Use the 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 Incident Management and collaboration with teammates and/or other teams.

ICC is a unique interface featuring: video tools, chat capabilities with an activity stream updated in real-time, and incident actions such as adding responders.

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.

If during the creation an Opsgenie Hosted Bridge was not set up, add an Opsgenie Hosted Bridge from the Incident Details page by clicking Incident command center 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.

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

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 Enter session 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 bottom of the video window.

Once joined, a full-screen view of the participants' video will be visible. Video/audio controls and the screen-sharing option is available at the bottom of the page. Next to these controls, you can access Participants and Chat panels by clicking on the respective buttons. On the left-hand side, you can switch between participants' videos and pin them if needed. The active speaker will automatically be shown in the video area if no one is pinned (and if the screen-sharing mode is not active).

What’s in the Incident Command Center?

Participants panel

From the Participants panel, you can view who joined and left, check the responder teams and participants details, add responders to the incident, and assign response roles to the users.

Each responder team is represented on the top of the Participants panel and the number of team members that are in the session is listed next to the team name. If the team is aware of the incident, a label is shown next to the team name. The teams of the participants are also listed under each participant's name. If you hover over a team name, a card with the team's details and a link to the responder alert of the team would appear.

To see the details of a participant, click on the participant's name. You can assign a response role to the participant by clicking on the Assign Role button and selecting the role. To dismiss a user from the session, click on the ellipsis button next to the participant's name and select Dismiss. A dismissed participant can rejoin the same session.

Built-in Chat

From the Chat panel, send messages to the other users in the ICC Room. The panel also lists the activity of the participants in the war room. If the Chat panel is closed when a new message is sent, a notification will appear on the left-hand side of the page.

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 bottom of the page. Screen sharing will start automatically on Firefox. For Chrome, you need to download extension developed by Opsgenie.

Adding Responders

The users that have the necessary rights can add responders through the ICC. Click Add Responders and enter the team/responder name to add a new responder to the incident.

How to create conference room for the Incident Command Center?

Incident command center rooms are defined via the Incident Configurations section under the Settings page.

1. Navigate to the ‘Conference’ page on the Incident Configurations section.

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

ICC past sessions can be found on Analytics page.

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