Incident Management Features to Start with

Let's now summarize and have a closer look at the most important features that must be a part of your chosen incident management solution.

‍

Real-Time Alerting and Notifications

Multi-channel actionable alerts: SMS, email, phone calls, push notifications. By leveraging various channels, incident management platforms ensure no alert goes unnoticed, significantly reducing response times (MTTR) and enabling teams to act swiftly in critical situations. We also recommend checking that notifications are actionable, which means that the first actions can be performed right within the channel (without the necessity to log in anywhere or switch the apps).

Alert customization and filtering to reduce noise. By prioritizing alerts based on severity and relevance, these features reduce the risk of alert fatigue and ensure timely action on high-priority incidents. Filtering out duplicates and low-priority alerts minimizes distractions, while tailored notifications ensure the right team members are informed promptly.

On-Call Scheduling and Escalation Policies

‍Flexible scheduling options are a cornerstone of effective incident management platforms. End-to-end incident management platforms, like ilert, this allows you to create dynamic, rotating schedules to ensure 24/7 coverage without overburdening teams. Your team(s) can view and adjust their on-call shifts, helping maintain a fair workload distribution. These features eliminate the need to create manual calendars and maintain manual schedules, reducing the probability of human errors and ensuring seamless incident coverage.

Automated escalations to ensure no alert is missed. If one team member is not available and does not see a notification, an alert is automatically routed to the next available team member or higher-level support.

Integration Capabilities

Integrations enable incident management platforms to interact with a variety of tools and systems to ensure comprehensive coverage for time-critical events.

Key integration capabilities include:

Monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus) These integrations allow platforms to directly receive and act on performance metrics and alerts, enabling early detection of system anomalies.

ITSM ticketing tools: Integration with ITSM tools like ServiceNow ensures that incident workflows and documentation are synchronized, bridging real-time response with structured post-incident processes.
Manual incident reporting: Platforms support incident initiation through manual inputs, such as incoming phone calls, ensuring that non-automated issues are integrated into the response workflow, too.

Integration with collaboration platforms, like Slack and Microsoft Teams, is worth mentioning separately. ChatOps go beyond simply sending notifications to channels. Modern incident management platforms leverage these integrations to enable users to perform key actions directly within chat environments. Teams can

‍

Acknowledge, reroute, and perform key actions right from the chat

Report new alerts via bots

Check the availability of on-call engineers with the help of commands

Open private war rooms to avoid exposure to sensitive information

Use communication from the chats for later postmortem documentation

‍

Incident Response and Collaboration

Incident management solutions should also provide features to streamline incident response and foster effective collaboration. Here are the most critical things to look for.

Shared incident timelines: All stakeholders can view a real-time, centralized log of incident events, actions, and updates. This ensures everyone is aligned and facilitates better coordination during high-pressure situations. It also serves as a record for post-mortem analysis.

Create dedicated war rooms for major incidents: Incident management platforms enable easy and fast creation of war rooms for incidents. In tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack, war rooms are typically structured as dedicated channels or group chats with enhanced access controls to ensure only relevant stakeholders are included. Unlike regular chats, war rooms are designed to centralize all incident-related communication and resources, offering specific commands to perform incident-related actions without the need to switch apps.
Communicate with stakeholders and update your status page using one tool: Stakeholder communication is just as important as resolving the incident itself. The incident management platform should enable teams to send timely updates to customers, partners, and internal stakeholders. The best option is to have status pages as a part of the alerting platform itself. It removes a significant amount of manual work from teams and, as a consequence, reduces the chances of manual errors. With built-in status pages, engineers can respond to issues faster without wasting time switching between various tools.

Post-mortem analysis: After the incident is resolved, post-mortem analysis features help teams understand what went wrong and how to prevent similar incidents in the future. Post-mortem analysis tools should be able to collect incident-related information from various sources, including chats, alert details, timelines, logs, and monitoring dashboards. They should also be capable of describing the problem and steps taken to resolve it in a concise and clear manner. AI assistance is a great help here. Additionally, the formatting of the final document should be intuitive and easy to use, enabling teams to access and comprehend the data quickly.

Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting are key features of incident management tools. They provide actionable insights into performance, process effectiveness, and recurring issues, enabling teams to continuously improve and make data-driven decisions. Two areas are worth paying attention to.

Incident trends and metrics: Understanding incident trends and key metrics is crucial for identifying recurring issues and areas for improvement. Look for solutions that provide:

Key incident management metrics, such as the Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and total number of alerts, should be available out of the box.

Customizable dashboards that Allow users to create tailored views of metrics relevant to their teams or roles.

Filtering and segmentation.

Sharing settings to facilitate easy sharing of reports with stakeholders through automated email reports, export options (e.g., CSV or PDF), or direct links to dashboards.

Historical comparisons to identify long-term trends.

Team performance and response times: Evaluating team performance ensures fairness, prevents burnout, and promotes accountability. This involves monitoring individual and team performance during on-call shifts. It also includes aligning performance data with compensation structures tied to on-call responsibilities. Additionally, identifying disparities in on-call workloads ensures equitable shift distribution.