Before I stumbled into the tech industry (a story for another day), I spent several years in the customer service world as a server and front-of-house manager in restaurants. It was in these jobs that I first honed some critical skills that would later lead me on the path to incident response.

Tech companies face a daunting challenge: a staggering 90% of their IT teams are stuck doing mundane, repetitive tasks, leaving only 10% to focus on strategic innovation. Companies know that automation is the solution to these repetitive, low-level incident response actions; however, many need support to begin automating.

IT incident management aims to swiftly identify, address, and resolve IT disruptions to restore normal service operations. Tracking IT incident management key performance indicators (KPIs) is a vital step toward minimizing disruptions for customers and users. But there are several different KPI and metrics choices, and it’s not easy to identify the right ones that can drive meaningful improvements in incident management.

On December 8, 2023, Adobe's extensive customer base was impacted by a series of outages in the Adobe Experience Cloud, starting from 8:00 AM EST and continuing until 1:45 AM EST on December 9. We haven't seen a third-party outage of this magnitude since the DoubleClick outage of 2018.

If you're on a data team, have you ever considered using an incident management tool to respond to pipeline issues? If the answer is no, then you might want to check out this episode. Here, we chat with Jack, Data Analyst at incident.io, to better understand why data teams can—and should—look to incident management tools like incident.io to manage issues. We chat about: Read Jack's blog post about incident management for data teams.

Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) is a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures the average duration needed to restore normal operation for an application, service or piece of infrastructure component. Your MTTR directly impacts customer satisfaction, so you must have a keen understanding how it influences the reliability and availability of your services and applications to make informed decisions, enable operational efficiency, and ensure a seamless customer experience.

Incidents and bugs are two common occurrences that can disrupt the smooth operation of systems and applications. While these terms may seem similar, they represent distinct concepts with different implications. Understanding the nuances between incidents and bugs is crucial for effective incident management and proactive problem resolution.