Incident management tools are really important.
While it may come off as obvious that an incident management software company is incentivized to try to sell folks on this idea, if you take a few steps back it actually just makes sense.
Incident management tools, regardless of which one you’re looking into, all serve one important purpose: to make responding to outages, bugs, and little things in between a bit less painful.
In the absence of a dedicated incident management tool a few things can go awry. Response processes become ad hoc indefinitely, downtime gets extended way beyond reason, customers churn and employees get burnt out.
But there’s a lot of nuance here that’s worth getting into. In the end, the answer to these woes remains the same: adopt an incident management tool because it can meaningfully improve the way you manage (and learn) from incidents. But how?
Here, I’m going to add a little bit of color to this.
By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of exactly why it’s worth your time to look into an incident management tool and how it can truly transform the future of your business.
OK, why are incident management tools so important?
It’s hard to look for an incident management tool without first understanding why you need one in the first place.
It feels fair to say that today, the opportunity for an incident to kick off at any moment is much more likely. Systems are getting more complex, software more dynamic, and customer bases are growing by the minute.
At this point, it’s no longer a question of if an incident is going to happen, it’s more of a when.
Because of this, it’s really important for organizations to create robust incident response plans to help them prepare for these moments. And an incident management tool can go a long way in helping you action that plan.
But it goes so much beyond that. Here are some reasons why incident management tools are not only important, they’re critical.
Because incidents happen more frequently than ever before
The evolution of technology has been a double-edged sword, offering advantages as well as potential risks. On one hand, it has streamlined operations and has really been a boon to anyone using tools like Notion, Datadog, Pagerduty and more. But on the other hand, the complexities of these tools really lend themselves well to incidents.
Because of this, it’s not uncommon to experience several incidents that affect various systems at the same time. Software isn’t binary anymore. It’s a web of databases, Catalogs, and so much more.
So when things go wrong, you need to be quick on your feet and response as quickly as possible. Otherwise you can find yourself under an avalanche of incidents.
An incident management tool can help you, well, manage incidents that much better. So whether you’re dealing with single or double-digit incidents on a daily basis, you’ll always have the confidence that, no matter what comes your way, you’ll be able to manage it in the most efficient way possible.
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan”-Eleanor Roosevelt
When you plan things out, they tend to go much more smoothly than if you didn’t. This is especially true when it comes to incidents.
In the absence of an incident response plan, when things do go awry, folks may end up looking around wondering who’s going to take the reins. Not only that, but then you’re left with loads of outstanding questions such as “what’s our communication plan?” and “once this incident is resolved, then what?”
The best incident response tools anticipate all of these questions and give you the context you need to answer them.
They play a critical part in a full-fledged cybersecurity strategy
Cybersecurity is not just about installing a firewall and hoping for the best. An effective incident response strategy involves multiple layers of defense, continuous monitoring, vulnerability assessment, and proactive threat hunting. And it’s fair to say that incident management tools play a key role in this strategy.
With continuous monitoring, you can quickly detect and mitigate malicious activity. Post-incident, it provides valuable insights, enabling your team to learn from the incident and improve future strategies. An incident response tool not only helps in managing current threats but also plays a crucial role in shaping your future cybersecurity posture.
OK, so what are the benefits of an incident response tool?
So I’ve talked about why adopting an incident management tool is so imporant. To recap:
- They can help you deal with difficulty of managing incidents across incresingly complex tools
- They help streamline and give structure and a playbook for your response
- They play a critical role in your overall security posture
Now let’s pivot to how they can tangibly help.
Incident response…with structure
I covered this in passing in the earlier sections, but incident management tools provide a clear and structured approach to incident response, enabling organizations to handle incidents that much better.
These tools facilitate the creation of incident tickets, or in the case of incident.io, incident channels, where key details such as type, severity, and affected systems can be documented clearly.
By capturing this information in a centralized system, incident management tools can help provide a comprehensive overview of the issue at hand, allowing teams to prioritize and respond to incidents based on their impact and urgency.
Also, incident management tools often include automation features that can accelerate incident response. For instance, with incident.io’s Workflows feature, teams can set up automations that trigger predefined actions and notifications based on the incident type or severity.
For example, you can set up a workflow that alerts certain groups of people when an incident of critical severity is created. Or even bring certain folks into an incident channel whenever the status of an incident is updated.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork
Effective incident management heavily relies on collaboration among various stakeholders.
Incident management tools function much like a central hub, bringing together cross-functional teams, such as engineering, customer success, operations and more to collaborate seamlessly and resolve incidents much faster.
With tools like incident.io, teams can easily assign Incident Leads, share and track status updates, and generally maintain much greater visibility into the incident response process.
All communication about incidents happens in a single thread, eliminating the need for siloed information and giving folks the context that they need at a glance. A win-win for everyone.
Learning from incidents
Before I jump into this section, it’s worth remembering that learning from incident isn’t a goal, it’s a means to an end!
That said, one of the most valuable aspects of incident management tools is their ability to help you create more resilient products, processes, and teams through learning.
Take incident.io’s Insights feature. With it, organizations have access to a whole host of dashboards that help give insight into the effectiveness of their incident response. For example, you can better understand how you’re managing your pager load across your team, better predict spikes in incidents triggered by seasonality, and even dive into traditional metrics such as MTTX.
With these insights, and others, teams can make meaningful changes to their incident response processes. For example, you may notice that one person is carrying most of the on-call burden, and is burning out as a result. This can help you institute more effective and reasonable on-call rotations and set better organizational expectations about pager load.
It’s time for an incident management tool
Typically when it comes to onboarding new tools, the decision to either do it, or not, comes down to ROI. “If we bring on this tool, will our processes be meaningfully better as a direct result of it? Will it make our jobs easier?”
When it comes to incident management tools, the answer is a resounding yes. Regardless of which tool you decide on, adopting one is a sensible choice to make. Not only will you meaningfully improve your response processes, you’ll also learn how to build more resilient products and create more efficient workflows.
You’ll probably automate a good chunk of your response work, too. Talk about good ROI.
