What Is Incident Management? (A Complete Guide)
System issues and unexpected downtime can cost $300,000 an hour, according to Gartner. By the time you know what happened, how it happened, who it affects, and what you need to do to resolve it, an incident can easily consume your IT budget. That’s why incident management, a process for identifying, resolving, and documenting these problems, is so essential.
Incident management primarily involves IT and DevOps teams, within a broader IT service management process. It typically sits within the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework, recognized best practices industry-wide.
In this guide, you’ll find:
- A clear definition of incident management — and why it’s important
- A high-level overview of the incident management process
- Helpful tips and best practices for incident management
- Incident severity levels
- Common incident management KPIs (key performance indicators)
What is incident management?
Incident management is a defined practice for preventing, identifying, addressing, and documenting IT incidents. These incidents can range from authorization issues locking users out of essential tools to data center outages and individual application crashes. ITIL v3 formalized this process, giving IT teams strict guidelines to follow when managing incidents. With ITIL 4, this has been restructured as a service management practice, giving teams more flexibility to design their own approach to incident management.
Incident vs. problem vs. service request
These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction between them. An incident is an unplanned disruption to a service or system, such as an outage, subpar performance, or widespread failed authentication. A problem is the root cause of an incident, such as hardware or software issues. A service request is a user need that is planned and can be scoped, such as a password reset or authentication configuration.
Incidents are unplanned, impactful, and often expensive. Problems are what you look for to resolve incidents. Service requests are day-to-day tasks.
Why incident management is important
When incident management processes are established, IT teams are able to quickly and efficiently address issues that arise, reducing the impact on other areas of the business and on your customers. The incident management process also accounts for the collection of data (ie. what went wrong, why, how it was fixed, etc.). Without this, your organization will have a harder time resolving current and future issues.
An incident management system saves your team from having to create an ad hoc response to every IT issue, wasting valuable time and resources in the process. It also keeps users happy, by speeding up response and resolution times.
Not only could an incident lose you revenue, but you could even be held liable for breach of service level agreements. So while it might cost your organization time and resources to set up an incident management process in advance, the long-lasting benefits are more than worth it.
The incident management process
While every organization is different, there are some key steps that every incident management process should cover.
Before the incident
Preparation is key. Before an incident actually occurs, you’ll first want to ensure your management process is established and onboarded. Do a few practice drills and tests to make sure your team knows what to do in the case of different types of issues.
You’ll also want to make sure you have a dedicated team monitoring any possible incidents before, during, and after they arise. Your help desk team will be receiving incident reports from users, while other members of the DevOps and IT teams will be collecting data and monitoring other aspects of your system’s health. With numerous sets of eyes keeping watch, you have a better chance at catching incidents and limiting any possible downtime.
During the incident
Step 1: Identification and logging
This is the first step of any incident management process. Here, the end user or a help desk agent will identify the incident and collect data regarding the issue using standard reports, solution analyses, or manual identification. Automated detection systems can monitor systems for degradation that leads to potential incidents, accelerating identification, but manual reporting is still essential so incidents don’t slip through the cracks.
Incident logging should include timestamps, who reported the incident (or which system if it was automated), affected services, an initial severity estimate, and any related error messages.
Step 2: Prioritization and categorization
After an incident has been identified and initial data has been collected, it needs to be prioritized (i.e., how severe is the incident?) and categorized (i.e., which type of incident is it?). This determines expected response times, escalation paths, and stakeholder involvement.
Step 3: Notification and escalation
After the incident is categorized, there may be a need for escalation. While smaller incidents might not require a widespread internal or external announcement, larger incidents will most likely call for escalation to more senior team members, as well as an official alert to customers.
More severe incidents may require on-call escalations and stakeholder communication to be resolved quickly.
Step 4: Investigation and diagnosis
At this stage, your IT team will analyze the incident and work to find a root cause of the issue. This might involve pulling in other teams for a more thorough investigation and troubleshooting process.
Step 5: Incident response
Once the issue is investigated and diagnosed, resolution and recovery can take place. This is where the root causes and any future threats are addressed, and the systems involved in the incident are restored to a fully functioning level. Teams will also want to ensure that everything has been done to prevent a recurring or similar incident in the future.
Step 6: Incident closure
Now that the issue is resolved, it’s time to officially close the incident. This is where a report or official closure notice is sent, or where you close user help desk tickets. On your team’s side, closure also involves reflecting on the steps taken to resolve the issue, identifying any opportunities to improve for future incidents, and emphasizing the preventative measures established in the previous step.
Post-incident review: Learning from what went wrong
A post-mortem or retrospective session is a structured analysis post-resolution that focuses on identifying root causes for an incident, reviewing the impact timeline, and brainstorming preventative measures for future incidents.
In modern IT Service Management, postmortems and retrospectives are meant to be blameless. The goal is not to point fingers at individuals involved in an incident, but to identify systemic failures. That way, everyone feels comfortable enough to share what they observed during an incident without fearing that they’ll be blamed for it.
