> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.incident.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Slack channels > Give investigations the real-time context that lives in your Slack. Slack messages often hold context that telemetry alone can't provide: an engineer mentioning a database migration, an automated deploy notification, a feature flag flip. Connecting the right channels lets investigations pick up these signals and link them to what's happening in the incident. Connecting channels as a source is available for Slack only. Investigations in Microsoft Teams still read their own incident channel, but can't draw on other channels you'd connect here. ## How investigations use this During an investigation, the channels you've connected are searched for recent messages that could be relevant: discussion that explains a cause, or change events like deploys and config pushes that line up with when the incident started. Relevant messages are connected to the incident, with links back to the original. Add the channels where people share context that could explain an incident, such as: * Team discussion channels * Deploy and release notification channels * Infrastructure and config-change channels Automated messages in these channels (deploy bots, CI notifications, feature-flag alerts) are also turned into [change events](/investigations/connect/change-events): structured records of changes that investigations correlate against the incident timeline to find a likely cause. ## Setup From the [Investigations settings](https://app.incident.io/~/investigations) in your dashboard, choose the public Slack channels investigations can read. They only ever read the channels you explicitly connect, so pick the ones with the highest-signal context. You don't need to connect everything. ## Related How a Slack message becomes evidence in a finding. What an investigation reads from inside the incident, including its own channel, always.