Incident Management Best Practices: How to Respond to Outages Quickly

There are several causes of outages: human error, a lot of activity on your website, say a massive sale or even software incompatibility; frankly, these are sometimes unavoidable.However, when these incidents happen, how we respond to them determines the level of impact that will be made.

A prompt response will minimize downtime and also help you retain customer's trust and loyalty.

This blog post will look at incident management best practices and how you can respond to outages promptly and efficiently.

Incident Management Best Practices

There are best practices you can implement that can help you manage incidents when they occur, and some of these are

1. 1. Educate Your Team: Educate your team on what incidents mean to your business. Incidents mean differently to a lot of people. For instance, if you are running an e-commerce business, an outage may mean a slow loading speed in times of sales, it can be an issue with the checkout page, while for a finance company, an incident may mean debits on your website that does not reflect at your customer's end.

   Once you have educated your team and defined what incidents mean, take them through a step of actions they need to take when incidents happen.

   For example, during outages, the technical team works behind the scenes to fix the issue, and the customer success team works with the marketing team to send mails to customers to let them know the situation is being addressed and also let them know as soon as the website is back up. When everyone knows what to do and are coordinated, the impact of incidents is minimized.

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3. 2. Have an Incident Management Toolkit Available: Another practice is to have a toolkit and templates available. This toolkit will contain items such as a step-by-step process of what to do to resolve outages, escalation procedures, contact lists, and incident management tools needed etc. With your incident management toolkit and templates, there would be no incident that you won't be able to resolve within a short period effectively.
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5. 3. Use Reliable Incident Management Tools: The tools you use will determine your processes' efficiency. For instance, a trustworthy website/IT infrastructure monitoring tool will ensure you receive downtime fast, calling your attention to the incident on time and allowing you to respond faster.

   Additionally, there are infrastructure monitoring tools like Pinghome that allow for effective incident management as well. With one tool, you can get notification on time and kickstart your incident management process, saving you the cost of subscribing to different tools to carry out the two processes and streamlining your operations on one platform.

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7. 4. Automate Tasks for Effectiveness: One of the causes of incidents is human error. There are operational tasks that you can automate that will reduce the frequency of incidents in your business. Task automation will not only save you from mistakes that can lead to incidents but also save you time and energy that you could have set getting repetitive tasks done manually.
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9. 5. Set up an Incident Response Team: Imagine having an incident where your key pages are affected and no personnel on-ground to resolve the issue. This will only lead to a prolonged outage, and the effect will compound.

   One of the best incident resolution practices is setting up an incident management team to respond to and fix such incidents promptly. Under this best practice is to have an on-call schedule of people who keep watch over your IT infrastructure that can address any issue promptly.

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11. 6. Let There be Effective Incident Communication: One of the best practices for incident management is communicating effectively with the team and stakeholders. Send a message to every team that needs to do something concerning the outage, for example, your technical team and the customer success team.

    Secondly, prioritize communicating with your customers and keep them updated on the issue especially if it is taking too long already. Let the teams know what to do, speak calmly to the customers, and let them know it will be resolved shortly. Also, let them know once the issue is resolved so they can return to your website and complete pending transactions.

    One of the ways you can keep your customers informed is through using status pages. Tools like Pinghome allow you to share status pages with your customers and help you maintain their trust in such periods. Another communication best practice is to keep your communication with the team streamlined on communication channels such as Slack or Microsoft teams depending on the one your team adopts.

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13. 7. Always Document and Learn from Past Incidents: Always document any incident that you experience in your incident log. What was the root cause of the incident, how did you approach it, how soon did you resolve it, and how did it affect your business? A detailed postmortem analysis should be carried out after each incident and documented. Keeping a log of your incident files and learning from past incidents will help enhance your incident management game subsequently.
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15. 8. Regularly Troubleshoot and Review: You do not have to wait for an incident to happen before you realize something is happening with your IT infrastructure. Set a period where you regularly troubleshoot your websites and apps. This will help prevent looming outages and help you stay on top of your game.

    Also, regularly review your problem management process and ensure it is the best at any time.

How Do You Respond to an Outage Quickly and Effectively?

When you experience an outage, here is a step-by-step process of what to do to respond to an outage effectively.

1. 1. When you get the alert, the first thing is to alert your technical team and identify the problem and the root cause.
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3. 2. Once the problem has been identified with the cause, the technical team should get started with getting the problem solved.
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5. 3. The other teams should get in line as well. The customer support team should keep customers updated on the situation via email and be on standby to let them know once the outage has been resolved.
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7. 4. Once the outage has been resolved, a post-mortem analysis should be documented, and the team should learn how to prevent such from happening again.

It is important to note that ongoing monitoring throughout the response helps track progress and provides updates to stakeholders and customers.

Manage Incidents Effectively With Pinghome

Pinghome is an incident management tool that helps you manage incidents effectively through the following ways.

1. 1. Automated Alerts in Downtime: Pinghome monitors your site by allowing you set up rulesets that are tailored to various data sources such as AWS CloudWatch, Microsoft Azure, NewRelic, and more. When you do, you receive prompt and automated alerts to quickly alert appropriate personnel and resolve the incident as soon as possible.
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3. 2. Keep Customers Informed in Real-time: Pinghome status pages allow you to keep your customers updated in downtime and retain their trust.
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5. 3. On-call Management: Pinghome helps you manage your on-call schedule, ensuring the right people are available to address incidents the moments they occur and make the rotation easy.
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7. 4. Streamline Incident Responses: Pinghome allows you to set up custom automated actions in cases of incidents, allowing for swift and streamlined responses to incidents.

   Pinghome is an all-in-one tool you need to monitor your IT infrastructure and manage major outages effectively like a pro. Book a Pinghome demo or start free trial to see how you can enhance incident response and keep your customers connected during critical times.