Policies

You can leverage policies to define rules about how your organization’s on-call and incident management program should be setup and run. This includes policies around:

• Debriefs being scheduled and/or completed
• Follow-ups being assigned and/or completed
• Post-mortems being exported and/or completed
• On-call users having a specific notification setup

If any of the policy rules are not met, we’ll send users reminders to ensure they are addressed within a specified timeframe. In addition, you can set up policy reports to see which tasks are still outstanding across your organization.

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Creating a policy

To create a policy, go to Settings → Policies. From there, it’s recommended to leverage one of our default policy templates. If you require a more complex setup, you can set up your own policy via Create new policy button.

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Viewing outstanding policy tasks

Once your policy is configured, you’ll want to see which tasks aren’t yet completed — for example, follow-ups still outstanding 30 days after resolve. A few places help you track this:

• The team page: each team’s Tasks tab lists every open task for the team, including policy violations and post-incident tasks, with filters and the associated policy shown for each one. The Overview tab also has an at-a-glance Open tasks panel.
• Per-policy: within each policy’s configuration, the right side panel shows outstanding or dismissed tasks for that specific policy.
• In context: within an individual incident, or within the Post-incident section of the dashboard.
• Policy reports: scheduled summaries delivered to Slack or email (see below).

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Creating a policy report

You can stay on top of outstanding tasks by heading to Settings → Policies and scheduling a report to run every day, week or month. This report will be sent either to a Slack channel and/or email address of your choice. The report will summarize all the outstanding tasks related to those selected policies.

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Notifying users about tasks

Within each policy’s configuration, you will be able to set who is the assignee (ie. who will be reminded to complete this particular task). For example this could mean:

• For On-call notifications, it would be the on-call user
• For follow-up completion, this could be the follow-up owner
• For post-mortem completion, this could be the incident lead

You can configure when the assignees should be notified about tasks as well. For example, notified follow-up owners:

• 2 days before it’s due
  • Notifications before a due date do not apply to on-call policies such as notifications settings. This is because you are either in violation of that policy or not, there isn’t a way to know you will be in violation beforehand (we aren’t mind readers yet! ).
• the day it’s due
• 1 day after it’s due
• etc.

We will then notify these users of their outstanding tasks via Slack, email and the home page (in the right side bar) per the policy’s notification configuration.