A post-incident review should include a timeline of the incident, a list of contributing factors, an overview of impacts on the business and its customers, a list of causes, follow-up action items (and their stakeholders), and a plan for a future review.
You don’t need to run a post-mortem after every single incident. Usually, they’ll be triggered by:
- Incidents above a certain severity level, like P1 / SEV-1 or P2 / SEV-2.
- Novel failure modes.
- Delayed incident detection.
- Significant customer impact.
How to prioritize incidents
Most ITSM frameworks use the same four tier priority or severity system. This prioritization system is used to determine how quickly IT teams need to respond and how incidents should be escalated. Each tier considers the impact of an incident based on the number of users it affects and whether it’s something like a complete outage or a partial degradation.
| Severity Level | Common Label | Example | Typical Response Target |
| P1 / SEV-1 | Critical | Complete service outage affecting all users | Less than an hour |
| P2 / SEV-2 | Major | Core feature unavailable for a subset of users | Less than four hours |
| P3 / SEV-3 | Moderate | Non-critical feature degraded, with workaround available | Less than 24 hours |
| P4 / SEV-4 | Low | Minor issue, with small impact on only a few users | Next business day |
The severity of an incident doesn’t just determine the swiftness of a response, but also the escalation path an incident might follow, and the type of response, both of which are typically tied to SLA (Service Level Agreement) commitments. Where escalation is concerned, a Critical incident might require immediate, on-call escalation and stakeholder notification. Conversely, a Low incident might be logged in the IT team’s backlog, with a note to include it in the team’s next sprint planning session.
A Critical incident might require multiple specialists to meet immediately, even if the incident happens outside of typical work hours, while a Low incident, after being identified, might only be assigned to a single expert the day after it happens. It becomes part of regular work.
Incident management KPIs and metrics
Tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics turns incident management into a measurable, improvable process. These metrics are commonly segmented by incident severity, allowing you to track the impacts of your process across different types of incidents.
There are four primary metrics used in incident management.
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
The time between when an incident first starts and when the IT team becomes aware of it. This metric can be used to measure the effectiveness of your monitoring tools. It’s typically improved by:
- Improving monitoring coverage, whether that’s with synthetic monitoring, real-user monitoring, or improving infrastructure.
- Automated anomaly detection, which can identify potential weaknesses before they cascade into incidents.
- Shift from manual reporting to automated detection, so you can detect incidents before a customer submits a ticket.
Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)
The time between the initial alert for an incident and acknowledgment from an engineer. This measures the effectiveness of escalation paths, as well as communication between frontline agents and engineers. This metric can be improved by:
- Adding automatic escalation, so if a primary on-call person doesn’t properly escalate an incident, it doesn’t just fall through the cracks.
- Route alerts by severity, so incident alerts aren’t all going through the same clogged channel.
- Use multiple notification channels for escalating agency. As incident severity increases, alerts should move from push notifications, to SMS, to phone calls for critical alerts that go unacknowledged.
Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
Mean time to resolution tracks the time from when an incident is initially detected to when it’s resolved. This is the metric that encapsulates the overall success of your incident management process. It can be improved in a number of ways, including:
- Pre-planning responses with documentation for common failure modes.
- Implementing strong visibility and tracking during incident resolution, not just for detection.
- Choosing a single person to act as the leader for each incident resolution.
Incident Volume
This measures the total number of incidents experienced over a specific period, segmenting them by severity. Tracking this can help identify systemic issues when incident volume increases, especially if you track incidents based on specific services. You can improve incident volume by:
- Targeting root causes instead of fixing symptoms, especially when the similar incidents keep recurring.
- Adding proactive monitoring to your process to catch degradation before it becomes a full incident.
- Improving change management processes when deploying new features or making configuration changes (common incident sources).
5 examples of incident management tools
Like any other process, incident management can be improved by using the right tools. Here are the primary tool categories you’ll want to add to your stack.
Incident tracking tools
These tools allow organizations to automate incident identification, meaning they won’t need to rely on employees manually spotting and reporting incidents. They’ll also allow you to track your progress as you work on resolving these incidents.
Chat tools
While it’s entirely possible to communicate via email or in-person meetings when resolving an incident, it’s nowhere near as efficient as using a chat tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams. These tools allow you to set up dedicated channels for incident management, link to important documents, and more.
Alert systems
Depending on the kinds of incidents you need to track, various alert systems can allow you to get automated reports on incidents as they occur. A company with a software product, for example, might use alert systems that trigger when servers go down or website pages stop working properly.
Documentation tools
Like any other process, incident management depends on rigorous documentation. You need to document incidents as they happen, document your response, and draft new processes when encountering new major incidents.
Status pages
These are especially relevant for organizations with software products and services but can be used by any organization. Status pages let customers know when an incident is affecting the product or service they pay for, and when they can expect that incident to be resolved.
