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Running an incident debrief is often a helpful way to make sure that everyone is on the same page. You might go over your post-mortem, ensure that you’ve recorded all follow-up tasks, or distilled and shared any important learnings. But how do you know who to invite? This might vary based on the size and impact of your incident but it could include people directly involved in the incident, members from the teams of services that were affected, and any senior execs that express an interest. You can set up custom rules to automatically invite the right people to your debrief based on incident fields, custom fields, and even data you keep in your catalog. This helps avoid having to remember who to invite, what teams were affected, and manually typing in their emails each time to the calendar invite.

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Adding an invitee

To set up automated lists of invitees for your debriefs, navigate to the debrief settings page. The debrief settings page, with Incident to Active Participants as the only invitee By default, we’ll add Incident → Active Participants to your debrief. You can edit this or add additional invitees using the Add invitee button. When adding an invitee you can choose for them to be invited only under certain conditions. For example, you might only want to invite the team leads for a critical incident: The Add invitee drawer, inviting team leads only when Severity is one of Critical The invitees can be the active participants in the incident, observers, particular roles or even custom expressions and fields that return a list of users. If you cannot find the user within our system, you can alternatively type a raw email address by clicking Enter email(s) instead. This is handy for group / team emails which may not appear in the users list: An Email(s) field holding a group address, incident-management-team@example.com If you use the catalog (and you’re missing out if you aren’t!) this can become very powerful. You could invite all the team leads of components or features that were affected - like in the above example - all powered by your own custom catalog entries. To add your own expression, click the lightning-bolt Use a variable icon inside the field. In the variable picker, choose Add new expression under Expressions, then pick Query on the Create expression chooser. In the below you can see how (with a few catalog entries configured) you might want to select the team leads of any service affected by the incident: An expression querying Affected services, then navigating to Owning team and Team lead Once created you will see your new entry in the list of invitees and any conditions that apply to that list: Two rows in the Invitees list, the second only applying when Severity is Critical

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Creating a debrief with invitees

Once you’re set up, you can create a debrief from the incident’s sidebar: under Links, find the Debrief row and click Schedule. If you’ve connected Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, we’ll ask when you’d like the debrief to be and how long it should last. Click Schedule, and we’ll create the event for you, invite everyone your invitee rules match, and link it to the incident straight away. The Schedule debrief form, with a callout offering Open in Google Calendar above the time and duration fields

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Scheduling in your own calendar

If you’d rather choose who to invite yourself, or check when people are free, click Open in Google Calendar (or Open in Outlook) at the top of the form. Then click the button for your calendar, and we’ll take you to a pre-filled event there, with the same invitees, ready for you to edit and pick a time. The Schedule debrief drawer with a Back to scheduling form link, a callout explaining how to keep the event linked, and an Open in Google Calendar button We’ll remember that choice in your browser, so next time Schedule opens these buttons straight away. Click Back to scheduling form to switch back. If you haven’t connected a calendar, Schedule always opens these buttons, but we can’t link the event to your incident until you connect one. Here we have 2 guests added who were active participants in the incident and our custom group email - all automatically added for us, neat! A pre-filled Google Calendar debrief event with two guests and the group email added
If you’ve installed our Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar integration, we’ll automatically attach this event for you when you hit Save, so everyone will know when it is. Keep the incident ID and the word “debrief” in the title, and keep the connected user on the invite list.