First things first
Is this guide for you?
If you're a team of more than one on-call engineer and you update your product constantly, you must have an incident management solution in your tech stack. How comprehensive, advanced, or, on the contrary, simple it should be, is the decision to make. But you have to choose something.
This guide is for DevOps and IT administrators who already understand that the pager won't save them in the next downtime and that they can’t afford to oversleep the next critical alert. It aims to help you not drown in the variety of solutions on the market and to choose the best option that will cost adequately and will cover all your needs.
What you can expect to learn from this guide:
The key differences between real-time incident management platforms and other solutions providing incident-related features
The critical and non-critical features to manage IT incidents
Helpful tips on comparing solutions and testing them
Identify metrics to achieve better uptime with your chosen platform
Free helpful instruments for solution evaluation
Before we plunge into the deep waters of incident management platforms, we want to leave one more note for the reader. Dozens of platforms emerged in the last several years, and many of them are truly great.
There is a tendency in the market to move from dedicated tools for one specific incident response stage to platforms that cover incidents from the beginning till the retro. We highly recommend you look at end-to-end platforms, as they are built from the very start as complete incident management solutions.
Hence, we wouldn't recommend opting in with tools that aim only at the communicational part of incidents or only post-mortem creation.
How incident management is evolving:
Likely, the first time an incident management solution emerged in your attention field was at the time you first learned about ServiceNow or similar IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms. Those were the first to introduce workflows to centralize incident response.
Today, ITSM platforms fall short of providing the agility needed for real-time incident response. While they focus on structured workflows, compliance, and post-incident documentation, the progressive real-time incident management platforms emphasize rapid detection, immediate communication, and automated response.
Various solutions have emerged to address the dynamic needs of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and IT operations teams. All of them have many similar features but introduce different approaches to resolving incidents faster.
Understanding the key differences between traditional ITSM and modern real-time incident management can help businesses make informed decisions that align with their operational goals and incident response strategies.
