Ideally, IT incidents would never happen. The reality is that they do — and more frequently than any site reliability engineering (SRE) or DevOps team would like. In fact, research indicates some teams spend up to 80 percent of their time just addressing incidents instead of focusing on building and improving their systems and software.

Every technical manager or CTO must assume incidents will occur and plan accordingly. Just as effective monitoring is invaluable for tracking and evaluating your application stack’s performance, a solid incident management tool is essential for tracking and evaluating your incident response.

Whether your applications run on-premises or in the cloud, downtime and other incidents are costly. Even subtle incidents, such as slow-loading forms and unreliable buttons, chip away at your bottom line. If customers can’t use your service or your platform doesn’t perform to their expectations, you risk upsetting and losing them. You may lose money from not meeting your customers’ service level agreements or failing to deliver a great customer experience. Also, troubleshooting and mitigating failures or outages adds runtime and management costs.