Dealing with incidents can be stressful. On top of dealing with the issue at hand, responders are often responsible for handling comms, coordinating the efforts of other engineers, and reporting what happened after the fact. Monzo built Response to help reduce the pressure and cognitive burden on engineers during an incident, and to make it easy to create information rich reports for others to learn from.

The headline post when an incident is declared

If you're interested in how we use this tool at Monzo, there's an overview in this video.

Response is a Django app which you can include in your project. If you're just looking to give it a try, follow the instuctions for the demo app!

Start a new Django project, if you don't have one already:

$ django-admin startproject myincidentresponse

Install response:

$ pip install django-incident-response

In settings.py, add these lines to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "after_response",
    "rest_framework",
    "bootstrap4",
    "response.apps.ResponseConfig",
]

Add the following to settings.py:

USE_TZ = False # if this exists elsewhere in your settings.py, just update the value

STATIC_ROOT = "static"

# Django Rest Framework
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    "PAGE_SIZE": 100,
    "DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS": "rest_framework.pagination.LimitOffsetPagination",
    "DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES": [
        "rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated",
    ],
}
#

# Markdown Filter
MARKDOWN_FILTER_WHITELIST_TAGS = [
    "a", "p", "code", "h1", "h2", "ul", "li", "strong", "em", "img",
]

MARKDOWN_FILTER_WHITELIST_ATTRIBUTES = ["src", "style"]

MARKDOWN_FILTER_WHITELIST_STYLES = [
    "width", "height", "border-color", "background-color", "white-space",
    "vertical-align", "text-align", "border-style", "border-width", "float",
    "margin", "margin-bottom", "margin-left", "margin-right", "margin-top",
]

RESPONSE_LOGIN_REQUIRED = True

In urls.py, add the following to urlpatterns (you may also need to import include):

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('slack/', include('response.slack.urls')),
    path('core/', include('response.core.urls')),
    path('', include('response.ui.urls')),
]

Follow these instructions to create a new Slack App.

from response.slack.client import SlackClient
SLACK_CLIENT = SlackClient(SLACK_TOKEN)

Before you can complete the Slack app setup, you need to have the app running somewhere that's accesible to to the internet. That means either deploying your Django project somewhere (see here or running it locally and exposing with something like ngrok.

For simplicity, we'll assume you're developing using ngrok.

First make sure your DB is fully migrated and up-to-date:

python3 manage.py migrate

Next, run the Django development server:

python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Finally, run ngrok:

ngrok http 8000

Make note of the ngrok url as you'll need it in the following section as the public-url.

Head back to the Slack web UI and complete the configuration of your app, as described here.

In Slack, start an incident with /incident Something's happened. You should see a post in your incidents channel!

• Visit the incident doc by clicking the Doc link.
• Create a comms channel by clicking the button.
• In the comms channel check out the @incident commands. You can find the ones available by entering @incident help.