Automated incident root-cause, straight into Slack
When something breaks at 2am, the Datadog alert is only the start. The real work is figuring out why, fast, while downtime ticks and the on-call engineer plays detective across a dozen dashboards.
The problem
An alert fires and the on-call engineer starts from a blank page: opening dashboards, correlating spikes, and guessing which deploy did it. Every minute of that is a minute of downtime, and it happens at the worst possible hour.
What we built
We built a system that does the first pass of incident response automatically. The moment Datadog fires an alert, it gathers the related metrics, logs, and recent deploys, correlates them into a likely root cause, and posts a plain-language summary into the Slack incident channel, before the engineer has finished reading the page.
How it works
- Catches Datadog alerts by webhook the instant they fire.
- Pulls the surrounding metrics, logs, and recent deploys for context.
- Correlates the signals into a ranked, plain-language root-cause hypothesis.
- Posts the summary and suggested next steps into the Slack incident channel.
The result
On-call stopped starting from a blank dashboard. Every alert now arrives with a likely cause and the context already attached, so resolution starts in seconds instead of after ten minutes of digging.