Overview

Slack is a messaging and collaboration platform widely used by teams to communicate in real time. The Datadog Slack integration connects your incident response workflows directly to Slack, so teams can declare, manage, and resolve incidents without leaving their chat environment.

With the integration, you can:

• Respond faster by declaring Datadog incidents directly from Slack.
• Automatically create Slack channels for collaboration when Datadog incidents are declared.
• Execute your incident response in Slack. For example, page on-call teams, assign responder roles, or update severity.

The Slack integration documentation is organized around the typical lifecycle of using Slack with Incident Management:

1. Install and connect Slack: Set up the integration between your Slack workspace and Datadog.
2. Declare incidents: Learn how to start incidents using Slack commands or message actions.
3. Manage incidents from incident channels: Use dedicated Slack channels with commands, syncing, and automations.
4. Configure global notifications: Keep your organization informed with automatic updates.
5. Reference Slack configuration options and Slack commands: Explore detailed configuration options and see the full list of available Slack commands to tailor and streamline your incident response workflows.

Prerequisites

Install the integration through the Slack Integration tile with the proper OAuth scopes. For more information, see the Slack integration documentation.

After the integration is installed, navigate to Service Management > Incidents > Settings > Integrations to enable Slack capabilities for Incident Management.

Declaring incidents from Slack

When you connect a Slack workspace to a Datadog organization, users in the workspace can use Slack shortcuts related to Incident Management.

You can declare an incident with the following slash command:

/datadog incident

To declare an incident from a Slack message, hover over the message, click More actions (the three vertical dots), and select Declare incident. Datadog posts a message to the message’s thread confirming the incident’s creation.

By default, only Slack users connected to a Datadog organization can declare incidents. Slack users can connect to a Datadog organization by running /datadog connect.

To allow any Slack user in the workspace to declare incidents, enable Allow Slack users to declare incidents without a connected Datadog account in Incident Management settings.

Incident channels

You can configure Incident Management to automatically create a dedicated Slack channel for each incident that meets criteria you define. Your responders can then manage the incident directly in Slack from the incident channel.

To use incident channels, go to Incidents > Settings > Integrations and enable Create Slack channels for incidents.

The channel name template you define determines how Datadog names the incident channels it creates. The following variables are available in channel name templates:

• {{public_id}}: Incident’s numeric ID
• {{title}}: Incident’s title
• {{created}}: Incident’s creation date in format MM_DD_YYYY
• {{yyyy}}: Incident’s four-digit creation year
• {{mm}}: Incident’s two-digit creation month
• {{dd}}: Incident’s two-digit creation day of month
• {{random_adjective}}: Random adjective
• {{random_noun}}: Random noun

Message syncing (Slack mirroring)

After enabling automatic channel creation, you can configure Incident Management to sync messages between an incident Slack channel and the incident’s timeline in Datadog.

To enable syncing, enable Push Slack channel messages to the incident timeline in Incident Management settings, and then select one of the following options:

• Mirror all messages in real-time: Datadog syncs all messages posted by Slack users to the incident channel.
• Push message when 📌 is added as a reaction: Datadog syncs messages only when Slack users react to them with pushpins (📌).

For both options, a message’s author does not need to be connected to the Datadog organization for Datadog to sync the message. For message pinning, the pinner does need to be connected to the Datadog organization for the message pinned to sync.

In organizations with usage-based Incident Management billing:

• Authoring a message that is synced to Datadog does not make you a billable user for the current month.
• Pinning a message that is then synced does make you a billable user.

In organizations with seat-based Incident Management billing:

• You do not need a seat for Datadog to sync your messages to Incident Management.
• When you pin a message, you must have a seat for Datadog to sync the message you pinned.

Slack commands in the incident channel

In an incident Slack channel, you can run Slack commands to modify the incident’s states and severity, assign responder roles, page on-call teams, and more.

For a full list of Slack commands, see Slack commands.

Other incident channel configuration options

Access all configuration options for Slack in Incident Management through the Incidents > Settings > Integrations page.

Global channel for incident updates

You can configure Incident Management to automatically post updates about incidents to a selected Slack channel. To enable this:

1. In Datadog, navigate to Incidents > Settings > Integrations.
2. In the Slack section, enable Send all incident updates to a global channel.
3. Select the Slack workspace and Slack channel where you want the incident updates to be posted.

Datadog automatically notifies the selected channel about any newly declared incidents, as well as changes to incident states, severities, and incident commanders.

Under the hood, this feature is a built-in, hidden incident notification rule. If you would like to customize the message or its triggers, disable it and define your own notification rule.

Slack commands

You can view the full list of available Slack commands at any time by typing /dd help or /datadog help in Slack. This will open the command reference directly in your Slack workspace. To open the action tray for common incident management actions, type /datadog.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Install the Slack IntegrationDOCUMENTATION In-app Slack integration tileAPP Manage incidents seamlessly with the Datadog integration for SlackBLOG