Why Slack outshines Zoom for incident management

by | Jun 9, 2025 | Uncategorized

Slack is more effective than Zoom for communication among engineers during incident response, and should be your primary tool. Here’s how best to use both Slack and Zoom during incident response.

I’m focusing on Slack and Zoom as the most common tools for text-based channels and audio/video conferences, but these insights apply broadly to similar platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or even traditional phone bridges. The key takeaway is that, for effective incident management, prioritize channel-oriented text communication over audio/video conferences.

First, Slack is much better suited than Zoom to the asynchronous nature of incident response. Responders and stakeholders can post updates, ask questions, and share information as they discover it, without interrupting everyone else’s workflow. This allows individuals to focus on their specific task while both staying informed and keeping others informed. Threads within the incident channel keep related discussions organized, preventing chaos. In contrast, a live Zoom call demands everyone’s primary attention. If a responder needs to step away to investigate an issue, they miss crucial real-time updates. A Zoom call is inherently single-threaded, focusing on only one thing at a time; this synchronous nature is inefficient for a fast-moving incident, where different people are working on different aspects simultaneously. Zoom calls can utilize breakout rooms for in-depth discussions, but then someone must manage the breakout rooms, and participants in the breakout rooms miss out on what happens in the main room while they’re away.

Second, Slack provides a much more useful persistent record, with much better searchability. All messages, links, code snippets, and files shared in a Slack channel are persistent and easily searchable. This creates a complete, timestamped history of the incident, which is helpful both during and after the incident. 

People who prefer to work in Zoom often think that they’ll remember to capture important information, discoveries, and decisions in Slack, but they seldom follow through on this effectively. In the heat of the moment, they become so engrossed in the conversation that critical information and insights never get captured in Slack, where they’d be most useful for later responders and post-incident reviewers.

During the incident, responders joining an in-progress response can quickly catch up on the past conversation in Slack. In contrast, with a Zoom call, new responders have to interrupt the ongoing discussion and ask someone to bring them up to speed. While there may be an AI transcript of the Zoom conversation, people joining a call in progress cannot access the transcript from before they joined, and the quality, completeness, and correctness of the AI transcripts often leave much to be desired. Similarly, any prior Zoom chat associated with the call, from before the person joined, isn’t available to them.

After the incident, the entire Zoom call might be available within a few hours (if somebody remembered to record it!), but who wants to wade through a multi-hour recording to review an incident? It’s much faster and easier to review the history in Slack, in the responders’ own words, rather than relying on some AI’s often imperfect understanding of their words. While Zoom has a chat feature, it’s primarily designed for synchronous use during meetings; the Zoom chat is generally less organized and more difficult to navigate than Slack channels, making it challenging to reconstruct the incident timeline or locate specific information later.

Third, despite Zoom being the obvious “visual” space, Slack has much more useful capabilities for sharing visuals during an incident. While Zoom’s screen-sharing capabilities can indeed be helpful during an incident, only one person can share their screen at a time, and the rest of the responders are treated as simply passive viewers of what is currently being shared. If you want to revisit something that was shared earlier by someone else, there’s no easy way to do so without interrupting to have the prior speaker find that prior visual and share their screen again; you can’t simply scroll back in the channel, as you can in Slack. Graph and dashboard links shared in Slack serve as a starting point for explorations by other responders, rather than simply treating them as passive viewers being led through the data by whoever is currently sharing their screen.

Fourth, Slack has much better integration with other tools that are useful during incident response. Slack has a vast ecosystem of integrations with monitoring tools, ticketing systems, version control platforms, and other DevOps tools (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty, Jira, GitHub). This allows responders to push alerts, share graphs, link to relevant code, and trigger actions directly within the incident channel, centralizing information and workflows, and reducing mental context switching and tool switching for responders. There are powerful incident management tools designed specifically for Slack, such as FireHydrant, Incident.io, and Rootly, as well as a variety of free and open-source tools. And you can easily build your own custom tools with Slack’s Workflow Builder, or build more sophisticated tools with Slack’s rich APIs. While Zoom also has integrations and APIs, they are primarily focused on enhancing the meeting experience (e.g., scheduling, whiteboarding). Zoom’s integration capabilities for pulling in live data from various engineering tools are less robust for incident management purposes, compared to Slack. 

Fifth, incident response in Slack is more scalable and less overwhelming than in Zoom. Team members joining an incident channel in Slack can swiftly catch up by reviewing its history, and AI tools can provide summaries. Responders can easily highlight status reports and key incident details using canvases and pinned posts. Inviting stakeholders to observe without active participation allows them to stay up to date without disrupting core responders. Conversely, large Zoom calls often become chaotic, leading to communication issues and role confusion. Keeping non-essential stakeholders informed often requires separate updates or “listen-only” modes, which can be distracting and add significant management overhead for the incident commander.

Incident communication in Slack feels less formal than a large Zoom call, encouraging more direct and frequent updates. It also avoids the “meeting fatigue” that can set in with prolonged video calls, especially during high-stress incidents; being on a continuous video call for hours during a major incident can be mentally draining and less conducive to focused problem-solving.

In a busy company, Slack also makes it feasible for stakeholders to monitor multiple simultaneous incidents by allowing them to bounce back and forth between multiple incident channels and read any updates they missed while away. Similarly, using Slack makes it feasible for observers (such as executives or account reps, for example) to check in on incident progress intermittently, between meetings or other demands on their time, and catch themselves up on what has happened since their last visit without having to interrupt the conversation for someone to give them a briefing.

Finally, many responders have shared with me that they find it much easier to participate in Slack than in Zoom. They feel that, in Zoom, by the time they mentally formulate a question that they want to ask or an observation that they want to share, the discussion has often moved on to something else, and they don’t want to interrupt or circle back. Slack is more tolerant of this, with its ability to drop questions or observations into threads and then share the key decisions or discoveries from those threads with the main channel, without losing track of what was happening in the main channel in the meantime.

All that said, Zoom can still be useful in incident response. While Slack is the best tool for the bulk of incident communication, Zoom still has a role as a place for initial triage or war rooms for high-level sync-ups at the start of critical incidents to establish initial understanding of the situation and define roles. Zoom can also be useful for in-depth discussions of complex issues that require real-time interaction, screen sharing, and whiteboarding for troubleshooting beyond the capabilities of text (though the discoveries, decisions, and outcomes of these discussions should be shared with everyone else in the Slack incident channel). Additionally, it can serve as a valuable forum for providing concise, structured updates to non-technical stakeholders, such as leadership or customer service, who prefer verbal briefings, while responders continue their work in Slack.

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Incidents can be extremely costly for your business, impacting both your customers (resulting in lost revenue, missed sales, and a damaged reputation) and your staff (leading to decreased productivity, lower morale, and higher turnover). That’s why it’s essential to be proactive, prepare for future incidents, and learn as much as possible from each incident. As an expert incident management consultant, advisor, and coach, I can help your organization develop these vital skills and prevent expensive mistakes. Contact me today to discuss how I can assist your team.