Site reliability engineering platform provider Blameless Inc. wants to help companies boost incident response times with CommsFlow, a new tool announced today that helps streamline communications between engineers and other stakeholders when applications and services go offline.

Blameless sells tools for software engineers to respond to incidents with applications, such as when they unexpectedly go offline or start performing poorly. So it knows only too well how critical it is to ensure communication between the various stakeholders involved.

As Blameless points out, application incidents remain a big challenge for most organizations, all the more so if they’re using different cloud infrastructure platforms and cloud-native tools. It says on-call engineers will benefit from no interruptions while trying to troubleshoot and resolve incidents.

However, businesses generally demand updates on the progress of incident resolution efforts. Blameless says this need to communicate their progress becomes a big distraction for engineers.

CommsFlow fixes this with a healthy dose of automation, delivering timely, context-rich updates on the situation to customers, partners and internal teams. The updates are sent automatically at workflow transitions or as task reminders for on-call engineers, Blameless said, in order to reduce the cognitive load and speed up time to resolution.

Blameless said CommsFlow can integrate with collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams to help teams run effective, automated and comprehensive communications during incident resolution. It benefits companies by keeping everyone up to date while limiting distractions for engineers, meaning they can focus on resolving issues faster.

Besides CommsFlow, Blameless said its incident resolution platform will also integrate with services, including PagerDuty to provide more context around incidents and Atlassian Corp. PLC’s Statuspage in order to give engineers more control over the specific components that an incident has affected.

Blameless co-founder and Chief Executive Lyon Wong said fast incident resolution can only be achieved if engineers are highly focused, so it’s necessary to eliminate any distractions.

“If we can alleviate the burden with features that automatically communicate at the right moments, it’s a game changer for on-call teams,” Wong said.

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