It’s just a regular Tuesday morning, your customers are their usual selves and your helpdesk agents are going about their normal day. The sun is shining bright and the birds are chirping happily. Just as you were sipping your coffee, you thought that your day was going to be like any normal one. Fast forward five minutes: everything changed, and somehow it was not all that cheerful anymore. The phone lines are choking up, your Twitter is buzzing, and the birds’ chirps are drifting away.

Teams are always looking for a speed advantage, and that comes from planning, crisp execution, and teamwork. To this end, we’re excited to release new enhancements to Incident Collaboration to help make life easier for DevOps teams during incident response. The Mattermost platform includes built-in Incident Playbooks with predefined response plans and task lists. Playbooks can be customized to your environment and specific use cases.

Mattermost release v5.29 is generally available today. In addition to offering bug fixes for increased stability, the new quality release features the general availability of a pre-installed incident management application, channel moderation settings, and Mattermost Omnibus.

The idea behind Incident Management is to be ready. Not ready for anything, as that can be an unrealistic expectation, but ready to respond when the unexpected inevitably happens. DevOps teams often create incident playbooks in order to ensure they are as ready as possible to handle situations as they arise. Luckily, there is some amazing documentation on how to do just that from our friends at PagerDuty.

Mattermost is a platform based on collaboration — not built simply for facilitating team and asynchronous communication, but built on the philosophy that having the ability to collaborate efficiently makes the world safer and more productive for everyone. This is true in many day-to-day situations in an organization, but it is especially true in the world of DevOps. When an emergency arises, information needs to be moved from person to person and team to team as quickly as possible.

Despite the global pressure of finding ways to solve customer challenges in the new normal, business leaders have found that the right set of tools with a focus on customer experience can be a powerful competitive advantage. But because of the pandemic, offices globally are working at limited capacity, and communication and collaboration with employees, customers and partners has become more difficult.

Tanay is the Head of Developer Relations at n8n. He has published books on WebVR, virtual assistants on Raspberry Pi, and FirefoxOS. He has been listed in the about:credits of the Firefox web browser for his contributions to the different open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation. I’ve been involved in the DevOps world for a while and yet I finished reading The Phoenix Project only recently. The book piqued my interest in how teams execute their incident response playbooks.