Incident Response FAQs
General Questions
What is Harness Incident Response?
Harness Incident Response (IR) is a platform that centralizes incident management, automates response workflows, and integrates with monitoring, collaboration, and on-call management tools.
How does Harness IR differ from traditional incident management tools?
Harness IR provides AI-driven incident summaries, automated runbooks, and direct integrations with monitoring, communication, and ticketing platforms to reduce manual effort and improve response times.
Incident Handling
How are incidents created in Harness IR?
Incidents can be created manually via the UI, automatically from monitoring alerts, or through webhooks from third-party tools.
Can incidents be automatically assigned to on-call responders?
Yes, Harness IR integrates with on-call management tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie to automatically assign incidents to the right responders.
Does Harness IR support incident priority levels?
Yes, incidents can be assigned different severity levels based on pre-defined criteria.
Automation & Runbooks
What are runbooks, and how do they work?
Runbooks are automated workflows that execute predefined actions during an incident. They can include steps like notifying responders, updating tickets, and triggering CI/CD rollbacks.
Can I integrate custom scripts into runbooks?
No, custom scripts cannot be directly integrated into Harness Incident Response (IR) Runbooks. However, you can achieve the same functionality by executing a Harness pipeline from a Runbook
Can runbooks be triggered automatically?
Yes, incidents can be configured to trigger runbooks based on alert conditions or webhook payloads.
Integrations
Which communication tools does Harness IR support?
Harness IR integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom for real-time collaboration.
Can Harness IR sync with ticketing tools?
Yes, it integrates with Jira and ServiceNow to automatically create, update, and close tickets.
How does Harness IR handle on-call escalations?
It integrates with PagerDuty and Opsgenie to escalate incidents based on defined schedules.
Security & Compliance
How does Harness IR secure incident data?
Incident data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES 256). Access control is enforced through RBAC.
Are all incident actions logged?
Yes, every action taken in an incident is recorded in the audit logs for compliance tracking.
Does Harness IR support multi-factor authentication (MFA)?
MFA is supported through authentication providers such as SAML and OAuth.
This FAQ structure covers anticipated user concerns while keeping it aligned with the existing documentation format.