New features summer wrap-up: Evolving ChatOps, AI-assisted Incident Comms, and Time-based alert grouping

It is time to sum up the product updates that we introduced during summer 2023. As always, our focus has been on minimizing limitations in the incident response process and accelerating the workflow from acknowledgment to resolution. We invite you to contribute to the ilert roadmap by submitting your feature and improvement ideas here.

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AI-assisted Incident Communication

We know how hard it can be to gather your thoughts and choose the proper wording to communicate incidents to customers and stakeholders when everything is red. To help maintain your focus on issue resolution and simplify the process of documenting incident summaries, we introduced ilert AI.

ilert's AI assistance feature swiftly and accurately generates incident communications. When a new incident arises, you can input a basic technical overview into the message fields, and our AI will handle the rest. Based on your input, ilert AI will produce an incident summary and a status page message, also highlighting the affected services.

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You can utilize ilert AI for incident updates as well. You do not need to describe statuses in detail now. Your team can concentrate on issue resolution and be sure that friendly and clear messaging will reach your users.

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This represents our first foray into integrating AI with our product, but there is more on the horizon. AI-assisted post-mortem creation is in development and will be available soon!

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To try out the AI assistance, activate it in your account settings. Please be aware that some of the AI features share data with third parties. Learn more about ilert AI and its capabilities in our documentation.

Advanced ChatOps

While the financial system heavily depends on Excel, corporate communication leans on chat applications—especially true for Dev teams. This is why we're introducing a group of ChatOps features that are designed to keep all the vital incident management tools on hand in your main communication tool — be it Slack or Microsoft Teams.

From now on, you can manually create alerts from Slack and Microsoft Teams. All updates on an incident are now threaded to prevent clutter and streamline resolution progress tracking. 

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By adding Slack or Microsoft Teams as an alert source, you can significantly reduce the friction in communication between different tech teams. This is particularly important for enterprise companies where there are many departments, and reaching out to a colleague isn't always straightforward.

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Other key points include:

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• Whole teams or individual team members can receive instant incident updates.
• Even users without an ilert account can report incidents.
• You can determine channels where users can report incidents, decide the escalation paths, and set the desired notification priority.

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Additionally, you can establish a dedicated incident channel in Microsoft Teams to keep only proper team members posted and collect all incident-related information in one place. All responders are automatically added to a dedicated channel. This will ease collaboration during the response process and will enhance post-mortem creation later. And stay alert — the same feature for Slack is on the way! 

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You can find all information on how to integrate ilert with your corporate messengers here.

Maintenance windows in the mobile app

Our maintenance windows feature allows ilert users to schedule downtime for alert sources and services. This ensures that on-call responders and status page subscribers aren't overwhelmed with alerts and are kept informed about maintenance periods. With the latest update, we have added this feature to our mobile apps. You can now effortlessly transition both alert sources and services into maintenance mode on the go and, at the same time, easily keep your users informed.

Time-based alert grouping

To effectively manage a high volume of alerts, consider utilizing our alert grouping feature. This function systematically groups related alerts within specified time frames or allows only one alert per source at a given time. Instead of navigating through multiple alerts, you'll find these consolidated alerts presented as distinct events on the alert timeline. You have the flexibility to select time-based parameters, such as "2 minutes" or "5 minutes", or opt for action-based criteria like "until the alert is accepted or resolved."

Additional improvements

• Try out our new alert creation interface — both on desktop and mobile. The escalation policy and Notification priority fields are auto-filled based on your alert source's default values and are updated whenever another alert source is selected.
• You will also find that the workflow for creating an Alert source has been refined to be more intuitive and efficient.
• We have enhanced the view and filters for alerts on mobile. It should be easier now to navigate through the list.
• You can now set up a primary phone number for use in live call routing and as a quick dial option in the mobile app.
• The list of integrations has been expanded. Now you can connect ilert to Uptime Kuma, Github Advanced Security, and Twilio Errors.