Show HN: I am building an open-source incident management platform

Show HN: I am building an open-source incident management platform(github.com)

168 points by sanj001 1 year ago | 31 comments

I'm building Incidental, an open-source (MIT license) incident management platform.

I've been working on it for the past couple of months as a hobby, and now it's at a state where I'm comfortable sharing it. This is also my first open source project.

Features: - Custom roles - Custom severities - Integrated with Slack - Web interface

Todos: - Custom fields - Custom workflows

Website: https://incidental.dev Github: https://github.com/incidentalhq/incidental

I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks!

synack 1 year ago |

Use the semantics of the standard Incident Command System. Emergency responders have spent decades figuring out the best way to organize for these situations. Tech orgs should leverage that work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System

https://training.fema.gov/nims/

misswaterfairy 1 year ago | |

Agreed. ICS is designed to be scalable and flexible (without the marketing fluff that tech companies try to sell).

Am firefighter/emergency manager and regularly train and utilise ICS. It works for any incident you throw at it, even a kids birthday party if you really need it to.

joseferben 1 year ago | |

this looks interesting. any first hands experience applying this for tech incidents?

eep_social 1 year ago | | |

I have experience applying ICS-style process to incidents and have delivered training to ~hundreds of engineers at $job. I am partial to this PD doc: https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...

shahahmed 1 year ago | | |

this is detailed in the Google SRE book: https://sre.google/workbook/incident-response/

vindex10 1 year ago |

I will just share a somewhat similar project: https://github.com/netflix/dispatch

Also open source, also Python, also incident management, also custom severities (but not as much of custom roles, afaik) :) Has some integrations with slack, but not focused on Slack particularly.

Can be a good project to learn from as well :)

My relation to it: I only contributed with a couple of pull requests there :)

SoftTalker 1 year ago | |

Best Practical, makers of the venerable "RT" request tracker, also make an IR system based on that technology.

https://bestpractical.com/rtir

I haven't used their Incident Response but used the basic RT for years. It's solid and never gave us any trouble. It is all (or mostly) written in Perl however if that is a concern.

Open-source and free to run on your own, or you can pay for cloud hosting and support.

brunoqc 1 year ago | |

It looks nice. I wish it would support prometheus/lokio/grafana.

novia 1 year ago |

I love to see it. Thank you for building this. This is a problem that's been solved many times over by private companies, and they charge other institutions exorbitant fees for the privilege of using their software. I hope you can get many companies to put skin in the game and contribute towards fixing bugs. It'll be cheaper for them in the long run than paying those external vendors.

For those of you complaining about the slack integration in the comments, you know you can just not connect that, right?

dewey 1 year ago | |

> I hope you can get many companies to put skin in the game and contribute towards fixing bugs. It'll be cheaper for them in the long run than paying those external vendors.

This would be a nice world to live in, but unfortunately this is very rarely the case as you can see with most open source projects that are used in many companies and are underfunded and understaffed.

Most bigger companies value saved time of not integrating something themselves, liability and having someone else to call if something goes wrong higher than saving a few thousand bucks a year for some external vendor. Which makes total sense for something that's not your core business.

lawrjone 1 year ago | |

Don't these people already have the option of running open-source tools like Netflix's Dispatch or Monzo's Response? If they have the open-source options why would they pay for the hosted services?

rm_-rf_slash 1 year ago | | |

Support, liability protection, SLA…there’s a reason people pay for tools they can get for free.

evnsio 1 year ago |

As the person who originally wrote the Monzo Response project (https://github.com/monzo/response), I expect you'll find some traction in smaller orgs, but when folks start doing things at scale they'll hit an inflection point where running their own incident software/not having folks to log feature requests with will force them to pick something more off-the-shelf.

Basically, nobody runs their on-call system on open-source because it's mission critical. At a certain point, IM platforms hit the same level of criticality.

julianeon 1 year ago | |

Insightful comment; makes sense.

nagstler 1 year ago |

I'm definitely looking forward to this project!

Have you considered how Incidental might integrate with other open-source tools?

I'd love to use something like this in my OSS project.

https://github.com/Multiwoven/multiwoven

snthpy 1 year ago | |

I was thinking along similar lines.

It would great if incidental and multiwoven used some standard connector library instead of Slack's api so that I can seamlessly use them with other services like Teams which we use at work.

allywilson 1 year ago |

Different auth options (SAML, OAuth, etc.) would be a nice to have. I look forward to the progress on this tool :-)

matthewcford 1 year ago |

We've been building same thing hope to share it soon.

dotancohen 1 year ago | |

Tell us more.

Rickasaurus 1 year ago |

My pet feature is good and tight Jira (or ticket manager) integration so it opens tickets for the team to put time on, maybe even syncs time? Really nicely streamline so the time to remediate is tracked as part of the team's work.

pinkmuffinere 1 year ago |

I love your minimal-but-effective splash page! It looks like it didn’t take too long to build, but it shows what the tool looks like and gives a link to waitlist

keane 1 year ago |

Different use case but, in addition to integrating ICS, take a look at Sahana EDEN: https://sahanafoundation.org/eden/features/#core

throwaway81523 1 year ago |

This is the kind of thing where I'd really rather see a clear statement of the problem and a description of the types of solutions that already exist. Then writing a CRUD app is a "mere" exercise.

jbcranshaw 1 year ago |

Just curious, what's the backstory? What inspired you to work on this?

jensenbox 1 year ago |

What was your thinking for choosing a SPA style app vs something simpler like HTMX? Just curious.

efilife 1 year ago |

Your site doesn't work on mobile

otabdeveloper4 1 year ago |

> Slack

Thanks but no thanks.

DowagerDave 1 year ago | |

could be worse... Teams cough, cough

shahahmed 1 year ago | |

curious, is this because you expect something other than Slack supported?

otabdeveloper4 1 year ago | | |

Slack is a piece of shit software.

Sorry for being blunt. Yes, I will be that guy.