Incidents rarely go wrong because of one big failure. Most of the time, it’s a handful of small, familiar mistakes that slow teams down, muddy communication, or create confusion in the heat of the moment.

Fortunately, these mistakes are predictable and fixable. Here are the seven most common gaps we see across engineering teams, plus practical ways to eliminate them with better process, automation, and the right tooling.

1. No one knows who’s in charge#1-no-one-knows-whos-in-charge

Nothing derails an incident faster than uncertainty around who’s driving. Maybe multiple people jump in and take charge… or nobody does. Either way, teams lose precious minutes.

How to prevent it:
Define clear roles ahead of time and assign them automatically when an incident kicks off. When everyone can instantly see who the Incident Commander is and what they’re responsible for, teams stay aligned from the first minute.

FireHydrant helps with:

• Auto-assigning roles, like the Incident Commander: Ensures there is always a single, clear decision-maker from the start.
• Role templates tied to incident types: Define different roles for any incident type (e.g. security, IT, etc.), ensuring consistency by defining responsibilities up front.
• Clear visibility in Slack/Teams: With automatic creation of incident channels, everyone is able to clearly see who’s doing what, reducing confusion and duplicate work.

2. Alerts are noisy, slow, or hitting the wrong people#2-alerts-are-noisy-slow-or-hitting-the-wrong-people

When alerts go to the wrong engineer (or everyone), people start ignoring them. On the flip side, slow alerts delay investigation and extend impact.

How to prevent it:
Build team-owned routing rules, use heartbeat checks for system health, and reduce the clutter with noise controls. Alerts should reach the right group at the right time...no more, no less.

FireHydrant helps with:

• Dynamic routing rules: Automatically send alerts to the right teams based on ownership, service, priority, or other criteria.
• Heartbeat monitoring: Detects silent failures early by alerting when expected signals stop coming in.
• Priority-based escalation: Ensures urgent issues get eyes immediately while lower-priority ones don’t disrupt sleep.
• Noise reduction policies: Automatically group or suppress repetitive alerts so one noisy check doesn’t wake up your entire on-call rotation.

3. Every incident starts from scratch#3-every-incident-starts-from-scratch

If your incident flow depends on institutional knowledge or “what we usually do,” consistency goes out the window. Response varies wildly depending on who’s online.

How to prevent it:
Codify your process with incident templates, runbooks, and automations. When incidents follow repeatable steps, your team gets faster and more consistent automatically.

FireHydrant helps with:

• Incident Type templates: Standardize severity levels, roles, communications, and required fields.
• Runbooks and workflow automations: Handle setup steps automatically so responders can dive straight into mitigation. For instance, automatically create Slack/Teams channels, page on-call, add a Zoom bridge, and create a Jira ticket (to name a few options).
• Auto-created channels, roles, and commands: Reduces manual setup and gets teams oriented immediately.

4. Communication is inconsistent or scattered#4-communication-is-inconsistent-or-scattered

Without structure, communication becomes noisy. Stakeholders ping responders directly, updates get missed, and teams waste precious time answering the same questions over and over.

How to prevent it:
Use structured updates that automatically route to the right audiences — internal, external, or executive. Keep updates in one central, trusted place.

FireHydrant helps with:

• Internal + external update workflows: Keep stakeholders informed without disrupting responders.
• Status Pages with one-click publishing: Publish customer-facing updates reliably and quickly.
• AI Audiences (Summaries for Specific Roles): Generates tailored updates for execs, customer teams, and engineers with zero extra work.

5. Critical information gets lost during the incident#5-critical-information-gets-lost-during-the-incident

Decisions, context, handoffs, and discussions often vanish into Slack scrollback or someone’s memory. When you can’t reconstruct what happened, incidents take longer and retros suffer.

How to prevent it:
Pull key events into a triage space automatically and summarize the conversation as you go. AI and automation should capture context so responders can stay focused.

FireHydrant helps with:

• AI Scribe for real-time summaries: Transcribes Zoom or Google Meet discussions so nothing gets lost.
• Automatic timeline population: Logs alerts, role changes, commands, and updates as they happen.
• AI Summaries: FireHydrant pulls all the relevant information from your incident (chats, meetings, incident metadata) to provide a summary of what's happening.

6. No one knows what actually happened afterward#6-no-one-knows-what-actually-happened-afterward

After the incident ends, teams often have incomplete or conflicting accounts. Was the alert delayed? When did customer impact start? Who took what action?

How to prevent it:
Centralize the full picture: timeline, alerts, events, chats, updates. When all your data is in one system of record, post-incident analysis becomes accurate instead of guesswork.

FireHydrant helps with:

• Complete, auto-generated timelines: Provide a reliable source of truth for every incident, no manual effort required.
• Linked alerts, services, roles, and decisions: Gives you a full picture of what changed, when, and why.
• Saved video/voice meeting + chat activity: Eliminates the “I think this is how it happened” problem.

7. Retros never happen...or they take forever#7-retros-never-happenor-they-take-forever

Some teams skip retros entirely because they’re painful. Others do them, but they take hours because no one remembers anything or can’t agree on the timeline.

How to prevent it:
Make retros lighter, faster, and grounded in actual data. Templates and automation remove the overhead; AI insights make them more insightful.

FireHydrant helps with:

• Retro templates: Keeps the process consistent and helps teams move efficiently. Templates also give different teams the freedom to create retros that fit their requirements, rather than a one-size-fits all retro.
• AI insights + impact summaries: Highlights trends, contributing factors, and customer impact automatically.
• AI Follow Ups: Create AI-generated Follow Ups and automatically create tickets in Jira or ServiceNow, ensuring improvements actually happen and are trackable.
• Pre-filled timeline context: Cuts prep time dramatically and keeps retros accurate.

Small mistakes add up. Consistency fixes them.#small-mistakes-add-up-consistency-fixes-them

Incidents are stressful, but they don’t have to be chaotic. With the right guardrails, clear roles, and automated workflows, teams can move through incidents with confidence, not confusion.

If you want help tightening up your process or exploring how FireHydrant can fit into your team’s workflow, we’re always here to chat.