Feature Focus: a Closer Look at ilert AI
For the last 12 months, our team has concentrated on elevating product features by integrating generative AI. By seamlessly weaving AI into the fabric of the service, we have enhanced the efficiency and responsiveness of incident management processes and pioneered a new approach to handling crises. A powerful set of new functions is designed to simplify the preparational phase of incident management, speed up the response process, and take off the burden of manual work from on-call teams in the post-incident phase.
In this blog post, we've compiled all of the AI-assisted features, aiming to help you understand their potential for your incident management process. If you're curious to learn more or have questions about ilert's AI potential, we're happy to see you at our webinar "AI and Incident Management," which will take place on April 30 and will be led by ilert Founder and CEO Birol Yildiz. Reserve your seat.
Additionally, we have published a free guide on how to leverage GenAI & LLMs in incident management processes.
Prepare: Leverage AI for On-Call Scheduling
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We at ilert believe that incidents are inevitable. Fast-paced and ambitious teams must constantly deploy and introduce changes to their service, which is a fertile ground for breakdowns and mistakes. So, the best strategy here is "forewarned is forearmed."
On-call scheduling is a critical component of effective incident management, as it ensures that there is always a designated responder available to address and mitigate issues at any time, day or night. A robust on-call schedule provides a structured, reliable method for mobilizing the right personnel with the necessary expertise to swiftly tackle emerging problems.
Establishing an effective on-call schedule poses several difficulties, primarily due to the challenges of balancing organizational needs with individual employee well-being. One of the most significant hurdles is coordinating the diverse availability of team members while ensuring that all critical skills and roles are covered 24/7. There are also technical complexities, like careful orchestration of schedule layers where different teams can be involved, shift rotation and proper hand-off, and administrative burdens related to the introduction of new team members or the departure of existing ones.
Keeping all these complications in mind, we have introduced a new approach to on-call scheduling. All manual adjustments that have to be done manually can now be automatically set up with the help of a simple chat interface. Provide all the information necessary for a new schedule in a natural descriptive way, and let ilert AI handle the rest.
Respond: Let AI Communicate Incidents Details
Reducing manual work during IT incidents is crucial to ensure that engineers can focus their efforts where they are most needed: on investigating and resolving the issue. In a high-pressure environment, every second counts, and the cognitive load on engineers is significantly increased. They need to rapidly assimilate information, apply their expertise to diagnose the problem and implement a solution. Having to concurrently manage communications—such as updates to stakeholders, coordination messages among team members, or instructions for a workaround—can severely detract from their primary task. Searching for the right words or crafting updates requires mental bandwidth that could otherwise be dedicated to problem-solving.
That's why we introduced ilert AI for incident communication, too. ilert's AI-powered assistance swiftly crafts precise incident-related messages. Upon the occurrence of an incident, simply provide a brief technical summary into the designated fields and let ilert's AI take over from there. It will generate a concise summary of the incident and craft a message for the status page, indicating which services have been impacted based on the information you've provided.
Furthermore, ilert's AI can also provide updates during the incident. Detailed status descriptions are no longer necessary; your team can focus solely on resolving the issue, confident that clear, user-friendly communications will be sent out to users.
Learn: Create Postmortems Automatically
Dedicating time to learning after IT incidents is paramount for organizational growth and resilience. This period allows for conducting thorough postmortems, a critical process where teams dissect what happened, identify the root causes of the incident and understand the effectiveness of the response. The primary importance of postmortems lies in their ability to transform incidents into learning opportunities. By meticulously analyzing each event, teams can uncover weaknesses in their systems and processes and develop actionable insights to prevent similar incidents from reoccurring. Furthermore, postmortems contribute to building a culture of transparency and continuous improvement, where mistakes are openly shared and used as stepping stones for enhancement rather than being stigmatized. This dedicated time for reflection and learning is not just about fixing what went wrong but about reinforcing an organization's resilience, paving the way for more robust and reliable IT operations in the future.
To cover this last incident management phase, we have introduced AI assistance in postmortem creation. Gather timeline data and communications from chat tools, like Slack and Microsoft Teams, alongside comments made in ilert, review all associated alerts and their specifics, and export a file for potential future enhancements — this is our postmortem feature in a nutshell.
What's next
Some more great AI news will come in the following months. As most of the AI features are in the public beta stage, we appreciate your feedback and ideas on improving them. Feel free to share your thoughts in the Roadmap or email us at support@ilert.com. Also, remember to join our webinar, where we will dive deeply into AI in the incident management realm.
