Incident Management Features You Don’t Want to Overlook
Reliability and Scalability
These are critical factors to ensure uninterrupted service and the ability to grow alongside your company. To ensure that the chosen solution will fit your company's needs today and tomorrow, pay attention to the following key aspects.
- High availability and redundancy. To minimize downtime, a reliable incident management tool must offer high availability and redundancy. A modern incident management platform should be built on a globally distributed infrastructure with:
Highly available architecture ensuring service continuity even during infrastructure failures
Multiple geographic regions for data storage and processing to maintain service during regional outages
Distributed system design to handle high loads and maintain performance at scale
When evaluating solutions, look for vendors with a proven track record of uptime and transparent communication about their infrastructure design and reliability measures. The platform should be built to handle mission-critical alerting without single points of failure.
- Provider-level redundancy. Reliability goes beyond infrastructure. Effective tools provide redundancy at the provider level and support diverse communication methods. For example, ilert uses three trusted telecommunication providers for alerting. By partnering with multiple providers, we ensure that if one fails, others will step in to meet customer needs. Simply put, you’ll always receive your alerts.
- Ability to scale with your organization’s growth. As your organization expands, your (chosen) incident management tool should scale seamlessly by handling increasing numbers of incidents, users, and integrations through dynamic resource allocation. It should also offer modular features that enable customization and the expansion of capabilities as your needs evolve while ensuring compatibility with both existing and future tools in your tech stack, such as monitoring systems or collaboration platforms.
Here are key scaling factors to consider when evaluating incident management solutions:
Team Growth:
- Support for multiple teams and departments with different alerting needs
- Cross-team coordination capabilities
- Flexible user role management and access controls
- Pricing models that accommodate team expansion without dramatic cost increases
- Ability to manage complex on-call schedules across growing teams
- Team-specific views and permissions
- Consolidated reporting across the organization
- Automated user provisioning and deprovisioning
Alert Volume:
- Platform performance with increasing alert volumes
- Alert aggregation and deduplication capabilities
- Intelligent alert routing to prevent alert fatigue
- Alert throttling and rate limiting options
When evaluating solutions, consider not just your current needs but where your organization will be in 12-24 months. Ensure the platform can scale with your growth without requiring significant rework or migration to a different solution.
- Security and compliance are non-negotiable when dealing with sensitive incident data.
Key considerations include:
Data encryption: Both in-transit and at-rest encryption to protect data from unauthorized access
Access controls: Role-based access and multi-factor authentication to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data
Compliance with industry standards: Adherence to regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 to meet legal and contractual obligations
Audit trails: Maintain detailed logs of all actions within the system for accountability and compliance audits
User Experience and Accessibility
Beyond the incident management features, it’s essential to ensure the solution you choose is easy to adopt, user-friendly, and reliable. Well-designed platforms ensure that users can focus on resolving incidents rather than navigating a complex system.
- Intuitive user interface: An intuitive user interface (UI) is essential for ensuring that teams can operate efficiently during critical situations. The solution should have a clean layout, logical navigation, and easily accessible key features. A well-designed UI reduces the learning curve and improves adoption across diverse teams. To evaluate whether a UI is intuitive and clear, users can:
Request a product demo: Observe how easily key actions can be performed during a walkthrough. Another option is to check interactive demos that are also often available for many solutions.
Explore a free trial: Hands-on experience can reveal whether navigation feels natural and tasks are straightforward.
Review user feedback: Check reviews or case studies to see how others have rated the platform’s usability.
Assess onboarding materials: Clear documentation, tutorials, and support resources often indicate a user-friendly design.
- Mobile app functionality for on-the-go access: Since most of us have 24/7 access to our smartphones and smartwatches, you should have access to your incident management platform on the go. The mobile app should support all essential features available on the desktop, allowing users to manage incidents entirely from the smartphone. This includes receiving real-time notifications, updating incident statuses, communicating with team members, and accessing shared resources. A mobile app that supports daily usage empowers teams to stay connected and responsive, no matter where they are.
Consider the following points when evaluating mobile app functionality:
How regularly the app is updated and whether updates address user feedback.
The app’s ratings and reviews in app stores, as they reflect user satisfaction
Whether the app is available and fully supported on both Android and iOS platforms.
The availability of advanced features like biometric login for quick access and integration with device-specific capabilities like widgets or shortcuts.
APIs and Infrastructure as Code
The Importance of APIs
A robust API is crucial for modern incident management platforms, especially in environments practicing DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). A well-documented, comprehensive API enables:
- Automation: This will allow your team to programmatically create and manage alerting rules, on-call schedules, and escalation policies, reducing manual configuration work and potential human errors.
- Custom Integration Development: This will enable you to build custom integrations with internal tools and services not covered by out-of-the-box integrations.
- Configuration Management: Changes to incident management configurations can be version controlled and automated as part of deployment pipelines.
- Data Export: Incident data can be extracted for custom reporting, analysis, or integration with data warehouses.
When evaluating incident management solutions, look for:
- RESTful API with clear documentation
- Comprehensive API coverage of platform features
Terraform Provider
If your company is practicing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, a native Terraform provider is essential. It would allow your teams to:
- Version Control: Track all incident management configurations in Git alongside other infrastructure code
- Review Process: Apply the same peer review process to incident management changes as other infrastructure changes
- Automation: Automate the creation and updates of incident management resources through CI/CD pipelines
- Consistency: Maintain consistent configurations across different environments
Key Terraform provider capabilities to evaluate:
Resource coverage (alerts, schedules, escalation policies, etc.).
Import support for existing resources.
Data source availability.
Documentation quality.
Regular maintenance and updates.
When combined, robust API support and Terraform integration can enable your teams to manage their incident management platform with the same rigor and automation as the rest of your infrastructure.
