Run a Free Incident Management War Room that Actually Resolves Things

Most “war rooms” devolve into noise. You don’t need another overpriced dashboard; you need structure. Here’s how to run a free incident management war room with exit1.dev as the backbone.

Set roles before the outage

A war room collapses when everyone freelances. Assign these roles ahead of time:

• Incident commander: Keeps the room focused and decides when to escalate.
• Comms lead: Posts updates to customers, execs, and the status page.
• Ops lead: Owns the technical mitigation.

Document the roster right next to your monitors. If you still haven’t built that roster, start with the free uptime monitor for SaaS guide.

Use exit1.dev as the single source of truth

When exit1.dev fires, the incident commander shares the alert message verbatim. No reinterpretation, no delay. Then they pin three links in the channel:

1. The failing monitor in exit1.dev.
2. The real-time latency dashboard.
3. The runbook page (even if it’s a Notion doc).

If you’re still tempted to open another tool, read the Pingdom alternative breakdown and remind yourself why you switched.

Keep communication brutal and timestamped

Every update must answer three questions: What changed? What’s next? Who owns it? exit1.dev already tracks the technical timeline, so you’re reporting human intent. Stick to a format like:

13:02 UTC – Ops lead – rolled back API deploy 812. Expect recovery in 5 minutes.

If nothing changes, say so every 10 minutes. Silence breeds executive drive-bys and customer churn.

Don’t close until you can explain the failure

The war room ends when the incident commander can explain root cause and recovery steps. Use the incident postmortem template as the exit checklist. If the explanation is mushy, you’re not done.

Lock in the learnings instantly

Before people scatter, assign follow-up tasks straight from the war room log. exit1.dev’s alert history plus Slack timestamps make it trivial. Drop those tasks into your issue tracker, link back to the incident channel, and schedule a 24-hour retro. That’s how free incident management stays sharp instead of sliding back into chaos.