Incident Command Center (ICC)

The Incident Command Center (ICC) is a platform that leverages Opsgenie’s native video conference tool (Opsgenie Hosted Bridge) to enhance Service-Aware Incident Management and collaboration with teammates and/or other teams.

ICC is a unique interface featuring: video tools, chat capabilities, activity stream updated in real-time, and windows for milestones, stakeholder updates, and responder alerts, to both view information and send new updates if the user has the right.

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Service-Aware Incident Management is available for the newest Enterprise Plan.

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Supported Browsers for Video Conference

Video conference requires recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, and Safari 11 or greater.

How to Use the Incident Command Center

Add an Opsgenie Hosted Bridge to incidents by either selecting the related war room in the creation process of the incident (on incident templates, or during manual incident creation) or manually after the incident is created. To add the war room during the incident creation process, choose the desired war room from the ‘Conference Bridge’ field while creating the incident or the template.

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When selecting a Conference Bridge, it must be a defined bridge under the Impacted Service. This means that users must first select an Impacted Service (which correlates to a Team) then the Conference Bridge drop-down menu is populated to make a selection. If the Service selected has no Conference Bridge defined under the corresponding Team, first define a Conference Bridge via the Teams Dashboard.

If during the creation an Opsgenie Hosted Bridge was not set up, add an Opsgenie Hosted Bridge from the Incident Details page by clicking the orange Start Opsgenie Hosted Bridge button and selecting the related room or entering a new one.

Once an Opsgenie Hosted Bridge is added to an incident, either at the creation of the incident or manually after the incident creation, the war room is accessible from the incident and the responder alerts of this incident. Click the Join button from the Alert list.

You can also join an ICC session on your mobile application:

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Please do not forget to allow pop-ups to be able to join a Opsgenie Hosted Bridge.

Click on the Opsgenie Hosted Bridge button to enter the Incident Command Center. Prior to joining, the option to enable/disable video and microphone is provided. Click Join Conference represented with the green phone icon to join the call.

See, talk, and send chat messages with every user joined on the call. The other joined users are shown in small rectangles which can be clicked and enlarged. Enable/disable video and microphone anytime during the call, and leave the call, via the buttons on the left side of the video window.

On the right-hand side, the ICC has the sections to view the responder team and the users who joined the bridge. Next to these sections are the Chat and Activity Stream windows (indicated by tabs) to chat with other responders, follow the updates of who joined and left the room, and who was invited in real time.

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Currently, the participant limit for an ICC session is 50 users.

Each responder team is represented by a color and the users have bullets next to their name with the color of the team that they are a member of.

To dismiss a user from the session, click on the participant's name from the Joined section. The participant's details appear. Click on the Settings button to dismiss the participant. A dismissed participant can rejoin the same session.

Features

Built-in Chat

In the same window featuring the Activity Stream, send messages to the other users in the ICC Room.

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Some third-party browser extensions may conflict with the new Chat feature, such as Grammarly, an English-language and grammar writing-enhancement extension. For troubleshooting, disable the tool to see if the chat function then works normally.

The Activity Stream provides details on the actions taken by participants in the war room.

Screen Sharing

Screen sharing feature allows you to increase efficiency of collaboration during an incident. To share a screen in a session, click the icon on the left side of window. Screen sharing will start automatically on Firefox. For Chrome, you need to download extension developed by Opsgenie. Click the pop-up to download extension. If it does not appear, you can use this link.

You can also switch to full screen during an ICC session by clicking "Open full screen mode" icon on the left side of window.

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Currently, screen sharing feature is only supported by Firefox and Chrome.

Milestones

Milestones are internal updates for incident remediation. Noteable breakthroughs or progress is added here for those involved in the remediation process.

Stakeholder Updates (previously Status Updates)

If a user is a member of the Owner Team of the incident, by default, they have the right to send status updates to the Service Status Page. Click the ‘Stakeholder Updates’ tab, then ‘Add New Status Update” and enter the related update message and description.

View the updates added in the bottom window via the Stakeholder Updates tab.

Adding Responders

The owner team of the incident has also the right to add responders through the ICC. Click Add Responder and enter the team/responder name to add a new responder to the incident,

Responder Alerts

Click on the Responder Alerts tab to view the list and the status of the Responder Alerts of the incident.

How to Configure an Incident Command Conference Room

Conference rooms are defined via the Team Dashboard. Each team can only use their own conference rooms for the incidents created for their services.

1- Navigate to the ‘Conference’ tab on the Team Dashboard
2- Click ‘Add Room’ and enter the room name and its description if necessary.

Notifications

Whenever an incident is created, the associated conference room to that incident becomes available and the first person - either from the owner team or any other responder team - to click on the Opsgenie Hosted Bridge button initiates the ICC session. Once the session is started, the users notified of this incident (i.e. its responder alerts) receive notifications for the ICC session start event.

The responder users who are newly added to the incident after the session start event would also receive notifications when they are added. The notifications would be sent via email and push (mobile app). If a user does not have a mobile app contact registered, they would receive SMS notifications instead.

Sessions

Every user with the roles User, Admin, and Owner in Opsgenie can view the Incident Command Center page that’s available on the left-hand side menu. All of the sessions in each war room are listed here. Ongoing sessions are listed in the Live Sessions tab and past sessions are listed in the Past Sessions tab. If the user viewing the page has the right to join a live session listed in this page (i.e, belongs to the related team or is an Admin/Owner), they can directly join from this page as well.

From the Past Sessions tab, Click on a past session, including the joined users and teams, and incident details to see the corresponding data.

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When an incident is closed or resolved, Opsgenie's Post Incident Analysis Reports are accessed by clicking into the details of the closed/resolved incident. This report gives extra insight into the collaboration efforts of your teams. This feature has to be enabled for certain plans, so contact support with any questions.

ICC User Roles

During a conference, there may be a need to differentiate user roles; basically as Incident Commander and Conference Participant. Consider a scenario where Incident Commander holds the rights to manage participants and Service Status Page, and participants only attend and work on the incident resolution.

This kind of scenario can be achieved by defining Custom Roles. Custom roles can be defined to create ICC roles such as ICC Commander and ICC Participant. To create such Custom Roles, you can start with the basic User role, name the custom role as you would like to, and change permissions as shown below.

ICC Commander:
ICC Commander can be the role which has command, control and coordination permissions during an ICC session. In order to create an ICC Commander role, the users should be granted the following capabilities in addition to the basic ICC Participant permissions:

• Ability to add Responders
• Ability to update the Service Status Page
• Ability to dismiss a participant

To create this role, navigate to the Users page and click the Add Role button in the Roles tab. Select the Base Role as User and enable ICC Dismiss Participant and Send Service Status Update rights.

ICC Participant:
ICC Participant can be the role which only has the permissions to attend and follow a conference session. Therefore, commander specific rights should be disabled for this role.

To create this role, navigate to the Users page and click the Add Role button in the Roles tab. Select the Base Role as User and disable Add Stakeholder and Add Responder rights.