Moments

Moments as control plane events in Hotpot.

Moments in Hotpot are control-plane, human-scale events. There are many types, which we'll document below. Hotpot is concerned with the various signals that represent work and disturbances in your organization. We're talking about alerts, pages, and incidents as well as day-to-day stuff like near-misses (and more coming soon).

Where do moments come from?

Moments come from our integrations as well as from you and your organization via tools like Slack. We also have a moment API you can use to send us all your useful moment data. As an example, you might use Hotpot with Datadog and Sentry. Each of those tools can page you using Hotpot, but they can also send all their warnings and other signals to Hotpot for you to keep track of. With Hotpot receiving all these moments you can use them in triage!

Moment types

There are many types of moments, each representing important operational signals. We plan to develop many more moment types, each with special data and special functionality within Hotpot.

Hotpot moments and their types are not connected to any type of notification or workflow. They are after-the-fact creations meant to capture something that happened. Creating a Page moment type, for example, will never page someone. It's merely bookkeeping!

Alerts

Alerts represent alerts generated, usually from some sort of monitoring or observability tool. These alerts need not be critical but can be of any urgency. Hotpot wants them all! The goal is to collect all the signals these tools emit and use them to help improve awareness and track how often they are noisy or actionable.

Incident

When your organization declares an incident, it's often a big deal. Sending these events to Hotpot helps connect the context of an incident with all the other signals you generate. After an incident you may find interesting connections with alerts that did (or did not!) fire in the lead-up to or during an incident.

Near-miss

Sometimes, we get lucky. We noticed we ran a command and left off the --qa flag or some other footgun. In these cases, it can be helpful to record this situation as evidence to help with future investments. Hotpot isn't just about reactive stuff but proactive as well. These can be an interesting part of handoff discussion.

Page

Note that a moment type of page does not page someone. It records a page for feedback and disruption tracking! If you want to page someone, learn about that here!

Paging someone is expensive. You're interrupting them and bringing their attention to a problem that (hopefully) needs solving. Tracking how often people are paged and the impact that has is important both individually and in the context of your organization's larger operational picture.