Improvements in slack integration

[marcosnils]

Hey there, we've started to use response very recently as a PoC to handle our incident response process internally. We were looking for a solution that integrates well with slack as our company is mostly distributed and we'd like to use a tool that provides flexibility and visibility during an incident and response seemed like a best fit for this purpose.
After trying response for a few days we came across a couple of bumps that we thought would have been covered given that the purpose of the tool is to coordinate and document incidents mostly that happens through slack. Here's the list that one of my colleagues (/cc @matheuss) pointed out that I also agree.

1. It doesn't pick images when pinning a message. This happens usually when sharing a link that contains some sort of image (like a metrics graph) that slack nicely renders.
2. it doesn't show the date in the timeline, just the time, so multi-day incidents are confusing. This should be easily fixable
3. It'd be nice if @incident commands could be /slash commands instead as the latter ones show better contextual hints on how to use them.
4. If action items or timeline events get edited in slack they won't get updated in response
5. Same as above but for message deletion
6. Action items don't translate group names
   
7. It'd be nice if each timeline event and action item could be linked through the URL to the original slack message. There's usually some very useful contextual information around a message that gets lost in response that i'd be nice to have.

We believe the tool has great potential as we haven't found anything similar in the OS space that provides a good out of the box integration with slack. We just wanted to point out what hurt us the most and if you have any ideas / opinions about the items described above. Keep up the awesome job!

[milesbxf]

Hey @marcosnils , thanks very much for the detailed feedback! It's great to hear that you're considering using Response.

1. It doesn't pick images when pinning a message. This happens usually when sharing a link that contains some sort of image (like a metrics graph) that slack nicely renders.
2. it doesn't show the date in the timeline, just the time, so multi-day incidents are confusing. This should be easily fixable
3. Action items don't translate group names
   
4. It'd be nice if each timeline event and action item could be linked through the URL to the original slack message. There's usually some very useful contextual information around a message that gets lost in response that i'd be nice to have.

Totally agree these are all issues. As we've stated elsewhere, we're not currently prioritising work on the UI as we're working on getting Monzo using Response internally. As there are so many Monzo-specific things, we've built our own internal UI and have been working hard on the REST API. The open source UI is definitely due some love though, and we'll try and get round to it at some point - any help/PRs you can provide to fix these things would be massively appreciated (I know @danpalmer has also been working on fixing some things).

3. It'd be nice if @incident commands could be /slash commands instead as the latter ones show better contextual hints on how to use them.

Currently, setting up /slash commands is a bit of a pain, as you can only do it via the Slack API UI. The setup is already quite convoluted and with around 15 incident commands, adding 15 separate slash commands would be pretty tedious. I've heard that Slack are working on improving this workflow and making it more automatable, so this might be more feasible in the future, but I don't think this would be useful at the moment.

Have you tried the @incident help command? That should give users context on which commands are available and how to use them 🙂

4. If action items or timeline events get edited in slack they won't get updated in response
5. Same as above but for message deletion

Yes, looks like we don't handle the message_changed or message_deleted events. I'd be happy to review a PR to fix this, but I don't think it's something we'll prioritise ourselves (it's not something we've seen many issues with in practice).

[marcosnils]

Thanks for the input @milesbxf and the honesty around the OS project. If we decide to stick with response we'll surely try to collaborate by generating discussion and helping to improve the points we've remarked above. WDYT if we keep this thread open for further discussions or as a starting point to generate new issues / ideas?

[milesbxf]

Thanks for the input @milesbxf and the honesty around the OS project. If we decide to stick with response we'll surely try to collaborate by generating discussion and helping to improve the points we've remarked above. WDYT if we keep this thread open for further discussions or as a starting point to generate new issues / ideas?

Thank you 🙌 I think it probably makes sense to raise separate issues to track improving the UI, and another one to track core functionality features (like Slack pinning)

[marcosnils]

Sure thing!. BTW, I'm currently visiting 🇬🇧 for a couple of months so if you wanna connect I'd like to share experiences about day-to-day operations. This week I'll be at Cloud Native London so if you're around let's meet!