Running incidents and executing Runbooks can be done directly in Slack where your team is already accustomed to working. This article includes a list of FireHydrant's Slack commands.
There are a number of aliases that can be used to execute slack bot commands. The different aliases are:
- /firehydrant
- /fh
- /incident
For the purpose of this article, we will utilize /firehydrant.
Help
/firehydrant help
Provides help text and a list of available commands.
New Incident
/firehydrant new [incident name]
Opens a dialog box asking for additional information to kick off a new incident. Here you can select the impacted environments and severity if known. Clicking Open from this dialog box creates a new Slack channel where all of your messaging is captured and sent to FireHydrant.
On-call
/firehydrant on-call
Allows you to see who's on-call for a particular service.
Link
/firehydrant link
Sends a prompt for you to link your Slack account with your FireHydrant account.
Edit Incident
/firehydrant edit
Allows you to edit the details of the incident. These details include the name, customer impact, description, infrastructure impacted, severity, and more.
Update Incident
/firehydrant update
Allows you to change the incident milestone and component status. From this section, you can also include a comment about why you are changing the status. If you have active status pages, you can post your update to the status pages as well.

Add Note
/firehydrant add note [note text]
Adds a note to the incident.
One way to think of notes are as pieces of information that are more important than normal chat messages. You can search a FireHydrant incident timeline and filter specifically by the content in a note (or notes) as opposed to typical chat messages. Adding a note gives you the option to publish the note to your status pages.
Task Management
Tasks are the way to track work during the course of the incident. Tasks can be created individually by any FireHydrant user during the course of the incident or can be predefined as task lists that can be assigned automatically through a runbook or manually during the incident.
/firehydrant add task
Create a new task on the incident. This allows you to assign a task to a specific user as well.
/firehydrant tasks
View the task management modal. This modal allows you to filter on multiple facets
- Assigned user
- Task state
- Task List
- Unassigned tasks
Additionally, you can quickly assign and change the state of tasks from this modal as well.
/firehydrant add task-list
Attach a tasklist to the incident. Task lists are predefined sets of tasks that can be assigned to a user to capture multi-step actions for triage or mitigation.
Add Action Item
/firehydrant add action-item
Allows you to create a post incident action item to the incident.
Note:
- If you are using our Jira or Clubhouse integrations, a subsequent ticket on the respective service will also be created and linked to the original incident ticket.
List Action Items
/firehydrant action-items
Lists out all the action items of the incident.
Add Runbook
/firehydrant add runbook
Allows you to add a Runbook to the incident.
Note: If a Runbook has already been added, it will not appear in the search bar.
Runbooks
/firehydrant runbooks
Lists out all the Runbooks that are currently attached to the incident. This will also allow you to open a Runbook and execute steps right from Slack.
Page a Service
/firehydrant page service [service]
Pages a service from PagerDuty or Opsgenie. These services must also be either linked with or imported from either PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
Assign Role
/firehydrant assign role
Assigning a role to someone with a linked Slack account sends that a direct message to that user, via Slack, informing them that they have been assigned a role to an active incident.

Assign a Team
/firehydrant assign team
Assigning a team allows you to bring responders into an incident quickly. When a team is selected, FireHydrant will show you a preview of the users and on-calls that will be brought into the incident. If a user has linked their FireHydrant account to Slack, they will get DMed and automatically brought into the channel as well.
Incident Status Report
/firehydrant status
Displays the high level summary of the incident. This is useful for new responders and people curious about the incident state to quickly figure out what is going on. The status is also sent to new channel joiners as an ephemeral message.
Incident Tags
/firehydrant tags
Allows you to update, add, or remove tags from an incident.
Resolve an Incident
/firehydrant resolve
This closes an incident, sets its status to resolved, and allows you to post a resolution note to any active status pages. A resolved incident continues to collect chat messages even after resolution. To re-open an incident, you must go to the command center.
Start retrospective
/firehydrant start retro
Allows you to create the retrospective document and update the description and customer impact.