FireHydrant Reviews

My main use case for FireHydrant is incident response, alerting, and coordinating teams during incidents, which helps us resolve issues faster, track incidents, and improve post-incident reviews.

FireHydrant helps me coordinate teams during incidents by centralizing incident updates, assigning roles, and keeping engineering and operational teams aligned. For example, when we experienced a production outage, we used it to coordinate responders, track progress, and share updates, reducing confusion and helping us resolve or restore services much faster.

FireHydrant has positively impacted my organization by improving our incident response time, team coordination, and overall operational efficiencies. Automated workflows reduce manual tasks while centralized updates help us resolve issues faster, and we've improved incident documentation and follow-up.

It has helped us reduce delays in incident response through automated alerts and faster team coordination, and we estimate saving around 10 to 30 minutes per incident by reducing manual updates and streamlining communication overall.

The best features FireHydrant offers are incident management, automated workflows, real-time team coordination, incident timelines, and post-incident reviews.

Automated workflows save our team time by handling repetitive tasks, sending notifications, and assigning responsibility automatically. They have reduced human error, improved response times, and let engineers focus on resolving incidents instead of manual coordination.

It also provides clear incident tracking and useful post-incident reviews.

FireHydrant could be improved by better integrations with monitoring tools and more customizable dashboards.

I would appreciate better integrations with Datadog, Slack, Jira, and PagerDuty. For dashboards, I would appreciate customizable incident metrics, real-time response time tracking, team performance reports, and filters by incident severity.

Improved reporting and analytics would also help teams identify recurring issues, track response times, and make incident management more efficient.

FireHydrant's AI governance and security seem very promising, but I would appreciate stronger transparency around data handling, access controls, and privacy regarding its AI capabilities.

I have been using FireHydrant for three years.

FireHydrant is generally stable and reliable. It helps us coordinate incident response and manage workflows consistently throughout my organization.

FireHydrant is a very scalable platform because it scales well as our team and incident volume grows. Its automated workflows and integrations help us manage more incidents without significantly increasing manual effort.

For the few times that I've reached out to customer support, they've been very helpful and responsive overall, providing useful guidance when we needed our issues solved. They've been very proactive and helpful overall.

I would rate the customer support an eight out of ten.

Before FireHydrant, we primarily used PagerDuty and Slack for incident alerts and team coordination. We switched to FireHydrant for its centralized incident management, automated workflows, and improved post-incident reviews, which helped streamline our response processes more efficiently.

It was relatively easy to deploy FireHydrant in my environment because the initial setup and integration required some configuration, but the process was straightforward.

The configuration process was straightforward overall. Setting up incidents, workflows, alert notifications, and team roles required some initial adjustment, but the platform was flexible.

FireHydrant integrates well with other AWS services I use, especially connected to monitoring and alerting tools, where it helps us coordinate incident response and keep teams more informed.

We've seen a clear return on investment through faster incident response and reduced manual coordination. We've been able to save around 10 to 30 minutes per incident through automation and streamlined communication, improving our engineering productivity overall.

The procurement process was relatively straightforward. Evaluating the features, pricing, and integration capabilities took some time, but the process was manageable overall.

The billing experience is generally straightforward, but clearer usage breakdowns and more transparent pricing would be very helpful.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very manageable and cost-efficient because the total cost depends on the organization's needs and plan, and the setup costs were manageable.

I evaluated other options including PagerDuty and Slack before choosing FireHydrant.

I rate FireHydrant four out of five.

I chose four out of five because of its effective incident management, automated workflows, and team coordination, although it could improve further with more advanced analytics, integrations, and dashboard customization.

The AI outputs are generally useful for summarizing incidents and identifying patterns, but they should be reviewed by engineers for more accuracy.

My advice for others looking into using FireHydrant, based on my positive experience, is to evaluate its integration, pricing, and workflow customization options before committing, and to start with a few key workflows to measure response times and expand your team as you become more comfortable with the platform.

I used FireHydrant to automate incident response by leveraging its integration capabilities, as well as its customization capabilities to allow me to plug in my existing observability and telemetry tooling, and then configure the platform to respond based off of the incoming telemetry. That telemetry was then used to route between various teams and products inside of the enterprise to better response and to ideally remediate automatically if possible.

