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.

Downtime fire alarm ? WTF

[rossdee]

You don't want a fire alarm that is connected to the internet

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[account_deleted]

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Sounds like a re-invented wheel

[imidan]

So, we do all that in our ticket tracking system. It has a facility for assigning responsibility and priority, for discussion and documentation of what went wrong and what we did to fix it, and of course keeps the tickets in the database so they can be referred to in the future if we have that problem again. Kintaba sounds to me like another ticket tracking system that we can roll out next to the existing one so that everyone has to be checking both systems all the time and we never know which one has the ticket we need, and there's no interoperability between the two. Some manager hears about this and we get saddled with it, and our meta-workload just went up with absolutely no benefit to productivity. Neat.

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[Scutter]

https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]

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[rho]

But Kintaba has a dashboard, which looks really sweet, and also gnarly, on the NOC wall.

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[AmiMoJo]

It's not a ticketing system, it matches employees with the responsibilities and skills needed to the emergency. So they can take the right ones up at 3AM to fix stuff.

Oh goody, more useless enterprise software

[rsilvergun]

that doesn't solve the problem of constant layoffs and an overreliance on cheap, often offshore, contract workers with zero institutional knowledge causing outages.

I hope it's at least got A.I.s. And Web Scale.

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[account_deleted]

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I wonder...

[theblkadder]

who on the /. editorial staff is getting paid for this promotional article.

I couldn't understand the summary

[_merlin]

Seriously, what's this about? All I see is a jumble of buzzwords and jargon. Maybe it should be called "Kintama [urbandictionary.com]" - only one letter different.

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[ediron2]

Nice effort for a joke. Maybe they were hinting at both kintsugi for the feel-good metaphor and secretly kintaba, because most IR's are bollux.

Meanwhile, this isn't a badly-written summary. I'd never heard of Kintaba before, and yet I understand incident response and Slack terminology enough to quickly suss out what they're doing.

So, either this was just for a joke, or slashdot's continued descent away from nerd relevance is on display, or you're so far away from incident response that I kind of am afraid

Hilarious

[trawg]

"when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames"

They figured out it was better to sell fire extinguishers to other blockchain startups!

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[account_deleted]

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[Cederic]

It doesn't inspire faith in their product.

"We're so shit at writing working software that we had to write software to track how bad we are at fixing our shit software. Would you like some?"

No.