Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Not every incident alert needs the same kind of response. One incident may need to wake someone up right away. Another may simply need to be picked up when the team starts work in the morning. Without a clear way to tell them apart, every incident feels equally urgent. That usually adds noise and makes incident response decisions harder than they need to be. This is where two questions help: In this guide, we’ll discuss what those questions mean and the four combinations that follow.

Monitoring tools track what’s happening across your systems and send a Slack message or email when something looks off. But they don’t call anyone and they don’t escalate the incident. If that Slack message goes unseen at 3 AM on a Saturday, the incident just sits there until someone opens their dashboard. Incident alerting fills this gap. When an incident triggers, it contacts the right person directly through a phone call or their preferred channel.