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WHAWIT posts incidents into a Slack channel as they are created. Each incident arrives as a message with controls — Acknowledge, Snooze, Resolve, Assign to me — that act directly on the incident. Every action is attributed to the Slack user who clicked it and appears on the incident timeline in WHAWIT. The message is live: it reflects the incident’s current state no matter where a change was made, and the incident’s story accumulates as replies in its thread — including merges, unmerges and the on-call agents’ findings. The same app answers /whawit in the channel, so you can ask about incidents, logs and deploys without leaving the conversation.

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Requirements

  • A WHAWIT account. Channels are connected per project: incidents of the connected project post to the channel.
  • Permission in Slack to add an app to your workspace. Whoever installs it picks the channel during Slack’s own consent screen.
  • To use the message controls or /whawit, the Slack user’s email address must be a member of the WHAWIT organization. Channel membership alone is deliberately not enough — anyone can read the message, only your team can act on it.

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Connect a channel

There is no code to copy. The organization and project travel with the install link, and Slack’s own picker chooses the channel.
1

Open your agent's notification channels

In app.whawit.ai, select the organization and project the channel belongs to, then open On Call → Agents, open your agent’s card menu (⋮ → Edit Settings), scroll to Notification Channels, and find the Slack app card.
2

Add to Slack

Press Add to Slack. Slack shows its consent screen: choose the workspace and the channel that should receive incidents, and approve.
3

Done

Slack sends you back to a Slack connected confirmation page naming the channel. From now on, incidents of that project post there as they are created.
The card then lists the connected channels — workspace and #channel, plus who connected each one — with a control to disconnect any of them. To add a second channel, run Add to Slack again and pick the other channel.
Connecting the channel is all it takes: creation cards, the live thread, merge narration and agent findings all follow from the binding itself. Escalation levels that include Slack still matter — they drive the 🚨 Escalation reminders as the policy fires — but they are no longer a prerequisite for seeing incidents in the channel.

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The incident message

When an incident is created, the message carries the severity and status, the summary and description, the service facts WHAWIT knows (service, assignee, who acknowledged, how long it is snoozed for) and the recommendations from the agentic triage, plus: After an action the message rewrites itself in place, showing what happened and who did it — Acknowledged by [email protected] — and the same entry lands on the incident timeline. Once an incident reaches a terminal state, the action controls are removed and only Open incident remains — except on a merged incident, which keeps Unmerge so a wrong merge is one click to undo. If your message also carries a Comment button, it opens a small dialog: what you write is added to the incident, attributed to you like any other action.
Your Slack profile email has to match your WHAWIT membership email. If it does not, WHAWIT answers you privately — only you see it — and the incident is left untouched.

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The message is live, and the thread is the story

The incident card in Slack is not a snapshot. Whenever the incident changes — acknowledged from the web app, resolved by the AI agent, reassigned, its severity raised, a comment added, synced back from Jira — the Slack message rewrites itself in place to show the current state, and the change lands as a short reply in the message’s thread: So one card per incident stays pinned to the truth, and its thread reads as the timeline — no scrolling through stacked, outdated notifications. Three behaviors worth knowing:
  • One card per incident, always. However an incident reaches the channel — created, escalated, or both in quick succession — you get a single card; repeats and updates go into its thread.
  • Escalation repeats thread too. If nobody acknowledges and the policy fires again, the reminder arrives as a reply in the incident’s thread (🚨 Escalation — level 2), not as a second card.
  • Resolutions are announced. The ✅ Resolved reply is also shown at channel level, so a resolution is visible without opening the thread.

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Merges narrate themselves

When WHAWIT’s AI triage decides two incidents are the same problem — or a person merges them from the web app — both cards tell the story:
  • The duplicate’s card rewrites to its closed state, gains a Merged into field linking the surviving incident, and keeps only Open incident and Unmerge.
  • A reply lands under the duplicate: 🔀 Merged into <incident> by Whawit AI triage (94% confidence) — the confidence appears for AI merges; a human merge is attributed by email instead.
  • The survivor’s thread answers with the mirror line: 🔀 <incident> was merged into this incident by ….
Pressing Unmerge on the duplicate’s card undoes it — the incident returns to the status it held before the merge, the card gets its buttons back, and both threads note ↩️ Unmerged from <incident> by [email protected] — status restored to open. Unmerge is authorized exactly like every other button: WHAWIT organization members only. Incidents closed by a merge also push their state to already-linked Jira and Opsgenie objects, so the external trackers stay consistent.

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Agent findings reach the channel as incidents

The on-call agents do not narrate their cycles into Slack. What a cycle finds reaches the channel the same way everything else does: as an incident card, deduplicated, with buttons on it. A finding that did not become an incident stays in the analysis, where the On-call section of the web app shows it in full. The agents’ own notification channels — email, WhatsApp, SMS, Discord, a pasted Slack webhook — are configured per monitor and are unaffected by this. Paste a WHAWIT incident URL anywhere the app can see it and it expands into a compact status card — severity, status, summary, project and age — so nobody has to open the web app to know what …/incidents/urn:incident:… is about. The card is read-only and only renders in workspaces connected to that incident’s organization.
Workspaces that installed the app before link unfurling existed need to run Add to Slack once more to grant the link permissions. Everything else keeps working without it — the creation cards, merge narration and agent summaries need no re-install and no new permissions.

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Ask WHAWIT from the channel

In a connected channel, /whawit talks to the same agent as the query page in the web app, scoped to that channel’s project: A question can take a couple of minutes: WHAWIT acknowledges it immediately, privately, and posts the answer to the channel when the run finishes. Follow-up questions in the same channel continue the same conversation, so “and what about yesterday?” works. In a channel that is not connected yet, /whawit replies privately explaining how to connect it.

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Alternative: incoming webhook (no app)

WHAWIT can also post through a classic Slack incoming webhook: paste the URL under On Call → Agents → your agent → ⋮ → Edit Settings → Notification Channels → Slack webhook → Webhook URL. The two paths are independent — you can have either, both, or neither. The webhook posts a plain notification with a link back to WHAWIT; there are no buttons that act in place, no /whawit, and no merge narration. The agent cycle summaries do not depend on it either — they arrive through the app connection. The app is the recommended experience.

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Security and data

  • Authority over incidents comes from WHAWIT organization membership, never from Slack channel membership. Someone outside the organization who clicks a button gets a private refusal and the incident is unchanged.
  • WHAWIT reads the clicking user’s Slack profile email to attribute the action, and stores the workspace and channel it needs in order to post.
  • The workspace credential Slack grants at install time is stored encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), with the key held separately in a secret manager.
  • WHAWIT does not read your channel’s conversation. It sees only what is addressed to it: button clicks, /whawit commands, and the incident links it is asked to unfurl.
  • Every request from Slack is signature-verified before it is read.

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Uninstalling

Removing the WHAWIT app from your Slack workspace stops the notifications immediately. The channel bindings are remembered rather than deleted, so re-installing the app lands the workspace back where it was instead of making you rebuild the wiring.

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Troubleshooting

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Next

Escalation policies

Where the Slack channel is switched on, level by level.

Microsoft Teams

The same incident actions, in a Teams channel.

Meeting bridges

Spin up a Zoom or Google Meet bridge from an incident — the join link lands in the thread.

On-call agents

The cards behind the findings that reach your channel.