Rule-based suggestions

Rule-based suggestions remind responders to take a certain action, such as providing an incident update, on a schedule that you can define. We post a message to the incident channel with buttons to complete the action. They’re available in Slack, and you can configure them from Settings → Suggestions.

If a suggestion arrives at a bad moment, anyone in the channel can snooze it. On Microsoft Teams, you’ll have AI suggestions instead.

Snooze a suggestion

Open the … menu on the message and choose:

• Snooze for 15 minutes
• Snooze for 1 hour
• Snooze for 3 hours
• Snooze for this incident

We remove the message from the channel as soon as you snooze it. A timed snooze brings the suggestion back when it runs out, if it’s still relevant. Snooze for this incident silences it for the rest of the incident, however long that runs.

A snooze covers everyone in the channel, and it applies to that one suggestion in that one incident: it doesn’t follow you into the next one. You can’t take it back either, so wait out a timed snooze if you picked it by mistake.

The same menu has Configure, which opens the suggestion’s settings in the dashboard.

The update prompt also has a Pause incident button. Pausing stops every suggestion until you resume, which is the quickest way to quiet a channel.

What runs by default

Every Slack organization starts with these, already on. The clock starts when a suggestion’s conditions first match, not when the incident is declared.

Suggestion	First sent after	Repeats every	Maximum times
Prompt to assign the Incident Lead role	3 minutes	5 minutes	5
Prompt to set a summary	5 minutes	30 minutes	3
Prompt to accept or decline a triage incident	15 minutes	30 minutes	10
Prompt to ask for help	15 minutes	Doesn’t repeat	1
Prompt to send an internal incident update	30 minutes	30 minutes	10
Prompt to update public status page	30 minutes	30 minutes	5
Prompt to create a stream	No delay	Doesn’t repeat	1
Prompt to resolve inactive incidents	6 hours	24 hours	3

Many of these carry conditions as well as timings, so you won’t see all of them on every incident. If your plan includes AI suggested updates, you get those in place of the update and triage prompts.

By default, we run suggestions using smart scheduling, which is designed to minimize the noise within your incident channels. We do this by adapting the schedule that the suggestion is run on based on activity within the incident. For example: if another suggestion was just sent, we might delay the next one by a few minutes.

Customize and turn off suggestions

Turn any suggestion off from Settings → Suggestions. The menu next to it offers Disable, which keeps the configuration for later, and Delete, which removes it. Both work on every plan, on the defaults you start with as well as any you add.

On Pro and Enterprise, you can also create suggestions and edit the ones you have:

• Prompt: the message we post in the channel, including variables such as the incident lead
• Conditions: which incidents it runs on, using incident attributes like type, severity, role assignments and custom fields
• Initial delay, Repeat interval and Attempts: when it first arrives, how often it comes back, and how many times per incident
• Smart scheduling: on or off

Suggestions don’t follow business hours. To keep nights and weekends quieter, condition them on higher severities, or stretch the initial delay and repeat interval.