Tips and best practices for incident management
While the key steps in the incident management process are generally the same between organizations, there are ways to improve and streamline the experience for all involved. Here are some best practices and tips to keep your incident management system as efficient as possible:
Establish a communications strategy
When it comes to resolving incidents, timelines are rushed and tensions are high. A strong communications strategy can ensure that in these often stressful moments, there is no confusion or misunderstandings. Your communications strategy should outline what channels and methods of communications they should use in updating and resolving incidents, and guidelines for external versus internal communication.
A clear and grounded communications strategy also helps keep a documented record of valuable information and data for future use.
Assign clear roles and responsibilities
When an incident occurs, it’s important that everyone knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and when. That’s why most organizations name a specific incident manager who’ll be the authority on what needs to happen to resolve any major incidents. When a team is rushing to resolve a sitewide system error, you don’t want to be held up by waiting for approval or trying to figure out who is meant to sign off on something before it is implemented. Ensure your organization has an airtight understanding of roles and responsibilities before an incident occurs.
Automate where you can
In order to keep the process running as smoothly as possible, try to automate as many elements as you can. Email notifications, closure reports, and many other aspects of your incident management process can be automated or integrated with AI to free up time and resources amongst your team members.
For example, if your web engineers use Jira to manage their work, you can set up a communication system between Zendesk and Jira. This way, when a help desk ticket is created through Zendesk, a bot automatically creates a ticket in Jira. You can also use AI tools like online chatbots populated with answers to provide users and customers with a self-serve option when troubleshooting minor incidents, saving your customer service team time and effort as well.
Make accessibility a priority
Incident management is useless if those involved are unable to make full use of your process.
Make sure that your help desk and contact page are easily accessible for your end users, and provide multiple options for contact. Some people have easy access to a phone, while others find email or a mobile app to be a much easier way of communicating incidents.
Ensure any tools or processes you’ve established are easy for those within your organization to follow. Set up time for your team to onboard new software or management platforms to make sure everyone understands exactly how to use these tools most efficiently.
Website outages, security issues, and other tech problems can be detrimental to your business — and your customers. While you can’t always prevent every possible incident, having an incident management process in place can help you reduce the impact these problems have on everyone involved.
Conduct regular incident drills
A real incident shouldn’t be the first test of your incident management process. Regular drills can help you identify issues with your process with low stakes, improving it over time. AWS’s GameDay exercises and other simulations can surface broken escalation paths, unclear ownership, and unexpected failure points.
Build a culture of blameless review
When teams and leaders try to figure out who to blame when an incident happens, communication becomes strained, investigation becomes complicated, and trust becomes scarce. Blameless post-mortems allow everyone to unite in finding ways to improve your process over time, turning each incident into an opportunity.
Close the gaps in incident management
Your incident management system needs the right integration. Find out how Unito streamlines incident management and ticket escalation.
FAQ: Incident management
What is incident management?
Incident management is a process through which organizations identify, categorize, and resolve issues before they can impact their operations. What qualifies as an incident can vary, from a difficult separation with an ex-employee to a security breach.
What are the five stages of the incident management life cycle?
While the incident management lifecycle might be a bit different depending on the organization or team that uses it, it will generally follow these five stages:
- Incident identification and logging: The first step in managing incidents is identifying them. This might be done with automated tools, though in some cases an employee might be the one to spot the impact of an incident.
- Incident categorization: Incidents need categorization for future analysis and to be matched to the proper resolution. This gives you a database that’ll inform incident response in the future.
- Incident prioritization: Not all incidents require the same response. Some are critical, with wide-ranging impacts throughout your organization, and need a resolution as soon as possible. Others, while still needing a response, can be managed during business hours.
- Incident response: At this stage, you’re performing the actual actions aimed at resolving the incident. In many cases, you’ll follow a pre-established process, though occasionally you’ll need to figure it out as you go.
- Incident closure: After you’ve put your plan into action, it’s time to finalize your response. That might mean documenting a new incident, improving existing processes, or communicating the impacts of an incident with other teams.
What are the essential components of incident management?
Managing major incidents depends on the following essential components:
- An incident manager: This person is responsible for handling the response to an incident, keeping processes up to date, and promoting improvement of the organization’s incident management endeavors.
- An incident management process: Having a defined process in place for resolving incidents leads to more successful resolution and less significant impacts on day-to-day operations.
- The right tools: You don’t necessarily need the most advanced tools to manage even high-priority incidents, but do need the right tools. That includes some way to document processes and incidents, a way to communicate when resolving incidents, and tools for spotting an incident before it gets worse.
- A dedicated communication channel: Whether your organization communicates primarily through meetings, email, or chat apps, you need a dedicated channel for bringing together your incident response team. This centralizes essential communication and prevents distractions.
- Regular review: Like any other process, incident management needs regular review to ensure it’s performing as intended.