While your incident is playing out, as well as supporting you and providing useful tools to help you run it more smoothly, we're also helping you build up a picture of what happened, ready for later, in case you decide to write a postmortem or run an incident debrief.

There are two main ways we do this:

• Implicit timeline items
  • There are some things that happen in the incident that seem important to us, so we note them down and add them to the timeline. Things like changes to severities or someone picking up an action. See below for more examples of what we can surface.
• Explicit timeline items
  • These are things that you tell us are important. The simplest way to do this is to use Slack's inbuilt "pinning" feature. Any pinned messages will be treated by us as something to include in your timeline

Pinned messages in Slack...

... will appear in the timeline

More things we add to your timeline for you include:

• Pull requests and commits in GitHub
• Errors in Sentry
• Severity changes
• Role changes
• Updates to the incident summary
• Changes to incident status
• Actions (created, assigned, updated)