Much of this guide focuses on handling and learning from incidents individually, but analyzing incidents in aggregate can reveal significant organizational insight.
With a robust system for tracking incidents and ensuring they're tagged with structured metadata, it becomes possible to:
Incidents demand time and attention from team members on top of their regular responsibilities, and the time commitment—while hard to quantify—can be substantial. If certain individuals or teams bear the brunt of incident workload, it’s important to address this proactively to prevent slipping deadlines and reduced employee satisfaction.
For leaders and managers, staying informed about incidents offers valuable insights into team health. Since incidents are managed by those closest to the day-to-day work, incident data provides a direct, unfiltered view of how things are going, even for senior staff who are less involved in daily operations.
Traditionally, businesses have tracked incidents using metrics like mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) and similar averages. Although simple to calculate, research shows that these metrics often lack depth, reflecting only the most extreme cases rather than providing a true view of performance.
With advanced tools like incident.io, which track and measure the entire incident process with minimal friction, we can go beyond MTTR to uncover data that truly improves incident response and team health.
Read on to discover what’s possible with these insights, using examples from incident.io’s own incident data.