Tutorial: Using O11y Slack to Manage an Incident

Use Observe’s O11y tool to help manage incidents with Slack and Notion.

Activate O11y Slack

To enable this feature, you must add the Observe O11y app to their workspace. Observe admin rights are needed. In Observe, click Settings, Workspace Settings, and Add to Slack. Select your Slack workspace from the top right, then click Allow.

You will now see the O11y bot in your Slack Workspace Apps list.

Communicate with O11y

To verify that the integration is active, use the following steps:

  1. /o11y login my.observe.account@my.organization.com – Login to the Observe Slack integration with the same email address you use to login to Observe directly. This may return a URL where you can grant access, or redirect you to an SSO or other sign in page, depending on how your Observe workspace is configured.

  2. /o11y what is observability? – Ask a question to ensure that the connection is working end to end.

Simulate an Incident

To simulate a simple incident, use the following steps:

  1. /o11y incident – Creates a new incident channel named with the date and a random number. Join the channel and invite colleagues.

  2. Use Zoom to have a conversation about your simulated incident. If you use the Zoom app, initiating the meeting from within the incident channel should cause O11y to join automatically. If O11y does not automatically join, use /o11y join $zoom_url to invite it.

  3. /o11y summarize – after you are done with the simulation, use this command to generate a summary of the channel and your Zoom call.

Join a Real Incident

To get a more realistic sense of capabilities, you can invite O11y to join an existing incident channel.

  1. Go to the incident channel and invite O11y with /invite @o11y.

  2. Click any date in the channel to get the context menu, then select “Jump to… the very beginning” to see how long back O11y should look. For this example, we will use 7 days.

  3. Use /o11y summarize --since 7d --save to record the incident as a runbook to your Observe instance.

  4. In Observe, go to Workplace Settings > Uploaded Documents to review the runbooks that are used.

  5. Use O11y GPT Help in Observe to ask questions about your incident.

O11y GPT Help using transcription from a Zoom call</p>

Figure 1 - O11y GPT Help using transcription from a Zoom call