Show HN: FireHydrant – A simple incident response tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FireHydrant – A simple incident response tool

firehydrant.io

53 pointsbtables14 comments

Full disclosure: I used to work at PagerDuty and am a shareholder. These views are my own. Take this with appropriate salt.

Congrats on the release.

Looking at this, it’s difficult to determine how it’s different or why it’s better than PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or VictorOps. The page talks about a close integration with Slack, but it’s unclear what problem that solves for me wrt incident management. Note keeping / scribing is one part of incident management, but theres also:

- mustering. Getting other SMEs on the call. Both knowing who to page and actually paging them are two important problems.

- triage. Quickly knowing the severity of an incident.

- context. Sorting through all of the incoming data and metrics to find the cause.

Does this tool help with those?

From what I recall about VictorOps, they started out with a similar thesis to incident management and focused on chat / mobile / collaboration out of the box. I don’t know if they validated their hypothesis, but their marketing material did change in recent years to cover other aspects of incident management. I take that as evidence that the chat piece alone wasn’t sufficient.

Final thing I’d recommend is making it easier for potential customers to self select on your home page. Right now you’re targetting the IM market at large with “Things break. Be ready.” Is that your customer though? Any sized organization? Could you take on a 500 user company? 1000 person? Maybe something like “we help small businesses manage incidents”.

“come fight fires with us” makes it sound like your team is actively helping resolve my incidents.

This feedback is great and very appreciated.

With the other competitors I get the point of targeting smaller customers. With that said, I think a point might be missed with what I'm trying to accomplish with this initially: Context being lost through engineers finding things. Metrics, logs, traces, etc all don't tell a root cause when its a new incident. That's usually a human putting 2 and 2 together. When that happens it can be lost never to be seen again (the trail of tears getting to the solution).

This is a super early release and this feedback was invaluable so thank you very much! There are plenty of ideas I'll be implementing in the coming weeks now that this first release is finally out of the way.

Looks like a good tool for incident management. Create notes/summary on the go and access them quickly next time similar event happens. There's definitely demand for it. There's also been recent discussion at r/DevOps: https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/8qi33c/manage_incid...

One thing that might be useful is to see aggregate incident data and find components that are operational burden for the team.

Shameless plug: I built http://nurtch.com for quick incident response with interactive runbooks. You can pull in graphs, get deployment status, rollback deployments, run SQL queries, run bash scripts and terminal commands over SSH directly from runbook.

Nurtch DOES look like an awesome idea: jupyter notebooks proved to be a greatest interactive tool as well as for sharing the work. Good job with the site, too, best of luck with it.

If you’re serious about automating operations and wiring with slack/Chataops, check out StackStorm (disclosure I am one of the creators). Open source Apache 2.0,?installable, no mines. It’s much heavier than Nurtch or FireHydrant, as it comes with IfThisThanThat logic and workflows to string individual actions in runbooks, chat ops out-of box, but different strokes for different folks, we all runnops differently, pick your pill. https://GitHub.com/StackStorm/st2

Thanks & good work with StackStorm :) I'm curious to know your take on Rundeck as well?

For others: StackStorm/Rundeck offers IFTTT for operations (amongst other things). Alert X -> Run script/workflow Y. It's an ideal approach to operations as it takes human out of the loop. Less on-call alerts, quick recovery. Sort of like a self healing system. Highly recommend.

Some companies can't/don't want to invest in full automation workflows. Nurtch is useful in this case as it allows partially automating runbooks by interleaving instructions and code. Downside is that human is still involved, engineer still gets paged :( but on the plus side, resolution could take 10 minutes instead of 2 hours & less upfront investment.

Rundeck is a good system, around for quite some time. I met many people who are using it in prod, some migrating to StackStorm when they need IFTTT, or those who prefer not to operate Java, some staying as Rundeck has more UI for one-off commands.

Needs information about your company on the homepage.

I realize you are small but i am unable to do even basic due diligence on your company/software on the site. Immediate nope.

Hard for me to judge if I’d want to sign up for a trial. There weren’t enough screenshots on the homepage for how I personally evaluate services at a glance.

Noted, did the features page hit that marker for you if you dont mind if I ask?

On mobile I didn’t even notice the features page hidden behind that hamburger menu.

On iPad, portrait, the CSS on the features page needs fixing. Things flow incorrectly.

Quick thoughts:

* Features page has more screenshots snippets

* Is pricing monthly? Doesn't say.

* A slightly more usable Free tier might entice more trial sign-ups.

* Another tier between Free and Candle would probably fit more freelancers and small teams.

Great feedback, thank you!

It would be interesting if instead of a simple keyword search to find incidents you could link related incidents in a graph model. Even better - do it real time as the incident is being recorded and addressed.

Also incident trends over time, response time analysis, resolution time analysis and similar post-facto reporting can be useful to operations analysts.

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