ChatOps Incident Automation: Slack-Based Response
Conversational incident management with automated runbooks, PagerDuty integration, and real-time collaboration
60%
Faster MTTR
40+
Automated Runbooks
100%
Incident Documentation
Quick Facts
Industry: E-commerce Platform
On-Call Teams: 8 teams
Timeline: 8 weeks
Incidents/Month: 50+
Stack: Slack, PagerDuty, n8n, GitHub
The Challenge
An e-commerce platform with 8 on-call teams was struggling with incident response chaos. When alerts fired, engineers scrambled across multiple tools - checking Datadog, searching Slack history, finding runbooks in Confluence, and manually updating status pages. Context was lost, and incidents often took hours to resolve.
Post-incident reviews were painful because there was no centralized timeline. Engineers couldn't remember what they tried, and similar incidents kept recurring because learnings weren't captured. They needed a unified incident management approach.
Pain Points
❌ Context switching between 5+ tools during incidents
❌ Runbooks scattered across Confluence/Google Docs
❌ No automated incident timeline or documentation
❌ Manual status page updates forgotten during stress
❌ 90+ minute average MTTR
Our Solution
💬
Slack Incident Bot
Built a Slack bot for incident lifecycle management. /incident declare creates dedicated channel, pages on-call, sets up video bridge, and posts to status page. All actions logged to channel timeline.
📋
Executable Runbooks
Migrated runbooks from Confluence to executable n8n workflows. Engineers trigger via /runbook commands in Slack, and results post back to channel. Automatic suggestions based on alert type.
🔔
PagerDuty Integration
Deep PagerDuty integration for smart routing, escalations, and acknowledgments from Slack. On-call schedules visible in channel, with one-click page and escalate buttons.
📊
Auto-Documentation
Automatic incident timeline generated from channel activity. One-click post-mortem creation with pre-filled timeline, metrics, and action items. Searchable incident database.
Results
60%
Faster MTTR
90 min → 35 min
40+
Automated Runbooks
Executable from Slack
100%
Auto-Documented
Every incident
75%
Less Recurring
Incidents reduced
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ChatOps for incident management?
ChatOps brings incident response into Slack/Teams, enabling declaring incidents, paging, diagnostics, and documentation all within chat, creating real-time timelines.
How does ChatOps reduce MTTR?
By eliminating context switching, providing instant runbook access, enabling real-time collaboration, and auto-documenting timelines. Teams see 40-60% MTTR reduction.
What tools integrate with ChatOps?
PagerDuty/Opsgenie for alerting, Jira for tickets, Datadog/Grafana for metrics, GitHub for deployments, and platforms like incident.io or Rootly.
What are automated runbooks?
Executable scripts triggered via slash commands that perform diagnostics or remediation, posting results back to the incident channel automatically.
Related Resources
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