Incident response

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is an incident response room?

Incident response is an established protocol, process, and rubric of how an engineering, devops, SRE, or on-call team comes together to address and prioritize urgent issues with the business, product, or customers. Examples include a webpage going down, data loss, missed SLA, security breach, unhappy customers, or a P0 bug. An incident response room in Switchboard is where your process, tools, and requirements can all come together to save time, prevent team and information fragmentation across meetings and tools, and give you access to all this from a single, secure space.

What are the benefits of creating an incident response room in Switchboard?

You likely already have an incident response protocol or playbook that document steps for your team to follow in a data breach, cyber attack, or on-call issues, but Switchboard is the perfect tool to transform these static docs into a virtual command center where your team can resolve issues together in real-time—whether you’re in-office, hybrid, or remote. By hosting all the apps, tools, and communications on Switchboard’s expandable canvas, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips for better decision-making in a moment where every minute counts and your team is under pressure. 

What applications can I use in Switchboard?

Any tool that you can use in your browser works in Switchboard’s browser app—from incident monitoring, alerting, issue tracking, CI, communication, development tools, and beyond. Incident response teams can also add monitoring reports, screenshare native IDEs, web analytics, customer reports, etc. 

How do browsers work in Switchboard?

Any room member can log into a web service from Switchboard’s browser app. This member can keep any page open and visible to room members, give shared control (even during video calls), or pause access when they are not in the room. In that case, other members can open their own view associated with their account. Occasionally you might be logged out of your apps and asked to log in again, just like on a web browser. 

Who has access to the room?

You can set different access levels for your Switchboard workspace and its rooms. Invite your engineers and on-calls as full members to your workspace so they can access any public rooms, and be invited to private rooms (which are not visible unless they are a member of that room). Invite contractors or other external partners as limited workspace members to give them visibility and access to only the rooms you invite them to. Other stakeholders can have limited access to a room during incident response calls to keep them up to date (but they’ll only have access when someone else is in the room to let them in).

Will the data update automatically?

Data inside dashboards, consoles, or any web tool update by refreshing the page or when you join the room—just like if you were viewing that report in your web browser. In the room, everyone can see this data on video calls in real time or asynchronously via video recordings, notes, and threads.