Show HN: I am building an open-source incident management platform

I will just share a somewhat similar project: https://github.com/netflix/dispatch

Also open source, also Python, also incident management, also custom severities (but not as much of custom roles, afaik) :) Has some integrations with slack, but not focused on Slack particularly.

Can be a good project to learn from as well :)

My relation to it: I only contributed with a couple of pull requests there :)

SoftTalker · a year ago

Best Practical, makers of the venerable "RT" request tracker, also make an IR system based on that technology.

https://bestpractical.com/rtir

I haven't used their Incident Response but used the basic RT for years. It's solid and never gave us any trouble. It is all (or mostly) written in Perl however if that is a concern.

Open-source and free to run on your own, or you can pay for cloud hosting and support.

brunoqc · a year ago

It looks nice. I wish it would support prometheus/lokio/grafana.

I love to see it. Thank you for building this. This is a problem that's been solved many times over by private companies, and they charge other institutions exorbitant fees for the privilege of using their software. I hope you can get many companies to put skin in the game and contribute towards fixing bugs. It'll be cheaper for them in the long run than paying those external vendors.

For those of you complaining about the slack integration in the comments, you know you can just not connect that, right?

dewey · a year ago

> I hope you can get many companies to put skin in the game and contribute towards fixing bugs. It'll be cheaper for them in the long run than paying those external vendors.

This would be a nice world to live in, but unfortunately this is very rarely the case as you can see with most open source projects that are used in many companies and are underfunded and understaffed.

Most bigger companies value saved time of not integrating something themselves, liability and having someone else to call if something goes wrong higher than saving a few thousand bucks a year for some external vendor. Which makes total sense for something that's not your core business.

lawrjone · a year ago

Don't these people already have the option of running open-source tools like Netflix's Dispatch or Monzo's Response? If they have the open-source options why would they pay for the hosted services?

rm_-rf_slash · a year ago

Support, liability protection, SLA…there’s a reason people pay for tools they can get for free.

synack · a year ago

Use the semantics of the standard Incident Command System. Emergency responders have spent decades figuring out the best way to organize for these situations. Tech orgs should leverage that work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System

https://training.fema.gov/nims/

misswaterfairy · a year ago

Agreed. ICS is designed to be scalable and flexible (without the marketing fluff that tech companies try to sell).

Am firefighter/emergency manager and regularly train and utilise ICS. It works for any incident you throw at it, even a kids birthday party if you really need it to.

joseferben · a year ago

this looks interesting. any first hands experience applying this for tech incidents?

eep_social · a year ago

I have experience applying ICS-style process to incidents and have delivered training to ~hundreds of engineers at $job. I am partial to this PD doc: https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...

shahahmed · a year ago

this is detailed in the Google SRE book: https://sre.google/workbook/incident-response/

vindex10 · a year ago

novia · a year ago

evnsio · a year ago

As the person who originally wrote the Monzo Response project (https://github.com/monzo/response), I expect you'll find some traction in smaller orgs, but when folks start doing things at scale they'll hit an inflection point where running their own incident software/not having folks to log feature requests with will force them to pick something more off-the-shelf.

Basically, nobody runs their on-call system on open-source because it's mission critical. At a certain point, IM platforms hit the same level of criticality.

julianeon · a year ago

Insightful comment; makes sense.

nagstler · a year ago

I'm definitely looking forward to this project!

Have you considered how Incidental might integrate with other open-source tools?

I'd love to use something like this in my OSS project.

https://github.com/Multiwoven/multiwoven

snthpy · a year ago

I was thinking along similar lines.

It would great if incidental and multiwoven used some standard connector library instead of Slack's api so that I can seamlessly use them with other services like Teams which we use at work.

allywilson · a year ago

Different auth options (SAML, OAuth, etc.) would be a nice to have. I look forward to the progress on this tool :-)

matthewcford · a year ago

We've been building same thing hope to share it soon.

dotancohen · a year ago

Tell us more.

Rickasaurus · a year ago

My pet feature is good and tight Jira (or ticket manager) integration so it opens tickets for the team to put time on, maybe even syncs time? Really nicely streamline so the time to remediate is tracked as part of the team's work.