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Blameless Changelog
Blameless Release Roundup
July 25, 2024
We're excited to announce the latest updates to Blameless, designed to enhance your incident management experience and improve team efficiency. Here’s what’s new:
📝 Feature 1: Multiple Retrospective Templates in the Retrospective Tab Editor
- ❓What it is: You can now create multiple retrospective templates in the Blameless Retrospective Tabs section, allowing different templates for different teams and incident types.
- 👐 Value Proposition: Tailor your retrospectives to fit the unique needs of each team or incident type, ensuring more relevant and insightful post-incident reviews.
- ⚙️ Problem Solved: One-size-fits-all retrospectives often miss critical nuances. This feature ensures each team gets a customized approach, avoiding excessive noise and irrelevant questions.
- 🤝 Use Case: A large enterprise with multiple development teams can create specific retrospective templates for each team. For example, the database team can focus on schema changes and query optimization issues, while the front-end team can concentrate on UI/UX challenges and browser compatibility issues.
- 💬 Customer Quote:
"Having the flexibility to create different retrospective templates has transformed our post-incident analysis, making it more focused and actionable. Our template in security is completely different from the rest of the company. The addition of multiple tabs in the Retrospective have allowed us to expand our usage of Blameless." - Security Incidents Manager
- 👟 How to Get Started: Head over to your Settings section in Blameless. Under Retrospective Preferences, you will see the Retrospective Tabs section. Here, you are now free to create your first new template!
🎉 Feature 2: Microsoft Teams Creation Process Upgrade
- ❓What it is: The incident creation process in Microsoft Teams has been upgraded from using an Adaptive Card to a Dialog (pop open modal), significantly reducing noise in the channel.
- 👐 Value Proposition: Streamline incident creation while keeping channels clean and focused, reducing distractions for your team not involved in Blameless directly.
- ⚙️ Problem Solved: Adaptive Cards can clutter the channel and distract team members. Dialogs keep the interface clean and efficient, unlocking other cool features customers have asked about.
- 🤝 Use Case: During a high-severity incident, the incident response team can quickly create incidents without cluttering the main communication channel. This ensures important updates and communications remain visible, and the incident creation process does not become a distraction.
- 💬 Customer Quote:
"Switching to a Dialog for incident creation has decluttered our channels to avoid confusion amongst users that are not directly interacting with Blameless at that time." - Site Reliability Engineer, Payments Product
- 👟 How to Get Started: This new update is automatically available for you and your team to use now!
🏷️ Feature 3: Tags (Custom Fields) & Service Dropdown Control in Microsoft Teams
- ❓What it is: You can now add tags (custom fields) on the incident creation dialog, and Microsoft Teams users can remove the Services dropdown for PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or Servicenow if desired.
- 👐 Value Proposition: Enhance the specificity of incident reporting with custom fields and simplify the incident creation process by removing unnecessary options.
- ⚙️ Problem Solved: Standard fields often don’t capture all the necessary details. Custom fields allow for more precise and useful data collection.
- 🤝 Use Case 1: A support team handling various types of incidents can add tags (custom fields) such as “Customer Impact Level” or “Affected Components” to better categorize and prioritize incidents.
- 🤝 Use Case 2: Removing the Services dropdown can simplify the form for teams that do not use that field, making the process faster and more efficient.
- 💬 Customer Quote:
"The ability to add custom fields and customize the incident ingestion form has made our reporting much more effective, as well as enhancing our ability to route to the right teams as soon as the problem is reported.." - Incident Manager, Major Incident Management
- 👟 How to Get Started: Head over to your Settings section in Blameless. You will see the section called Tag Management. Under a Tag Category, you will see the option to Show on the incident creation modal in the bot. This will add this Tag Category on your incident creation dialog in Microsoft Teams (also available in Slack). If you would like to remove the Services dropdown, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager for assistance.
📅 Feature 4: WorkFlows Reminders
- ❓What it is: Trigger automated Blameless WorkFlows based on a schedule or lack of activity in an incident.
- 👐 Value Proposition: Ensure critical workflows are executed timely and no incidents fall through the cracks, improving overall incident management efficiency.
- ⚙️ Problem Solved: Teams need to follow up with incident responders to make sure tasks are being completed, follow-up actions are taken care of, and incident progress continues towards resolution. WorkFlow reminders allow you to set up automated workflows that can follow up with the team on your behalf and escalate or route accordingly.
- 🤝 Use Case: In a scenario where an incident is ongoing and there has been no activity for a defined period, WorkFlows Reminders can automatically trigger a follow-up workflow to ensure that the incident does not stall. This could include reassigning tasks, escalating the incident, or prompting for status updates to keep the resolution process on track.
- 💬 Customer Quote:
"WorkFlows Reminders have been a game-changer, ensuring we never miss a crucial step during incident management." - DevOps Engineer
- 👟 How to Get Started: Head over to WorkFlows in Blameless. As you are creating a new WorkFlow, you will see the option to add a TRIGGER TYPE. A Blameless Event is a trigger based on something changing in an incident or retrospective and a Reminder is a trigger based on lack of activity in an incident or retrospective.
These new features are designed to help you manage incidents more effectively, with a focus on customization, efficiency, and automation. Upgrade now and experience a more streamlined and powerful incident management process with Blameless!
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