Incident management is a practice that seeks to resolve business-impacting events in the most efficient manner possible. But not every problem that arises requires an incident response, and it’s crucial that teams know the difference between a problem and an incident. Responding to problems may be part of daily routines, or small ad hoc projects that don’t require more than one resource or a significant time commitment.
In the era of Agile, organizations are increasingly moving their IT service management teams toward a DevOps world. There are significant challenges to transforming ITSM to DevOps, but one of the most significant is goal setting. In today's face-paced business environment, it's important to establish the parameters for measuring success and determine which objectives teams need to meet to accomplish business goals.
Effective major incident management depends on many things, including planning, precise execution, effective communication, and applying learnings from previous incidents to update those plans. Traditional major incident management wisdom addresses the importance of the remediation process, but it doesn’t speak on the issue of configuring your IT infrastructure.
Worldwide businesses and their technical resources use G2, the leading business solution review platform, to analyze software, gather user feedback, and make informed decisions about technology. Although we value all the recognition we’ve earned on G2 over the years, there’s one that always stands out and makes us feel extra proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.
During major incidents, it’s crucial that all stakeholders are provided with the status updates they need. Those communications however need to be tailored to what the stakeholder actually needs, and provided in a streamlined format that works best for them. Just like alert fatigue, communication fatigue can be detrimental during an outage or other service reliability issue.
Business continuity is a crucial part of any scalable operations plan, but many businesses fail to realize how important it is until their first critical emergency. Only then does business continuity management come to the forefront of planning exercises, and stakeholders are forced to reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and determine if they can avoid it happening again, or be better prepared if it does. The true business continuity management lifecycle begins long before an incident.
Digital transformation is accelerating rapidly to include virtually all enterprise functions. Organizations of all size, across all industries, are leveraging digital technology to enhance customer service and improve work efficiency. Integrating automation into core business functions has become a must to stay aligned with the ongoing digital revolution. The growing migration to the cloud has resulted in the distribution of company data and applications across multiple locations. This means that many complex business processes must leverage IT resources from the cloud and on-premises. This is where automation and orchestration can greatly improve the performance and efficiency of these complex tasks.
Your new release tested fine on staging, but it’s not playing nicely with applications and services in the wild. Your monitoring application notices something going wrong and raises the alarm. But often raising the alarm isn’t enough – to solve complex issues, you might need to roll back to the last good deployment while you figure out the root cause and get multiple people working together on the solution.
You likely deal with major incidents regularly, but do you know who first coined the term? You also probably use the best tools on the market to help you fix those incidents, but do you know what some of the first tools were? When incident management is part of your day-to-day, it’s easy to think you know it all. But we have a hunch that there are some interesting facts that haven’t crossed your mind yet!
What’s one of the fundamental principles of DevOps? Automation. There are many ways to leverage automation to facilitate DevOps practices for enabling consistency, reliability, and efficiency within the organization. That’s why we’re taking serious strides to ensure that xMatters can allow full automation and coordination of the many tools we use to make incident management easier and more efficient for front-line responders.
