Incident management for high-velocity teams
How to choose incident management tools
Categories, key features, and what to look for
There is no single, one-size-fits-all tool for incident management.
The best-performing incident teams use a collection of the right tools, practices, and people.
Some tools are specific to incident management, others are more general purpose tools your team also uses for other tasks. And some tools might be a totally bespoke experience built upon layers of integrations and customization.
No matter the use case, good incident management tools have a few things in common. The best incident management tools are open, reliable, and adaptable.
Open: In a high-pressure environment like an incident, it’s key that the right people have access to the right tools and information immediately. This not only goes for incident responders, but for company stakeholders who need visibility into response efforts.
Reliable: There are few things worse during incident response than also having your key response tools go down. Utilizing cloud tools, like Slack and Opsgenie, minimizes the risk of an outage on your infrastructure taking down your response tools.
Adaptable: Things like integrations, workflows, add-ons, customization, and APIs all open up the possibilities behind the product. You may want to get started with an out-of-the-box configuration, but as your practices and processes mature, you'll want your tools to be flexible enough to support changing needs.
Before the incident
Monitoring
Monitoring systems let DevOps and IT Ops teams collect, aggregate, and trigger alerts off data coming from thousands of different services in real time. These are critical to providing full visibility into the health of your services and often trigger the first alarm bells during an incident.
During the incident
Our recommendation: Insight
Leveraging a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for a faster resolution
Understanding the interdependencies within your infrastructure is key to determining the full impact of the incident and reaching a faster resolution.
Benefits
A CMDB helps you understand the relationships and dependencies within your IT infrastructure. If something goes down, this map lets you rapidly find:
- Potential causes of the incident. For example, determining which host a service is running on at the click of a button.
- Trickle-down effects of the incident. For example, discovering other services that are running on the same, troublesome host.
This means you can quickly investigate and communicate all aspects of the incident.
Team communication
Clear and reliable communication is undeniably critical during incident management.
Benefits
A solid communication platform helps teams communicate, share observations, links, and screenshots in a way that’s timestamped and preserved. This brings the right information and people together during an incident, and creates a rich record to learn from after the incident.
Features
Incident management templates aren't just reactive tools—they're proactive shields against potential risks. By establishing a standardized approach to incident response, templates help teams systematically identify and address potential vulnerabilities before they escalate into full-blown incidents. This reduces the likelihood of errors, oversights, and costly disruptions, enhancing overall organizational resilience.
Customer communication
Customer communication tools help keep customers informed during an incident.
After the incident
Our recommendation: Opsgenie
After the incident
1. Gather incident information
Identify the key information you need to track during an incident, such as date, time, severity, impact, symptoms, and root cause.
2. Customize the template
Adapt the template to reflect your company's specific needs and processes. Include relevant fields, sections, and workflows. Consider further customizing the layout and branding the document.
3. Fill in with relevant information
Once you've gathered all the necessary details, fill out the template with accurate and concise information about the incident. This ensures everyone has access to the latest information.
4. Regularly update
Keep your template up-to-date throughout the incident response lifecycle, reflecting progress, changes, and resolution steps.
After the incident
After the incident
Our recommendation: Opsgenie
Learn incident communication with Statuspage
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use incident templates to communicate effectively during outages. Adaptable to many types of service interruption.
Read this tutorialIncident communication templates and examples
When responding to an incident, communication templates are invaluable. Get the templates our teams use, plus more examples for common incidents.
Read this article