Announcements

Announcements keep everyone informed by sharing incidents in a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel. You don’t need to set anything up to get started. Every account comes with a default template and a default rule, so incidents are announced automatically from day one. This page is about customizing that behaviour, which comes in two parts:

• Templates control what your announcement posts look like: the fields, actions, and emojis that appear in the post.
• Rules control which incidents get announced, and where.

To customize either, go to Settings → Announcements.

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Templates

A template controls what an announcement post looks like. Every account starts with a single template, which is marked as your Default. This is the template used whenever a rule (or workflow) doesn’t specify one. Click a template to edit it. You can add or remove fields and actions, reorder them, and configure which emojis appear next to each field, with a live preview of the post as you go. To add a field or action, click Add and pick from the list.

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Using more than one template

You’re not limited to a single template. Click Add template to create additional templates. This is useful when you want variations for specific purposes, such as a stripped-back post for a particular audience, or a template paired with a specific announcement rule so different incidents are announced differently.

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Rules

Rules control which incidents get announced, and where. By default, we announce every new incident and its updates in a single channel. In Slack, that’s your #incidents channel. Click a rule to edit it. You can change which channel it posts to, add conditions so it only fires for specific incidents (for example, announcing critical incidents in #customer-support too), and pick which template it uses. Click Add rule to create a new rule, for instance to call out specific incident types or severities in a separate channel. For more on redirecting announcements to a different channel, see Announcement channels.

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Team ownership

You can give one or more teams ownership of a template or a rule:

• Templates: set the Template owner field when you create or edit a template. Your default template can’t be team-owned, and choosing which template is the organization default stays an account-level action.
• Rules: set the Announcement rule owner field in the rule’s create or edit drawer.

Ownership assigns the template or rule to a team. If your organization uses team roles, that ownership also controls who can manage it: only members of an owning team with the Manage announcements permission, or anyone who holds it account-wide, can make changes, and reassigning ownership always needs that permission granted account-wide. See Team resources for what ownership means more generally. Each team can see the templates and rules they own on their own Settings → Announcements page.

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FAQs