Tracking execution and identifying ownership improved things for my teams because nobody could hide behind a "I didn't know" or "it wasn't a problem" kind of response. As long as deep observabilities were in place, so logs, metrics, and traces, identifying where the issues were and then routing to those teams was critical. This also allowed me to take a data-driven approach in identifying where further R&D needed to happen across the product suite based off of what our customers were actually doing, bypassing biases from sales teams, development teams, and others.

The fact that the transposers existed was really what stood out to me in that they allowed me to integrate different systems. Instead of being shoehorned into a list of specific platforms, I could add anything I wanted. They're simple JavaScript. Take an input, massage its output, trigger the automations.

The overall configurability of the platform is quite robust, so wrapping natural language interactions around it would be really helpful. I'm thinking about almost replacing SRE teams. Many of the observability platforms are automating away the SRE roles. FireHydrant could probably work in that same world, noticing what observability platforms are doing and more about the why behind it, and then using that to enrich the incident response procedures.

I can't recall which cloud provider FireHydrant used for hosting.

I would advise others looking into using FireHydrant to really think through the cultural impact a tool like that can have on the teams. Some teams can be very possessive and resistant to change as they might be a little more legacy in design. Other teams can be quite adoptive of it because it helps them protect the customer experience.

FireHydrant's AI capabilities in terms of governance and security are fine. However, FireHydrant's AI capabilities need to be treated with scrutiny regarding accuracy and reliability of output, and for the provider to be able to instill absolute trust in the user base is very difficult. I would think that allowing the platform to grow with human in the loop feedback with the goal of reducing that feedback over time because it got it right is the right approach.

I give FireHydrant an eight out of ten because it was recently acquired, and when a product is acquired, it brings in some potential concerns. I haven't seen how the acquisition has affected the product as I'm no longer with the company.

My main use case for FireHydrant was incident management, where it was plugged into our monitoring tool, DataDog. From that, we were able to trigger alerts that go into Slack channels, and from Slack channels, we can trigger and create incidents in FireHydrant. FireHydrant later helps us manage the whole incident lifecycle, including mitigation, the process, and it will also create the Zoom bridge and all of that.

FireHydrant helped me manage the incident lifecycle by providing multiple statuses for the incidents. If I recall correctly, there are incident created, mitigated, resolved, and other statuses. During the incident resolution process, we are basically reporting back our process into FireHydrant, which records that. Later, we use all this data to generate the post-incident review document, so this was one way we used FireHydrant.

We were also using FireHydrant Terraform provider to create all the necessary resources inside FireHydrant itself, which was something really valuable for us. Given that I am a senior DevOps engineer, I was managing the platform for multiple teams by mainly providing some Terraform modules that the team could use to create their services inside FireHydrant and to manage the whole incident lifecycle.

FireHydrant had a great impact on my organization, given we were using it consistently across all the incidents that we had. The incident reports were also consistent, and everyone was following the same template that was deployed inside FireHydrant.

I cannot recall that we tracked specific metrics, but our process was really simple. Whenever a team deploys a new service, we have a dedicated FireHydrant service attached to the actual service, creating a kind of one-to-one mapping between the service, the application, and FireHydrant services. On top of that, FireHydrant does provide metrics such as MTTR and other metrics that people follow as part of their incident management process.

I believe one of the best features FireHydrant offers is the Slack integration, which was really helpful, and on top of that, it was able to create Zoom bridges and a few other things that I do not recall anymore.

The Slack integration in particular improved our team's workflow during incidents, as Slack was our main communication tool. From Slack directly, we were able to tag some specific messages inside the incident Slack channel, and FireHydrant was able to gather the relevant Slack messages inside the incident. We were able to generate nice reports based on the conversation happening in Slack.

For improvements, I think I have nothing on top of my mind, given I am not using it currently, so nothing special to add.

Back then, I think there were some missing features in their Terraform provider, so that is the only thing that comes into my mind regarding needed improvements.

I have been using FireHydrant for about three years, but currently, I am not using it anymore as I used it in my previous company.

My advice to others looking into using FireHydrant is to properly define your services inside FireHydrant, ensuring that everyone follows the same processes and workflows to avoid inconsistencies between teams and services.

I did not use FireHydrant AI capabilities, so I have nothing to add regarding its governance and security.

I have not used the AI capabilities, so I have nothing to add regarding its accuracy and reliability of output.

FireHydrant was deployed in our organization in a public cloud environment.

We were using AWS, specifically the SaaS version of FireHydrant.

We did not purchase this via the AWS Marketplace.

I would rate FireHydrant around eight on a scale of one to ten because I think it is a great tool that does its job really well.