Steps to Shortlist Vendors
Choosing the right incident management platform starts with a thorough understanding of your team's and company's unique needs and objectives. This process requires a balance of introspection, research, and analysis to ensure the shortlisted vendors are well-suited to your requirements. We don't recommend starting this process vendors-first. The list of solutions on the market is extensive and constantly growing, so it's better to drop the services that don't work for you from the beginning. We are also providing a helpful checklist to score chosen vendors later in this guide.
Outline your pain points
Start by identifying the basic and essential features that prompted you to look for an incident management platform.
Are you managing on-call schedules manually?
Are you missing alerts and suffering from high-impact incidents?
Is your business succeeding, and you need to find a scalable solution?
Describe the most painful areas and list the sources of alerts or notifications you rely on, such as monitoring tools like Prometheus or Datadog or manual reporting channels like phone calls.
Setting up a platform that integrates your tools out of the box is much easier. Otherwise, you will have to invest time in setting integrations yourself.
Identify your company type
As the next step, consider your company type. For instance:
If you are a managed service provider (MSP) handling multiple clients, look for a solution that supports multi-tenancy, audience-specific status pages, and alternative manual channels for triggering alerts, like a hotline. Otherwise, your costs may rise drastically as you will have to manage several independent accounts for different clients.
If you are a fast-growing startup that ships and introduces many code changes regularly, look for Deployment integrations that will connect your CI/CD pipelines with an alerting system. You will enrich alert contexts and will have more tools at hand to root the cause of incidents.
If you are a mature, established company with thousands of engineers, you should look for comprehensive support of teams, roles, and advanced administrative features. You will also need access to advanced reports that will help you not only see the load distribution across teams but also arrange on-call compensation properly.
Talk to stakeholders and users
Third, clarify who within your organization will use the platform. Engaging with key stakeholders from across the organization ensures a holistic perspective on the requirements. Engineering teams might prioritize technical integrations and platform reliability, while operations teams might focus on ease of deployment and streamlined workflows. Leadership, on the other hand, often values cost-effectiveness and strategic alignment with long-term goals. This collaborative approach guarantees that all critical viewpoints are taken into account.
Check legal requirements
Don't forget to identify compliance requirements, which may vary depending on your organization’s location and industry. Here are a few examples.
EU-based companies must adhere to GDPR and sometimes ePrivacy, which requires strict controls over data storage, access, and breach notification processes to safeguard user and data privacy.
US-based organizations may need to comply with CMMC for federal contractors, which focuses on securing defense-related information. There is also CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) relevant to businesses operating in California, enforcing data transparency and the right to delete personal information.
Managed service providers (MSPs) often face such requirements as ISO/IEC 27001 for information security management or SOC 2 to demonstrate trust and service integrity across multiple clients.
The finance sector must comply with the DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), which enforces risk management, incident reporting, and ICT security measures to enhance operational resilience.
Telecommunication companies often need to adhere to ISO/IEC 20000 for IT service management and may have additional standards, such as TL 9000 in the US, specific to the telecom industry.
Identifying regulatory requirements early can help avoid legal or financial penalties and narrow the list of potential vendors.
Where to Search
Once you have a clear understanding of your needs, begin researching the market for potential solutions. Customer reviews on sites like Capterra and Gartner Peer Insights can provide an outlook into real-world usage and satisfaction levels. You can check what users are sharing about ilert on Capterra website.
For mobile applications (that you will definitely need for better alerting), you can always check reviews directly on the App Store or Google Play.
Additionally, vendor case studies and testimonials can help you assess how well a platform has performed for organizations with similar requirements. Read ilert case studies and learn what ilert customers such as IKEA, REWE, and Adesso are saying.
Investigating which platforms your peers or competitors use can also provide a helpful benchmark.
