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When an incident is detected, sureops can automatically create a dedicated, private Slack channel for it. The channel becomes the war room: status updates flow in as the AI moves through the pipeline, approval requests post as the AI reaches steps that need a human decision, and closure posts a summary when the incident resolves. Channels are created private by design — a public channel would be joinable by anyone in your workspace regardless of invite state, which defeats the purpose of a scoped incident war room.
Incident channels are available for Slack in the current release. Connect your workspace once from Settings → Integrations → Slack, then configure channel behavior from Settings → Organization → Details (the Incident Channels card).

What gets posted to the channel

Two events don’t actually post to Slack today: a severity change only writes a timeline entry visible in the sureops UI — there’s no channel notification for it — and recommendation ready has no code path that ever triggers it, so it never fires. Separately, your org’s standing announce channel (configured once, not per incident) gets a broadcast post whenever a new incident opens above your configured notification threshold — see “Severity threshold” below.

Prerequisites

  • Slack integration connected — your Admin must connect sureops to your Slack workspace via Settings → Integrations → Slack
  • Incident channels enabled — toggled on in Settings → Organization → Details (the Incident Channels card)
  • The bot user added during integration must have permission to create channels and post messages in your workspace

Setup

1

Connect Slack

Your Admin navigates to Settings → Integrations → Slack and authorizes the connection. This lets sureops post messages and create channels in your workspace.
2

Configure the organization default

In Settings → Organization → Details (the Incident Channels card), your Admin configures the org-wide default:
  • Enable Incident Channels — turns channel creation on or off
  • Communication Provider — Slack is available today. Microsoft Teams is shown in the picker but isn’t selectable yet — it’s an enterprise-tier, coming-soon option, and its radio button is disabled in the UI.
  • Auto-create for severity — shown in the UI as a multi-select, but it currently has no effect on anything. The real gate for both channel creation and the announce-channel broadcast is Proactively notify for severity, below.
  • Proactively notify for severity — a single threshold (default: P2). This is the one setting that governs both whether a war-room channel is created for an incident and whether the standing announce channel gets a broadcast post for it.
  • Announce channel ID — the standing channel that receives the proactive-notify broadcast. Leaving this blank isn’t a misconfiguration — sureops falls back to the Slack integration’s default channel.
  • Auto-post lifecycle updates — shown in the UI, but it currently has no effect. Stage transitions and other lifecycle events post automatically whenever a channel exists, regardless of this toggle.
  • Archive on closure — shown in the UI, but it currently has no effect. Channels are archived only by archiving them manually in Slack, or automatically when the environment is torn down — see “Channel not archived after incident closes” below.
  • Auto-invite responders — whether qualifying team members are invited automatically
3

Override per environment (optional)

Go to Settings → Environments → [select environment] → Channels (the Channels for this environment card) to override, for a specific environment: enable/disable, communication provider, auto-create severity, auto-post lifecycle updates, archive on closure, channel name prefix (default inc-), and auto-invite responders — for example, disabling channels for a low-traffic dev environment while keeping them on for production. Proactively notify for severity and Announce channel ID have no per-environment override — they’re organization-wide settings only.
4

Test with a new incident

Trigger or create a test incident. sureops creates the channel within seconds of incident detection.

Severity threshold

There’s a single functional setting here: Proactively notify for severity (notify_min_severity), a threshold that defaults to P2. The same check decides both whether a war-room channel is created for the incident and whether the standing announce channel gets a broadcast post for it — so the two effects always move together and can never diverge. The Auto-create for severity field you’ll see in Settings is stored but not currently enforced anywhere — it has no effect on channel creation. Use Proactively notify for severity as the one source of truth for this behavior.

Auto-inviting responders

Auto-invite responders is a single on/off setting. When enabled, sureops automatically invites active org members whose role is Owner, Admin, Commander, or Responder (Observers are not invited) and whose Slack identity is already known to sureops. Members who haven’t yet joined your Slack workspace are picked up automatically once they do. Configure this in Settings → Organization → Details (the Incident Channels card), or override per environment.

Channel naming

Channel names are built from your configured prefix (default inc-), a sanitized form of the incident’s external ID, and a slug of the title. The external ID’s INC- prefix and hyphens are stripped — for example, external ID INC-2026-0042 with title “checkout latency” produces:

Approval requests in Slack

When the AI reaches a step that requires human approval, it posts an informational message to the incident channel — a rich, formatted Slack message with no interactive buttons — noting that an approval is pending:
In practice, the action description and risk level shown are generic placeholders like this today, rather than the specific action and its actual assessed risk. The same applies to the “action executed” message: it currently shows a generic placeholder for who performed the action and what it was, rather than the real actor and action description. Approve or reject the action from the sureops UI: the Pending Approvals panel on the Command Center, or the incident detail page. If no one approves within the configured timeout, the incident escalates and sends a one-time incident_escalated email to users who’ve opted in to that notification — there’s no on-call paging on this path. This notification is off by default per user, so confirm the people who need to know about a stuck approval have opted in under Notifications.

Per-environment configuration

You can enable incident channels per environment, so that staging incidents get a channel but non-critical development environments do not. Configure this in Settings → Environments → [select environment] → Channels (the Channels for this environment card).

Troubleshooting

  1. Need a channel right now? Open the incident’s detail page — the collaboration bar at the top has a Provision Channel button for incidents that didn’t get one automatically (for example, because the incident was below your configured severity threshold). Use it to create a channel on demand without waiting on a settings change.
  2. Confirm the Slack integration health is green in Settings → Integrations → Slack
  3. Check Proactively notify for severity in Settings → Organization → Details — the incident may be below the minimum severity you configured. This is the setting that actually gates automatic channel creation; Auto-create for severity is stored but currently has no effect, so changing it won’t help here. Note this setting has no per-environment override — it’s organization-wide only.
  4. Verify the sureops Slack app has permission to create channels in your workspace (check the app’s OAuth scopes in your Slack admin panel)
If none of the above resolves it, contact sureops support.
  1. If Announce channel ID in Settings → Organization → Details (the Incident Channels card) is blank, that’s not the problem by itself — sureops falls back to the Slack integration’s default channel. Confirm that default channel is set correctly under Settings → Integrations → Slack, or set an explicit Announce channel ID if you want a different destination.
  2. Check Proactively notify for severity — the incident may be below that threshold. This is the same threshold that gates war-room channel creation, so if a channel was created for the incident, the announce post should have fired too — it’s a single check, not two independent ones.
  1. Archive on closure is currently inert — toggling it does not archive the channel automatically when an incident closes. There’s no incident-closure archival hook today.
  2. Archive the channel manually from Slack if needed — sureops doesn’t prevent manual archiving
  3. Channels are also archived automatically when the underlying environment is torn down