Slack is one of the most widely used messaging Apps, providing collaboration and chat solutions to businesses. We at Squadcast understand that most of your work happens over Slack. Hence, we have made improvements to our Slack integration capabilities by introducing a bunch of UI and functional improvements. This blog will give you an overview of the latest improvements supported by this integration, which we hope will help in better collaboration and Incident Management.

Features of Squadcast and Slack Integration

Configuration and Notifications

You can now configure a default Slack channel for the entire account. There is an option to either select the channel from the dropdown or by entering the channel ID. In the previous version, it was challenging to determine which incidents the notifications were intended for, because each action or update notification was issued as a separate notification in the main channel. Now all the update notifications will be sent under the same incident thread and also on the main channel, making it easier to keep track of updates. You can also opt-out from receiving notifications on the main channel by deselecting the ‘Send incident updates to the main channel’ button’.

You can also revoke the integration when needed.

Now, you have more options to notify the right users. For all the configured Slack channels, you can choose which notifications you want to receive or send from Squadcast. You can send customized notifications like:

• Notifying users about the change in the status of incidents (triggered, Acknowledged, Resolved, Reassigned)
• Sending notes or tasks updates (created, updated, deleted, starred)
• Updating users about SLO-Violating incidents (Created, Marked as False Positive, Unmarked as False Positive
• Updating users about Postmortem and Runbook related activities (creating or updating Postmortems and Runbooks) 
• Sending notifications to users about task updates and communication links

In case you simply want to notify everyone, we have you covered there too. Just choose ‘Send notifications to all updates’ and you can notify everyone about all the updates/incidents.

Improved Incident Management and Actionable Messaging

In critical situations, especially when something is burning, every second missed has the potential to cost aplenty. With the Squadcast and Slack Integration, you can Acknowledge, Reassign and Resolve incidents from within Slack channels with a click of a button. Once the status is updated, it will get reflected in Squadcast. You do not need to sign in to Squadcast separately and can handle these incidents within Slack. This will ensure that your incident response teams have a centralized point for Incident Management and instant messaging.

Moving from a 2-column layout to single column layout

We have made some visual improvements to the Slack channel with the aim to offer you a better visual experience. We are moving from a 2-column layout to single column layout. The addition of emojis and icons is aimed at offering you a more crisp and expressive interface.

The new layout will also give you a pop up of the View/Create Postmortem nudge once the incident is resolved. With this nudge, you can instantly create a Postmortem for the resolved incident and document it for future reference.

Make your Slack Channel more Actionable

You can now perform more actions from within your Slack channels.

Here is what you can do with the new version:

Add Notes

Minor details can make or break situations, especially during calls or while working on critical incidents. With the new version, you can add notes to your incident details page with ease and notify the right users in the channel.

Attach Runbooks

You do not want to waste valuable time searching for different checklists and following up on the list items while working on critical incidents. You can choose and attach one or more Runbooks to your platform, so your team can reference it while working on critical incidents. In case you wish to view the Runbook, you can click on the view CTA, and it will take you to the Squadcast UI where you can view the Runbook.

Add/Update Tags

You can now easily add new tags or update existing tags after the incident is created. For example you can assign a severity to an incident or update it when needed.

Add Communication Links

You can add communication links like video calls, chatops and external links to an incident like Zoom or Google Meet links. This makes it easy for you to hop on a quick call directly from Slack and save valuable time.

Create dedicated Slack Channel

You now have the ability to create a dedicated Slack channel for an incident from your existing organization-level channel and receive only incident-specific notifications in that channel.

(Please Note: all actions apart from Create Channel are limited to dedicated incident channels only)

Conclusion

Slack is a powerful messaging and collaboration app and integrating it with Squadcast will boost your Incident Management, collaboration and other communication processes. We hope this blog helps you in exploring the benefits of our improved Slack V2 integration. You can try it for yourself with our Freemium Plan, and in case you have any issues, feel free to drop your queries to our Support Team. Also, here is a link to the detailed documentation for setting up Squadcast-Slack Integration.