Real-time alerts are crucial for proactive incident management, helping businesses prevent costly downtime by addressing IT infrastructure issues as soon as they occur. This article explores how real-time alerts enhance incident handling, allowing teams to respond quickly to mitigate risks and maintain system stability.
Did you know that unplanned downtime costs businesses an average of $5,600 per minute, as reported by Gartner? Want to learn more about the financial impact of major outages? Check out our article on the Top 10 Most Expensive Downtimes Ever for eye-opening examples and insights. Real-time alerts can prevent such costly interruptions by enabling proactive incident management.
Proactive incident management involves anticipating, preventing, and mitigating the effects of incidents. Instead of scrambling to address incidents after they occur, proactive incident management ensures you are prepared to prevent and mitigate them.
With real-time alerts, you get notified immediately your IT infrastructure is experiencing a problem for immediate attention and rectification. In this article, you will learn how real-time alerts help teams manage incidents properly. For a deeper dive into minimizing downtime through effective incident management, check out our guide: Leveraging Effective Incident Management.
What are Real-Time Alerts and How Do They Work?
Real-time alerts are a type of alerting system in which your IT infrastructure is continuously monitored, and you are notified if an issue arises. You get notification messages on Slack, email, or any chosen communication channel, allowing for immediate and targeted response.
Before now, most IT teams' incident response was reactive. In reactive incident management, teams look for solutions after the incident has occurred, but incident response has shifted to proactive management.
Real-time alerts are crucial for proactive incident management, as they help mitigate the significant costs of downtime. For instance, you are having a sales event, say a Christmas sales event, and you experience a spike in traffic to your website, with people trying to make a purchase. If you are about to experience downtime due to heavy traffic, an IT infrastructure monitoring tool like Pinghome will send you real-time alerts, allowing you to address the situation promptly.
How Real-Time Alerts Help Manage Incidents Proactively
Real-time alerts are a core part of proactive incident management in the following ways:
- 1. Early Detection and Rectification:
With real-time alerts, you get alerted before critical incidents occur. From situations such as CPU spikes, slow page loading speed, or an SSL certification approaching expiration, you get alerted so your IT teams can promptly address them before they escalate.
When an issue requires quick attention, you get alerts from various sources, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
2. Automate your responses:
Operating real-time alerts means you can get an alert anytime your IT infrastructure develops an issue. Automated response is another core part of proactive management. Issues that cannot be resolved by automated responses set in place can be escalated to the right human personnel.
With a monitoring and alerting tool like Pinghome, you can set up customizable automated responses and workflows when alerts are triggered to resolve incidents effectively.
Start a free trial here to see how Pinghome can help you resolve incidents proactively through customizable automated workflow.
3. Define escalation procedures: Not all issues need to be escalated; however, there should be a standard procedure when required. When technical problems need to be escalated, the critical issues will be assigned to the proper personnel. Instead of scampering, everyone will know what to do and do it promptly, leading to quick incident resolution.
4. Train Your IT Team Members on Response Procedures and Set up your on-call schedule:
After setting up an incident management tool and procedures, you must train your response team on operating the tool and ensure that each one knows their role in the response procedure.
Also, setting up your on-call schedule ensures that the right personnel is always available to attend to the alert when it arises and resolve it quickly.
Under the Pinghome incident management service, the on-call schedule management feature ensures that the right personnel are always available to attend to issues.
Let us show you how Pinghome can help you manage your on-call scheduling and ensure the right personnel is always available to address alerts when they come by starting a free trial here.
5. Continuously Improve your Incident Management Process: One of the best practices for proactively managing incidents using real-time alerts is to examine and constantly improve your incident response plan. You can predict the trend from past incidents and make iterations to your process in cases of future incidents. Also, prioritize continuously train your personnel based on iterations to ensure an efficient incident management procedure.
Getting Started with Pinghome
Pinghome monitors your IT infrastructure and sends you real-time alerts. It also has a wide range of features for proactive incident management, such as on-call scheduling and customizable automated workflow for incident management solutions for streamlined operations.
Pinghome sends real-time alerts to your preferred communication channels, such as Slack and email, so you can quickly respond to incidents. Pinghome includes advanced features to filter false alerts, reducing alert fatigue.
Here was what Christian Dyl, CEO and Co-founder of Adminix had to say about how Pinghome real-time alerts has helped them monitor their IT infrastucture:
Let us show you how Pinghome can help you proactively manage incidents through real-time alerts by starting your free trial here today.
