
Show HN: FireHydrant – A simple incident response tool - btables
https://firehydrant.io/
======
kenrose
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.

~~~
btables
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.

------
amirathi
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/8qi33c/manage_incidents/)

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](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.

~~~
dzimine
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](https://GitHub.com/StackStorm/st2)

~~~
amirathi
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.

~~~
dzimine
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.

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auspex
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.

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kkirsche
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.

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

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

~~~
jen729w
On iPad, portrait, the CSS on the features page needs fixing. Things flow
incorrectly.

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rotten
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.

