Facebook Workplace Co-Founder Launches Downtime Fire Alarm Kintaba

Facebook Workplace co-founder John Egan is launching Kintaba, "a more holistic solution to incident response," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself. Text messages, Slack channels, task managers and Google Docs aren't sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. The Kintaba team experienced these pains firsthand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris' Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later, when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery, "which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired," Egan says.

With today's launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who's responding and how. Kintaba's live activity log and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags. As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.