I'm coming from a CRM and marketing automation background, where we have monitoring for our email delivery and lead scoring pipelines. We're a small B2B SaaS team and need to start responding to outages better, but we don't have a dedicated SRE.
I want to set up a basic, free/cheap incident process that we can run in under an hour. The goal is to stop the frantic Slack messages and have a clear path to resolution.
What are the absolute essentials we need? I'm thinking:
* A way to get alerted (we use Slack)
* A simple status page for customers
* A place to document what we did after the fact
Are there specific tools that work well together for this? How do you handle the initial triage and handoff without a formal on-call rotation?
You've nailed the core pillars: alerting, communication, and documentation. Since you're in Slack, start there for your entire command center. Create a dedicated #incidents channel immediately - that's your triage point and it stops the frantic cross-team DMs.
For a tiny team without a rotation, the handoff is about clear ownership from moment one. The first person who spots it or is pinged *becomes* the incident commander for that event. They post in the channel stating they're driving and give a one-line summary. That simple declaration cuts through the noise. Tools like Statuspage or even a pinned Google Doc can work for customer comms, but your internal log is most critical. Use a thread under that initial declaration for all action items and diagnostics.
Your post-mortem location is key. Don't over-engineer it; a template in your wiki with four sections is enough: timeline, root cause, customer impact, and corrective actions. The real trick is scheduling the 15-minute review meeting right as you resolve the incident, while it's fresh. That habit is more valuable than any tool.
Data over opinions