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2024-12-02 Paging ergonomics

· 4 min read

🗓️ Scheduler improvements​

Resilience and feature improvements to sychronization with PagerDuty schedules, mostly to accommodate multistage shedules.

☎️ Paging improvements​

We've made many improvements to paging over the last few months, and this December, that hard work will pay off!

🗒️ A word about betas​

Hotpot aims to make the setup and maintenance of on-call as effortless and sustainable as possible. The features we're detailing below have yet to be integrated into Hotpot in most ergonomic ways, but we're sharing their availability to enable existing customers and collect feedback.

🤫 Beta: Paging workflows​

Responding to an alert or other page isn't instantaneous. Sometimes, you need a few minutes to debug or the help of a teammate. Hotpot now supports snoozing and escalation of pages.

!!!! is not an effective message to page someone with, but check out these new workflows!

Snoozing a page lets you delay the decision to handle or escalate for however long you need. Notification will resume after the specified time. Use this time to debug or determine if anything is wrong!

Snooze this to debug or even defer until the morning.

Escalating a page allows you to get help from a teammate or another team. Hotpot allows an arbitrary number of escalations if the problem requires help from many people.

Escalate a page to an individual or even another team that needs to get involved.

⏰ Beta: Working hours paging​

Not every team or organization has 24/7/365 on-call. For these situations, Hotpot now supports notifications during a user's working hours. This feature is currently limited to API calls. Reach out to us for more information!

‼️ Beta: Low-urgency paging​

Not every page is an imminent problem. Some are important but not urgent. Hotpot now supports medium urgency pages that do not escalate and only notify in Slack. This feature is currently limited to API calls. Reach out to us for more information!

️️️🕵️‍♀️ Triage improvements​

Triage and handoff power learning and awareness for on-calls. Improving handoffs was Hotpot's original goal, so we're excited about each improvement.

First, we've improved the stat view of the current stint. We've broken the boxes up for readability.

Much cleaner.

Next, we've updated our end-of-stint questions to support a neutral option.

Hopefully you use better text than what I used for this screenshot.

  • Changing sort order now retains any existing search settings.
  • Long group names wrap more effectively in the sidebar.
  • Clicking an individual moment and editing its content will redirect you back to triage.
  • Hotpot's group suggestion buttons now render more compactly and deal better with large group names.
  • The selection of moments has been improved in the triage listing.

🔎 Stint search​

It is now easier to track down stints that need to be handed off with the inclusion of a quick search feature on the stints page.

Quickly find any stints that are in need of a handoff!

This search is powered by adding a social status filter, and we've adjusted our search listing to clarify what status a given stint is in.

New status filter just dropped.

💼 Other changes​

  • Availability: The owner of an availability record is now shown when viewed directly.
  • General: Dependency updates across the board.
  • Operations: Metric export improvements.
  • UI: Header navigation is more resilient when clicking around a team's stints.