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When your incident tool opens an incident, it can ask Sidekick to start the investigation before anyone joins. Sidekick checks your connected tools, works out whether the issue is ongoing, who it affects, and the likely cause, then posts a summary in Slack. The trigger lives in your incident tool, not in Plain. The tool posts a Slack message that @mentions Sidekick, and Sidekick replies like it would to a teammate. See Sidekick in Slack for how mentions work.

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Before you start

You need to be a workspace Admin or Owner in Plain. Set up these first:
  • Sidekick in Slack: install it from Sidekick → Integrations → Slack. See Sidekick in Slack
  • Tools for the investigation: connect the tools Sidekick should search, such as Datadog, Sentry, GitHub, or incident.io, in Sidekick → Integrations. See Tools and integrations
  • A supported message source: Sidekick ignores @mentions from most Slack apps. It accepts them from the incident.io Slack app and from Slack Workflow Builder. For PagerDuty, Rootly, FireHydrant, Opsgenie, or another tool, use a Slack workflow that starts from a webhook

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Setup

1

Make the incident channel a Discussion channel

Sidekick only responds in Discussion channels, and Plain must be in the channel before the mention arrives.If your tool creates a channel for each incident, go to Settings → Channels → Slack in Plain and add an auto-join rule that matches the channel prefix, such as inc-. Set the channel type to Discussion. If your tool posts to one shared channel, invite Plain to it and set its type to Discussion.
2

Trigger on new incidents

In your incident tool, create a workflow or automation that runs when an incident is created. Add conditions if you only want Sidekick on some incidents, for example a minimum severity.For any tool other than incident.io, create a Slack workflow that starts from a webhook. Set your tool’s automation to call that webhook, and include the incident’s name, summary, and channel in the body.
3

Post a message that mentions Sidekick

Send a Slack message to the incident channel that starts with an @mention of Plain, followed by the task and the incident details. For example:
Replace the placeholders in braces with the variables your tool provides, such as the incident’s name, summary, and any attached alert. The more context the message carries, the less Sidekick has to look up.
4

Test it

Open a test incident. Sidekick replies in a thread under the message, and the summary appears in the channel.

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What happens during an incident

Sidekick replies in a Slack thread under the message that mentioned it. Your team can reply in that thread to ask follow-up questions, and Sidekick keeps the context of the investigation. Sidekick follows your actions and approval rules. If the investigation needs an action that requires approval, such as creating a Linear issue, Sidekick asks in the Slack thread first. Each investigation is a Sidekick session and uses credits from your workspace’s monthly allowance. The reply in Slack links to the full session in Plain.

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Write a useful investigation prompt

Sidekick gets only the message text and whatever it finds with its tools. To get a sharper first summary:
  • Name what to check: point Sidekick at specific sources, such as “check Datadog logs and recent deployments in GitHub”
  • Ask for a fixed format: request the same sections every time, such as status, impact, root cause, and what isn’t verified
  • Say where to post: ask for a top-level message in the channel so the summary is visible to everyone who joins