From Detection to Resolution: How Incident Management Tools Minimize Downtime

Companies that rely on technology for their business operations are prone to unforeseen disruptions such as performance lags, or, at worst, downtime. When proper know-how is lacking to address these issues, financial losses and poor customer satisfaction tend to result.

Being aware of issues the moment they occur and having an appropriate resolution process can prevent downtime and help provide customers with a smooth experience.

Incident management tools are what you need to stay ahead of the curve. They inform you of any unusual activity, enabling you to respond quickly and effectively to incidents. Using the insights from incident management tools allows you to enjoy a seamless operation, even in disruptions.

For a deeper understanding of how to implement effective incident management processes and tools, refer to our comprehensive guide: Leveraging Effective Incident Management: Processes and Tools to Minimize Downtime.

What Is An Incident Management Tool?

An incident is any event that disrupts regular operations or impacts your services. It can be a minor issue, such as low disk space, which leads to slower performances, or a significant problem, like database failure, which results in the loss of essential data.

An incident management tool is a software that helps businesses identify and control various incidents.

With a comprehensive incident management tool, you can automate actions and workflows that align with your specific incident resolution procedures. They function as a platform where the following activities take place:

• Incident Identification: When abnormal activity is detected, or a certain threshold is exceeded, such as high CPU usage, the tool recognizes it as an incident and sends a notification to inform the appropriate team.




• Incident Communication and Collaboration: Effective incident management often requires the efforts of various teams, such as DevOps and security; an incident management tool helps to facilitate the collaboration needed across teams to resolve issues. It also links your IT team and the stakeholders to ensure transparency and manage expectations through private status pages.

How To Craft an Incident Response Plan That Works

A successful incident management process goes beyond utilizing powerful management software; it includes your approach to the incident. An incident response plan is a structured procedure for detecting and managing incidents that can disrupt business operations. It contains the responsibilities required from every team, information regarding every incident, and detection methods.

Here is an incident response process you can adapt to minimize the impact and improve response times,

1. 1. Set Up Initial Measures: You don't have to wait for an incident to occur before taking action. Follow this incident response process to minimize impact and improve resolution times:
   • State the purpose of the plan. It can be to minimize downtime or to restore normal operations.
   • Outline the type of incident the organization will likely experience (e.g., security breach, system failure, network outage).
   • Assign the roles and responsibilities required from your incident response team and key personnel.
   • Ensure the resources you need, such as incident monitoring tools and communication channels, are readily available.
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3. 2. Incident Detection: To minimize the impact, incidents must be identified quickly. A robust monitoring tool should be used to keep track of the essential KPIs and receive notification immediately if there is an anomaly. This allows for immediate incident response and minimizes downtime.
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5. 3. Incident Classification and Prioritization: Some incidents require immediate and extra attention more than others, especially those that directly impact customer experience or involve sensitive data. Incidents should be classified according to severity (e.g., low, moderate, high, and critial).

They can also be classified based on their types (e.g., technical, cyberattack, and operational failure). This makes identifying which team would be directly involved in the resolution process easy.

At the end of every effective incident management process, the system is clean from any issues that can result in downtime, and several tests are carried out to confirm this.

DevOps and SRE Approach to Incident Management

The focus of DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams lies in system reliability and performance; they also have a unique approach to their incident management process: "the team that builds the service will be responsible for running and fixing it if it breaks".

This approach serves as one of the best practices to observe when streamlining incident response process; especially now that more businesses are adopting cloud services and complex microservice infrastructure to reduce downtime and improve scalability.

The approach of DevOps and SRE teams entrusts developers with the responsibility of resolving issues as they build the software. Hence, they will better understand the code base and service dependencies needed to minimize the impact.

In SaaS environments, where services must be improved and high availability maintained continuously, developers can monitor and resolve issues swiftly to minimize downtime.

With the "you build it, you run it approach" the agile teams have the flexibility to innovate while tending to real-time performance and reliability demands. However, this makes it difficult to know who is in charge when issues arise.

