Intro to Jeli’s Incident Response Bot — yes, it’s FREE

At Jeli we believe that incidents are opportunities to learn how technical systems and people work together. But in order to learn from your incidents, you have to get through them first. We see basic incident response tooling as table stakes for every organization, and have committed to providing our Incident Response Bot for free through the Slack App Store.

Jeli’s IR Bot is intentionally simple — we want to streamline your response experience, not pack it full of automations that require hours to configure every step in your process. The more we’ve used fully automated IR workflows, and analyzed how that impacts response, the more we found that automation usually ends up in the way. Jeli’s IR bot has what you need, when you need it. We don’t want to dictate your incident response process, we want to fit into it. 

Our goal at Jeli is to make an incident response bot that works with incidents as they actually happen, not the incidents we imagine when writing processes and tools. Real incidents unfold in unexpected ways, they can be messy and unpredictable, so we built our IR bot to be flexible, to adapt to whatever twists and turns an incident may throw your way.    

Jeli’s Incident Response Bot is a tool for people to use during an incident:

• To help those responding understand & communicate what’s happening, and
• To keep those not involved in mitigation efforts informed on the action.

The bot is easy to set up and easy to use. Configuration is minimal, and things like “which Slack channels are sent progress updates” can be customized during the incident as your understanding of what’s going on evolves. 

We know that adapting and maturing incident processes takes time, and believe in meeting our customers where they are currently, so nothing in the Jeli IR Bot is required. The last thing we want to do is to get in the way of creating or responding to an incident with a required field you don’t have enough information to fill out.

What our bot lets you do

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• Specify default broadcast channels in Slack, which you can change as you go.
• Assign an Incident Commander and Communications Lead, and customize the details they receive upon that assignment..
• Update the severity, roles, and stages at any time.

• The bot will prompt you to add some context to what led to those changes, to help inform stakeholders and give you a record free of hindsight biases for your incident review.

• Convert an existing Slack message from any channel into a status update with our message shortcut, or just use an emoji.
• Set reminders for things you wanted to look into after the incident. You can then decide upon mitigation what to do with them.

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Why it’s free

An IR bot in Slack is only the start of being able to turn incidents into opportunities. We’re happy to give you that for free. The best way to learn about gaps in your incident response process is to invest time in analyzing not only the technical details of how your systems were impacted, but how you as an organization responded. Understanding where there may be coordination confusion, lack of communication, or too much process in the way of mitigation efforts can help you fine tune your incident response so that it can just happen.

As you begin your incident analysis, you’ll eventually need to leave Slack, and you’ll want the ability to analyze across multiple incidents with annotations and other data (like our People View map of who was on call or observing each incident.) Incidents should be viewed as a connected series of events to be analyzed as a whole. You’ll discover contributing factors and opportunities to improve your technical systems and organizations — things that don’t appear in the messages themselves. 

That’s why we also offer a two-week free trial of our full product. Sign up when you install the bot, and it will automatically archive each incident in Jeli for future study and cross-correlation. We think you’ll see that we’ve poured our shared experience and learning into building a better tool for everyone — not only to mitigate incidents quickly, but to learn from them.

We’re excited to see what you learn, and how Jeli can help you generate insights about your organization. Not to disagree with the immortal words of Destiny’s Child, but we think you are ready for this Jeli.

You can get started with Jeli by using our free incident response chatbot. When you’re ready, all the pieces of your process will be there for a more seamless experience.