It’s been a busy month at FireHydrant. We’ve had our heads down shipping loads of improvements across the platform, and I want to take you on a quick tour of the changes. At the core of all these updates is a common theme: things are now a heck of a lot more intuitive. There’s a lot to digest here; read the full roundup of June releases below or follow us on Twitter for a bite-size demo each day this week.

I recently published a couple of blog posts about what happens when you invest in a thoughtful incident management strategy and three first steps to take to do so. What I’m getting at in these posts is that we need a shift toward proactivity in the software operators community. I’d wager most of the world is responding to incidents as they happen, and nothing more.

There are a number of lessons I learned guiding weeks-long backcountry leadership courses for teens that I carried with me into my roles in incident management. In this blog post, I’ll share three that stand out.

Too many of us are still playing whack-a-mole when it comes to incidents: an incident is declared, the on-call engineer is paged, the incident is resolved and then forgotten — until next time. It’s time to start thinking in terms of proactive incident management, not just reactive incident response.

At a going away party from a job I was leaving a few years back, my VP of engineering told a story I didn’t even remember but that I know subconsciously shaped how I viewed my role on that team: Toward the end of my very first day at the company, there was some internal system issue, and with pretty much zero context, I pulled out my laptop, figured out what was going on, and helped fix the issue.

Inflation is running rampant, the world stage is unpredictable, and what’s happening in the U.S. markets has been dubbed the “tech wreck.” A common theme I’m hearing come up in conversations across industries right now is value — we’re all looking to maximize every dollar spent, every hire made, every hour logged. For a lot of companies, this means looking at processes and tools with a critical eye for not only cost savings but also cost avoidance.

Previously, FireHydrant supported video collaboration tool integrations for Zoom and Google Meet. In response to customer asks, today we are pleased to introduce our new Cisco Webex Meetings integration for all paid plans. With the new integration, teams can automate Webex bridge creation as part of incident response.

True reliability takes into account all of the services that exist in your software environment — which is why it can get so complicated. An ecommerce site, for example, might have services that update current inventory in near real time, process payments in the shopping cart, trigger email receipts to send, kick off fulfillment orders, etc. And if one of these services isn’t operating at its best, that can mean money — and in some cases, customers — lost for the company.

When FireHydrant originally launched our Jira Cloud and Jira Server integrations, we did not support custom fields. This prevented customers who rely on Jira epic ticket types or other custom required fields from getting full value from our Jira integrations. That has changed with the launch of Jira custom field support. We now support the most common type of Jira epic tickets and field-level mapping of Jira custom fields with FireHydrant incident data.

When an incident happens, most organizations have a way of identifying all affected services. The trouble is, it’s often a human-centered process that depends on the knowledge of key individuals or manually updated documentation. There might be a version in your alerting tool, a version in your corporate Wiki, and a different version still in your team’s head.