an incident, you'll now see a redesigned incident update layout, allowing you to change the status of the associated degraded component at the same time. This change should help customers from forgetting to update a component status if necessary. We've also added an incident update history trail at the bottom of the update, giving you more context into the incident without having to go back and view the actual status page.
Email notification redesign
Our email notifications for incident creation and incident updates were fairly lackluster up until now. Here's a quick look at past updates vs. the new refresh.
Similar to the incident history trail on updating an incident, your subscribers will now see the complete incident history within every update notification as well as the timestamp for each update.
Postmortem Refresh
Postmortems are a great way to discuss a significant outage in further detail after the incident has been resolved. Customers generally want to understand the following:
- Were we affected?
- When did the issue begin?
- When was it resolved?
- What exactly happened and why?
- What is being done to make sure the same issue doesn't happen again in the future?
Before the new design, writing a postmortem for a resolved incident was fairly hidden within the interface and not user friendly to actually save and publish the postmortem. The new postmortem creation with Github Flavored Markdown and Preview functionality built in should help to better design and communicate with your customers after the dust settles.
