Incident configuration
Configure incidents to help Flow provide complete DORA metric data. Once incidents and deployments are both configured, Flow populates all DORA metrics. This provides you with more accurate information on how quickly you’re recovering from issues and service outages.
You can only configure incidents with Jira and ADO services integrations.
Before you get started
Before configuring incidents in Flow, talk to your organization about what incidents are and how you're currently tracking them. Decide which incidents you want to track in Flow, then configure those incidents in Flow.
To access all four DORA metrics in Flow, you must set up incident configuration and configure your deployments.
Incident data in reports
The DORA metrics Time to restore services and Change failure rate rely on Incident configurations to have accurate data.
Incident data appears in Metrics overview, Retrospective, and Team health insights.
Add an incident configuration
When configuring custom fields for incidents, Flow can only provide data from vendor custom fields that are text-based, numbers, booleans, or single-select dropdowns. To confirm you're using a vendor custom field, check with your system administrator. The following vendor system fields are also available for incident configuration: Parent ticket title, Project, Title, and Type.
Incident configuration tells Flow what an incident is for you. Set incident configuration rules to apply to teams, projects, or whole integrations.
To add an incident configuration:
Click Settings in Flow’s top navigation bar.
In the left navigation bar under Report Settings, click Configurations.
Click the Incidents tab.
Click Add incident configuration.
In the modal, add incident rules to indicate which tickets are incidents. Use filters to identify which tickets track incidents. Apply these rules to specific teams or projects using the ticket attributes of your integration. To apply the rules to the entire integration, don’t specify a team or project.
Test your rule in Flow or your ticket vendor to verify your incident configuration matches the tickets you expect. Adjust your rules as needed based on the results. Learn more about testing below.
Once you're happy with the results of the test, click Save.
Testing your incident configuration
Before saving your incident configuration, you should test it to make sure it returns the incidents you expect.
Tips for testing incident configurations:
When testing a rule in Flow, we only display incidents created in the last 90 days that match the configuration.
If you’re using the Project field in your configuration, input the full name of the project, not a short code or abbreviation. Flow must have the full project name to correctly find incidents.
Once you’ve set up your configuration, Flow must process the changes before displaying the data in your DORA metrics. This can take a couple of hours. Check back later to make sure the expected incidents are displaying.
You have two options to test your incident configuration:
The testing examples here use JQL. If you use ADO Services, use a similar format to test your configuration.
Click Test rule in Flow before saving your configuration. This only displays incidents created within the last 90 days.
Create a JQL version of your configuration and test the configuration in JIra to see what incidents will display. This is the best option if you want to have your test display incidents created before the 90-day cutoff, or if your query returns too many incidents for Flow to display correctly.
Simple configuration example:
JQL:
project in (BEE) AND (“Severity” = 1)Flow configuration:
Project equals Backend Engineers AND Severity equals 1
Tip: In this example, the project key is used in the JQL query, but the full project name must be used in Flow for the incident configuration to work properly.
Complex configuration example:
JQL:
(project = BEE AND issuetype in ("Potential Incident", “Confirmed Incident”)) OR (project = FEE AND assignee in ([Jira user ID]))Flow configuration:
(Project equals Backend Engineers AND Issue type contains Incident) OR (Project equals Frontend Engineers AND Assignee equals Stephanie Ventura)
Edit an incident configuration
Edit your incident configurations to change your incident settings.
To edit an incident configuration:
Click Edit configuration next to the integration you want to edit.
In the modal, add, remove, or edit incident rules to indicate how incidents are tracked.
Use the filters to apply these rules to specific teams and projects. Don't specify a team or project to apply the rules to an integration.
Click Save.
Delete an incident configuration
To delete an incident, click the trash icon next to the configuration you want to delete.
Troubleshooting
If you see an error message, your integration may not have been set up completely or may not have been fully ingested. Check the integration data status on the integrations page to see where the integration is in the process.
In this example, the integration is still processing and has not been completely ingested into Flow, as indicated by the Processing label in the Data Status column.