The developers don't need to be placed under strict rules to function correctly. However, there are laid down rules to observe when following incident management best practices:

1. 1. Distributed On-call duties: No developer should be tied to responding to calls alone; instead, a schedule should be created that enables them to work together in responding to calls and incidents that occur even at unfavorable hours, such as night or outside working hours.
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3. 2. Knowledge fuels quick approach: Still in line with the popular DevOps approach, the engineer who built the service is the best to resolve issues and incidents regarding the service.
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5. 3. Innovate rapidly with accountability in mind: Developers are responsible for creating software. The mindset that they would be in charge of any incident response relating to the software prompts them to adopt more quality and secure code that reduces downtime.

This approach helps to promote an effective incident management process within the organization.

The Benefits of a Standard Incident Management Tool

Effective incident resolution is possible with the right tools in place. Incident management uses the right tools to quickly identify and analyze every incident, improving response times and providing customers with the best user experience.

Here are the features and advantages of utilizing an efficient incident management tool like Pinghome.

1. 1. Automated Incident Response: You don't have to wait for an incident before thinking and implementing solutions. This essential feature allows you to design specific resolutions for any incident you face.

   You can automate and execute responses to incidents the moment they are detected. For instance, you can automate various actions like sending alerts, escalating the issue to relevant teams, or activating backup processes. This will help you save time, reduce downtime, and ensure a consistent response.

   
   

The data types used by each service and application are different, making it essential to create distinct rulesets that run well for each data type. Pinghome allows you to set up suitable thresholds for server metrics in AWS Cloud and different thresholds suitable for application performance in NewRelic, among others.

This fine-tuned control ensures a reliable response process that fits the characteristics of different services. This helps minimize downtime and leads to more reliable alerts.

Let us show you how Pinghome can help you manage incidents effectively by starting a free trial.

Best Practices To Adopt In Your Incident Response Plan

Here are the incident management best practices you can implement to optimize your incident response plan:

1. 1. Ensure a communication and collaboration channel: Have a clear communication plan, adopt a pre-defined template to save time, and schedule a fixed time for regular updates.

   All communication should take place on a single channel. This will allow the internal team and external stakeholders to receive notification about any incident and help foster trust and transparency.

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3. 2. Employ AI in incident management: AI and Machine learning can continuously improve your incident management. AI can comb through a large amount of data in real-time, such as logs, user activity, and system performance metrics, to detect unusual patterns that may signal an incident. The team can use a machine model to automate incident detection to identify and resolve issues before they escalate.
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5. 3. Train your Incident Response Team: A well-trained team is confident that when an incident occurs, they can evaluate the situation correctly and figure out the right steps to take. They can also detect potential incidents early on and take preventive measures.

   Having a team knowledgeable in response strategies puts your mind at rest, reduces the risk of data loss, and minimizes downtime and other damages from incidents.

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7. 4. Choose the right incident management tools: An effective incident response management tool strengthens your overall system performance and assists you in carrying out a quick and effective incident management process.

   Choose a robust incident management tool that can help you track incidents, create automated incident responses, and foster communication across several teams. Examples of such tools include Pinghome and Jira service management.

   Due to the complexities associated with incident management, you might need other adjuvant tools such as a documentation tool (Confluence, Notion), a Reporting and analytics tool (Tableau, Power BI), and a Root Cause Analytics tool (Splunk, Kibana).

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9. 5. Review the incident in detail: After resolving an incident, conduct a comprehensive study to discover the vulnerabilities that led to the issue and devise ways to improve your response times. The goal is to use the lessons learned from the previous incident to improve your incident management process and prevent the occurrence of future incidents.

   Here is an example of a template you can follow when carrying out a post-review of an incident:

   • Outline the order of the incident right from its first appearance to its resolution times
   • Evaluate how much damage it had on your customers, system, and business operations
   • Use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) techniques to identify causes not so visible to the eyes
   • Highlights how your incident response helped to lessen the impact of the incident
   • Note the areas of improvement and the response strategies you need to adopt
   • Create a well-detailed document of the entire incident

Wrapping Up

Incident resolution doesn't have to be complicated. You can handle incidents better by leveraging powerful incident management tools like Pinghome. It provides the insights and resources you and your team need to handle incidents before they affect your customers' experience.

With Pinghome, you can fine-tune your incident detection and response mechanisms, ensuring that you are promptly alerted to potential issues to enable swift incident management.

Here was what John Ciuchea, Technical Lead, had to say about how Pinghome has been helping them with incident monitoring and management:

Let us show you how Pinghome can help you manage incidents effectively and minimize downtime today by starting a free trial here.