{"id":1044,"date":"2017-09-19T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog2wrkdev.wpenginepowered.com\/coupa-incident-updates-itops-devops\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T06:39:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T10:39:17","slug":"coupa-incident-updates-itops-devops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog2workato.wpengine.com\/coupa-incident-updates-itops-devops\/","title":{"rendered":"How Coupa Uses Workato to Streamline Incident Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP) is a leading cloud-based spend management software company used by companies like Staples, Salesforce, H&R Block and more. As a Forbes Cloud 100 software company, seamless IT and DevOps are crucial to Coupa\u2019s success. Hans Gustavson, the senior site reliability engineering director wanted to find a powerful yet flexible solution to streamline communication between apps and decrease menial tasks for the engineers. \u201cWe\u2019re responsible for performance and making sure the site is up and available, as well as ho<\/span>w we manage and interact with the platform and services,\u201d says Gustavson. \u201cIt\u2019s important to allow the engineers to focus on triage and resolution of issues instead of going back and forth between different tools to create tickets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Gustavson was looking for a solution that allowed the team to rapidly build and deploy automations across a variety of SaaS services. \u201cWe\u2019re developers and we can certainly write our own integrations but we felt like there were solutions that are better suited for handling this type of orchestration instead of doing it in-house. We looked at a variety of products and ultimately chose to evaluate Workato. What we really liked is the ability of a recipe\u2014the workflow is intuitive and it doesn\u2019t require a deep expertise in coding or development,\u201d explains Gustavson. \u201cThere are a lot of use cases and scenarios where we want to introduce bots or automation using Workato to help us manage a particular activity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Related: 3 IT automations that deliver significant business results<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Manual Incident Updates in VictorOps, JIRA, HipChat and Cachet<\/span><\/h2>\n

Coupa\u2019s first order of business was streamlining communication and alerts for the engineers between VictorOps, JIRA, HipChat and Cachet.<\/span> Coupa\u2019s workflow for incident management kicks off when their monitoring tool alerts VictorOps to an issue. VictorOps then pages the group of engineers responsible for acknowledging it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Before using Workato, the next step was logging into JIRA and creating a JIRA incident ticket so they could track its progress as they worked on the issue. They also needed to enable communication between everyone involved with that specific issue by creating a dedicated HipChat room, where the on-call members could talk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the entire process, JIRA\u2019s incident management workflow had to remain accurate and up-to-date. As the issue progressed through JIRA\u2019s workflow system (from Open, Investigating, and Identified to Fixed, Watching, and eventually Resolved), those updates also had to manually be changed in their Cachet status dashboard.<\/span><\/p>\n

Related: 2 approaches for automating incident management<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Keeping Incident Updates Automatically in Sync with Workato<\/span><\/h2>\n

This process was efficient, but Gustavson knew it could be even better: \u201cWe realized we needed to make this process less burdensome to the engineer. We wanted to make it simpler and invisible.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, when an engineer acknowledges the issue in VictorOps, Workato automatically creates a new JIRA incident ticket. Workato also opens a new HipChat room for that incident and automatically invites everyone who is on-call into the HipChat room.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Once the engineers start working on the issue, a new set of Workato recipes keep JIRA and their status dashboard in Cachet in sync. The incident travels through 6 different JIRA statuses as it gets worked on: Open, Investigating, Identified, Watching, Fixed, Resolved. Workato watches the issue in JIRA and triggers when the status changes, updating it in Cachet. \u201cEssentially, the entire scenario facilitates communication of the alert status and helps people stay on top of what\u2019s happening,\u201d Gustavson says.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Easier Reporting and Increased Reliability<\/span><\/h2>\n

Coupa also uses Workato to enable better DevOps analytics. On an hourly basis, a recipe pulls issues from JIRA into a Google Sheet for analysis; a similar recipe aggregates alerts from VictorOps. This way, Gustavson\u2019s team can pick up on evolving incident patterns\u2014without doing any manual data entry.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Gustavson explains that Workato allows Coupa to leverage their tools to the fullest capacity and get more value out of those apps. With that leverage comes consistency; Gustavson credits Workato with improving the usability of his team\u2019s apps. \u201cWe\u2019re getting more reliable use out of our apps\u2014without the engineer needing to be an expert in each one,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s Workato\u2019s flexibility that proved the ultimate benefit for Coupa, Gustavson says. \u201cThere was never just one use case. There are more use cases coming up every day. Workato\u2019s flexible framework allows us to easily solve for them\u2014quickly.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

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Implementing An Agile Solution in <1 Month<\/span><\/h2>\n

Gustavson points out that, in many cases, solving an integration problem became the responsibility of the person who needed the integration. \u201cIt often falls on the shoulders of the individual engineer, who might be caught between a communications tool and an orchestration tool. But we want the engineer to work on what\u2019s most important: resolving incidents.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n