Incident Management Best Practices Explained

Originally posted on Squadcast.com

Did you know, only 40% of companies with 100 employees or less have an Incident Response plan in place? Does that include you too? Even if it doesn't, this blog post is for you. Explore the Incident Management processes, best practices and steps so you can compare how your current IR process looks like and if you need to revamp it.

Impacts Management & Impact of Incidents

Incident Management is a core component of Information Technology (IT) service management that focuses on efficiently handling and resolving disruptions to IT services. These disruptions, known as incidents, can include a wide range of issues, such as system failures, software glitches, hardware malfunctions, or any other event that hinders the otherwise normal operation of IT services.

Pretty direct. Isn’t it?

The average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.24 million, according to IBM Security. 37% of servers had at least one unexpected outage in 2023, according to Veeam. Incidents can have a wide range of negative impacts on an organization, categorized into operational impacts, financial impacts, reputational impacts, employee impacts and loss of customer trust. A 1% decrease in customer satisfaction can lead to a 5-10% decrease in revenue, according to Bain & Company. The fact is, downtimes are bound to happen. Both planned and unplanned. So, it’s better to be ready with an Incident Response plan in place with the best Incident Management procedure.

All steps involved in the procedure of managing incidents that arise within the tech environment and infrastructure create the Incident Management process.

Incident Management Process

Except for the fact that every organization has a different Incident Management process. There are various factors influencing these differences in their Incident Management processes like the industry size, risk tolerance, resource & budget, compliance requirements, and organizational structure (ITIL-based Incident Management or an informal approach relying on key individuals).

While the foundation of Incident Management procedure remains the same as defined by ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which is in broad sense the identification, resolution and documentation, differences are bound to arise in

The number of defined severity levels and their associated response times can vary greatly.
How and when incidents are escalated to different levels of management can differ based on complexity and impact.
The detail and format of incident logs and reports can be customized to specific needs.
The preferred methods for informing stakeholders about incidents (e.g., email, internal platforms) can vary.
Some organizations might use sophisticated Incident Management software, while others still rely on spreadsheets or email threads.

Tailored Incident Management Process

A tailored process better addresses specific needs, leading to faster resolution times and less disruption. This helps your Incident Response Team handle incidents effectively and with confidence.

Incident Management Processes designed on the basis of incident severity and complexity helps utilize resources optimally. Hence, it easily adapts to the changing needs and circumstances.

There's no "one-size-fits-all" approach. The best Incident Management process is the one that aligns with an organization's unique context and objectives.

The Stages In Incident Management

Every organization faces disruptions, from minor glitches to full-blown crisis. How you handle these incidents determines the impact on your operations, reputation, and bottom line.

Here's a breakdown of the key stages involved:

1. Identification

The first step is detecting the incident. This might involve monitoring systems, user reports, media mentions and even automated alerts to pinpoint the incident's origin and timeline. Think of it as triggering an alarm upon identifying an anomaly.

2. Triage and Prioritization

Not all incidents are created equal. So, this stage involves assessing the severity and impact, classifying them as critical, high, medium, or low. Compare it to sorting incoming tickets based on their potential damage levels. Classifying incident severity levels for your organization helps you prioritize them based on potential impact. The prioritization typically follows this structure:

a. Low-Priority Incidents:

These incidents result in minimal disruptions to business functions, if any.
Your team can easily devise workarounds without affecting services to users and customers.

b. Medium-Priority Incidents:

This category may impact some employees, leading to moderate interruptions in work.
While customers may experience slight inconvenience, the financial, security, and legal implications are generally not severe.

c. High-Priority Incidents:

These incidents affect a substantial number of users and cause significant disruptions in business operations.
Events such as system wide outages fall into this category, and they almost always carry a substantial financial impact, along with a potential large dip in customer satisfaction.

3. Containment and Response

It's the time to take action. This stage focuses on stopping the immediate spread of the problem. It might involve isolating affected systems, disabling features, or even taking entire services offline.

4. Resolution and Recovery

Now, to the root cause! This stage involves diagnosing the problem, fixing it, and restoring affected systems and data. For instance, gradually rolling out the fix while manually processing affected orders to ensure no customer purchases were lost in an eCommerce store during peak traffic hours.

5. Closure and Review

Don't fix and forget! This final stage captures lessons learned, reviews response procedures, postmortems and identifies ways to prevent future incidents. More like analyzing an incident report and updating response playbooks with the acquired knowledge. It involves a thorough documentation of any pertinent information that can be utilized to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Based on each stage of Incident Management Workflow, we can set aside a few key best practices. Staging Incident Management best practices ensures every disruption, from initial alarm to final review, is navigated with predefined steps, optimized resource allocation, and a focus on continuous improvement, ultimately minimizing chaos and building a resilient response system.

