Incident management

What is incident management? 

Incident management is a proactive framework and strategy for anticipating, handling, containing, and preventing incidents.

Incident management looks at the whole incident lifecycle and every system it impacts. Unlike incident response, which only focuses on an incident as it’s occurring, incident management encompasses the entire incident lifecycle — before, during, and after.  

Comprehensive incident management involves analyzing and maintaining the systemic elements that encourage incident prevention and response. These structural components include:

• Monitoring

• Alerting

• Triage

• Ticketing

• Workflows

• Data collection

• Communication

• Analytics and retrospectives

• Service ownership

Why is incident management important? 

Incident management illustrates a long-term investment in the health and reliability of your product by putting the customer experience at the forefront. It’s a commitment to healthy systems, to learning from experiences, and to continuously improving. 

What are incident management best practices? 

A strong incident management plan should:

• Assign service ownership to your core services 

• Clarify all incident roles

• Establish how to document the declaration process

• Encourage incident management drills to strengthen teams

Organizations should also consider investing in an integrative incident management tool that can automate communication, create consistent processes, and keep track of who owns what services.

How can I make my own incident management plan? 

If you’re already responding to incidents, that’s a good place to start in creating an incident management plan. When fully moving from incident response to incident management, make sure to:

• Set up a consistent process

• Declare ownership around product areas

• Run drills to test your incident management plan

Whether your organization has a foundational, intermediate, or advanced incident management plan, you can still further optimize it to receive the maximum benefit. For further instruction, take a look at our free incident management ebook.