New Features: AI-assisted postmortems, ilert Terraform updates, and expanded ChatOps capabilities

In incident management, staying ahead of the curve is crucial, and that's what we're doing with our latest suite of features designed to streamline your workflow and enhance your response capabilities. Furthermore, you have provided numerous excellent suggestions during this period. We value your feedback and invite you to reach out to us at support@ilert.com to share your experiences with ilert. Your input drives us to improve. Feel free to contribute to ilert's development and propose ideas for our roadmap here.

AI-assisted Postmortems (Beta)

We keep our promises and are excited to introduce an AI-assisted postmortem feature that simplifies learning from incidents, ensuring that every challenge is an opportunity for growth. Collect timeline and communication from chat tools and comments within ilert, see all the related alerts and details, get help from ilert AI, and download a file for future improvements. ilert postmortem feature is now available for Beta users. If you would like to join the closed Beta and try it, please message us at support@ilert.com.

‍

If you're seeking best practices and recommendations on enhancing postmortem creation, we strongly suggest perusing our Incident Management Guide. Our experts uncover how to avoid accusatory types of communication and build a productive learning system, how to conduct root cause analysis, and what action items could be after the incident. You can download it here for free.

Even more ChatOps capabilities

This year, we introduced a bundle of features for Slack and Microsoft Teams;  if you've missed them, catch up here. In the recent product update, we unlocked even more capabilities. 

Get on-call status for the current channel

The feature is accessible for both Slack and Microsoft Teams users. Simply tap into the ilert bot within your chat tool and append oncall to verify who's currently available. There are several modes for the command: to restrict the lookup to Slack users with an ilert account or to allow any Slack user to check who is on-call. Learn more about how to set up the feature for Microsoft Teams and Slack.

Establish dedicated incident channels in Slack

You can create a dedicated channel with just one click as soon as an alert occurs. Here is a quick video tutorial illustrating how to use it. Or, if you prefer reading, you can find related documentation here.

A few more additional enhancements for ChatOps:

• More alert actions have been added to the Slack bot, so you can escalate, reroute, add a responder, raise the priority, and add ilert comments from the Slack channel.
• We have changed the appearance of messages in the Microsoft Teams feed by replacing the word "card" with more precise summary details. 
• Now, mentioning works properly for Microsoft Teams.

Terraform ilert provider updates

With Terraform, you can create and manage ilert resources as part of your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) projects. This integration allows you to automate the setup of monitoring and alerting within ilert, aligning it with your infrastructure management practices. This is particularly useful for maintaining consistency across environments and ensuring that alerting configurations are version-controlled and repeatable. Here is the list of updates for the ilert provider.

• New alert action filter types are added: responder added to alert or removed from alert, and channel attached to alert or detached from alert
• Alert source templates are added
• delayMin field of escalation policies is introduced 
• New options available for alert source time-based grouping 
• A new field — teams: List<IDObject> is now ready to use and allows for multiple alert sources to be assigned to a single alert action

Revised support hours

Support hours are now a top-level entity. Thus, you no longer need to establish support hours for each alert source individually and can synchronize the timing for several sources concurrently. If you have yet to use this feature, you can find it under the ilert sources tab in your ilert account. This feature helps you to define hours for alert sources and call routing numbers to manage the priority of alert notifications and route calls to different targets.

Mute notifications

Usually, we build features that guarantee you will be alerted, but this time is different. Check the mute notifications feature under your ilert avatar and silence the notifications while you are on vacation or need rest. The feature is available both on desktop and mobile apps. Note that incoming calls from call routing numbers are not silenced.

‍

‍

‍

‍

And a quick overview of other alerting updates to check out.

• Escalate alerts to an escalation level of your choice manually. The escalation process will resume from the selected level.
• Check what alerts are related to the incident right on the main screen of the ilert desktop app. Just search for the fire 🔥 icon.
• Accept alerts even if another team member has already accepted them and even if you're not on the responders' list.
• SMS notifications look much better now as we reduced the alert source titles and increased the alert summary.
• Email notifications also look better; you can quickly distinguish ilert alerts from other emails.
• Also, emails sent from status pages to your subscribers became more user-friendly.
• Maintenance windows are improved, and you can see if any services or alert sources belong to the current team context. Previously, they weren't visible in such cases.

On-call features news

• We've enabled partial overrides for on-call shifts. So now, if your colleague asks to take only one day from the schedule, you can easily do it. 
• You can choose the default shift handover time on static scheduling without changing it from 00:00 every next shift.

Integrations

Particle: New Integration

We are thrilled to announce a new inbound integration in the ilert library! Particle is a brand known for its innovative solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT) realm. It provides an integrated IoT Platform-as-a-Service designed to assist businesses in connecting, managing, and deploying software applications across various connected devices. This platform operates from edge to cloud, offering a holistic service. Particle's approach is recognized as a full-stack Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), simplifying the process of building connected products that can drive growth, optimize operations, and potentially transform industries. Particle's diverse solutions include products like Monitor One, a customizable cellular IoT gateway for industrial equipment monitoring. 

‍

The integration of ilert with Particle allows users to get notifications from their devices through various channels like text messages, push notifications, voice calls, and messages on chat platforms. This integration facilitates the connection of Particle devices with other tools in your technological stack, enhancing the efficiency of responding to incidents. 

‍

The instructions on connecting your Particle devices with ilert are in our documentation.

‍

Other ilert integration improvements:

• You can now enrich your Autotask ticket data with company titles. The setting is optional.
• Dynamic priority mapping is enabled for Grafana.
• You can now see all fields of Auvik's payload.