Key Best Practices for Incident Management by Stage

1. During Identification:

Implement comprehensive monitoring: Utilize diverse monitoring tools for system performance, security events, and user reports.
Automate alerts and escalation based on predefined criteria: Trigger timely notifications for critical incidents requiring immediate attention.
Maintain clear incident definition and escalation thresholds: Ensure everyone understands what constitutes an incident and when to escalate.
Incident Reporting: Promptly encourage individuals to report incidents to the designated Incident Management team or help desk. Squadcast’s Webforms allows both customers and employees to report detailed incidents.

2. During Triage and Prioritization:

Develop a standardized prioritization matrix: Clearly define severity levels based on impact, urgency, and resource requirements.
Utilize decision trees or scoring systems: Facilitate consistent and rapid prioritization decisions.
Involve relevant stakeholders in complex prioritization cases: Collaborate with business owners and impacted teams for informed decisions.

What is a decision tree?

A decision tree walks you through a questionnaire, auto-filling parts of a new incident request based on your responses. Crafted by your company's manager or administrator, each node offers options, streamlining incident record completion.

3. During Containment and Response:

Prepare pre-defined Incident Response playbooks: Outline initial response steps for various incident types. This allows you to save time and you’ll have solutions ready for some common incident types .
Implement containment strategies like isolation, throttling, or disabling features: Minimize further damage and prevent broader impact.
Have readily available tools and resources: Ensure access to diagnostic & monitoring tools, emergency contact lists, and disaster recovery procedures.
Create a centralized Incident Management system or ticketing system to log and track incidents. For example, Squadcast serves as a centralized Incident Management tool, providing seamless integration with JIRA and compatibility with various other popular ticketing tools.
Assign unique identifiers or tags to each incident for easy reference and tracking.

4. During Resolution and Recovery:

Focus on root cause analysis: Utilize log analysis, forensic tools, and expert assistance to identify the underlying cause.
Implement robust rollback strategies: Have tested procedures for reverting changes and restoring affected systems quickly.
Prioritize critical data recovery when necessary: Employ reliable backup and recovery solutions to minimize data loss.
Subject matter experts & incident commander: Define distinct roles and responsibilities for Incident Response team members, encompassing incident coordinators and technical experts.
Establish effective communication channels and escalation paths to facilitate seamless coordination and collaboration during Incident Response. An incident war room helps a lot here.

5. During Closure and Review:

Conduct thorough post-incident reviews: Analyze response actions, identify areas for improvement, and update playbooks.
Automate incident reporting and documentation: Simplify data collection and facilitate knowledge sharing.
Share lessons learned across the organization: Proactively disseminate learnings to prevent future occurrences. Learning from past incidents definitely helps for future incident handling.
Perform post-incident reviews (postmortems) to analyze the Incident Response and pinpoint areas for enhancement.
Assess the effectiveness of Incident Management processes, identify any gaps or bottlenecks, and implement corrective actions.

Bonus Tips For Better Incident Response

Some more actionable tips for better Incident Response are:

Emphasize communication: Keep stakeholders informed throughout the incident with clear, concise, and frequent updates.
Prioritize training and drills: Regularly train your Incident Response team and practice playbooks to ensure coordinated and effective action.
Continuously improve: Regularly review and update your Incident Management processes based on experience and best practices.
Invest in automation and reliability tools: Leverage technology to automate repetitive tasks and improve response efficiency like Squadcast.

Why does Squadcast work as a best Incident Management platform for your business’s reliability needs?

Atlassian’s State of Incident Management Report highlights a few major pain points in Incident Management, like:

Difficult to get stakeholders involved: 36%
Lack of full visibility across IT infrastructure: 23%
Lack of context during an incident: 13%
Lack of automated responses: 9%
Lack of integration with a chat tool (Slack, Microsoft Teams): 8%

A dedicated Incident Management solution like Squadcast covers all points in the Incident Management workflow. It facilitates tasks that integrate On-Call Management, Incident Response, SRE workflows, alerting, enhances team collaboration through chatops tools, workflow automation, SLO tracking, status pages, incident analytics, and conducts incident postmortems. It specially promotes the SRE culture for Enterprise Incident Management and a preferred alternative to PagerDuty.

Squadcast Reliability Automation Platform

From incident detection to documentation, Squadcast gets you the best of an automated Incident Response platform with easy implementation and integration capabilities. Check here for full features and pricing details.

Read about real world customers: Squadcast Case studies on Modern Incident Management, SRE and DevOps

Chaos To Control: Incident Management Process, Best Practices And Steps