Incident

What is an incident?

Although companies define incidents in varying ways, in general: An incident is any unexpected degradation or interruption of functionality in a company’s product, systems, or website that is of such a degree that it’s noticeable to customers and/or internal stakeholders. Incidents can sometimes require an urgent response to restore service. Companies have engineering teams who are required to interrupt their product-building work in order to solve incidents. 

In order to help engineers quickly get back to their regular work, organizations need a well documented single source of truth and a process and/or tooling that helps engineers fix the problem as fast as possible.

Why are incidents important? 

Incidents are not inherently bad — they can provide insights about your people, processes, and products. Teams should view incidents as educational experiences, and then use that knowledge to create more reliable products.  

Should I treat all incidents the same? 

Incidents come in many sizes, with some only affecting a few clients and others knocking out entire systems. Companies should use the impact level (or severity level) of an incident to determine how they respond.

For example, a high-severity incident might render an entire product unusable. This “all-hands-on-deck” situation would need an emergency response, requiring entire teams across multiple departments to pitch in to resolve the issue. Lower-severity incidents, such as images not loading properly, may have easier solutions that do not require the attention of the entire team.

It’s impossible to prevent incidents from ever occurring. However, a good incident management plan can help you reduce future incidents and drastically cut down your incident response time.