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.
During the incident
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.
| | Feature set | Questions to ask |
|---|---|---|
|
| Feature set Multiple channels | Questions to ask How flexible is the CMDB? Can I store any CI or asset? |
|
| Feature set Integrations | Questions to ask Can I link CIs/assets with my service desk issues? |
Our recommendation: Insight
Respond to incidents faster
Map your infrastructure and its dependencies natively within Jira. Quickly find and resolve the cause of incidents and increase up-time!
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
| | Feature set | Questions to ask |
|---|---|---|
|
| Feature set Multiple channels | Questions to ask Can my incident response team quickly spin up a dedicated channel for an incident? |
|
| Feature set Integrations | Questions to ask Can other tools in my incident toolchain post into my team's communication channel? |
Customer communication
Customer communication tools help keep customers informed during an incident.
Benefits
There’s no getting around it, incidents are typically a bad experience for your customers. Keeping customers informed builds trust and speeds up response efforts. Communicating with customers lets them know you’re aware of the incident and working on a fix.
Features
| | Feature set | Questions to ask |
|---|---|---|
|
| Feature set Off of my infrastructure | Questions to ask Will my communication tool be operational and accessible even if my internal infrastructure is down? |
|
| Feature set Subscribers and notifications | Questions to ask Can customers opt in to get notifications when I post about an incident? |
Our recommendation: Statuspage
Incident command center
An incident command center is wherever your canonical record of the incident and its key details live. This could be an incident tool like Opsgenie, or an issue tracking tool like Jira.
Benefits
A command center tool offers one place to get everyone up to speed during and after an incident, listing key details like incident status, associated alerts, updates, and more. It also provides a historical record of the incident and its associated response effort.
Features
| | Feature set | Questions to ask |
|---|---|---|
|
| Feature set Source of truth | Questions to ask Can team members and stakeholders quickly get up to speed on the incident? |
|
| Feature set Timeline | Questions to ask Does the tool aggregate a chronological timeline of key events? |
Our recommendation: Opsgenie
Our recommendation: Jira Software
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