4 Major Capabilities of Automated Incident Management

Automated incident management ensures that critical events are detected, addressed and resolved in a fast, efficient manner. Automation allows incident management tools to integrate with each other and fosters instant communication across the systems.

Automation tears down barriers across IT operations (ITOps) teams and ensures all departments are on the same page. Teams gain full visibility into incident status to verify that incidents are addressed by the relevant groups. 

As IT issues become more frequent, teams leverage the power of automation to simplify and streamline the incident management process.

Why Is Automated Incident Management Important?

Lacking automation in the workplace results in disjointed communication and poor coordination across ITOps teams. Without automation, siloed teams cannot view real-time incident statuses and are uninformed of what is still required to resolve the critical event. This often leads to confusion across departments and slow incident response times.

It is common that each team uses different monitoring and ticketing tools. Uniformity in software as a service (SaaS) tools across teams is not promised, and the tools cannot communicate with each other during critical events. This further hinders effective, speedy incident management. 

Automation creates synchronous communication between systems. It ensures that all departments are aware of the status of the incident. ITOps teams can better understand who is responsible for response and what actions are needed to accelerate event remediation. 

Four Major Capabilities of Automated Response

Automated incident management defines the seamless orchestration between IT service management (ITSM) tools and IT service alerting (ITSA) platforms. This automation delivers four key capabilities: 

1. Eliminating alert noise and false positives
2. Triaging incidents to the right team and generating incident reports
3. Determining the cause of critical IT events
4. Driving the automation of repetitive high and low-priority incidents

1. Eliminating Alert Noise and False Positives

ITOps teams must only be notified of incidents that matter. To do so, they must configure ITSM and ITSA parameters to determine what alerts are important. This ensures that real, actionable alerts are triggered while false-positive notifications are minimized.

Automation controls can triage alerts to the right team members. This prevents all ITOps departments from being notified of an incident that is not relevant to their specific function. This way, teams can reduce the number of alerts and save valuable time.

By addressing alert noise and false positives, teams can:

• Minimize alert fatigue—Filter out unimportant notifications and prioritize incidents. The right teams receive intrusive, hard-to-ignore mobile push notifications for events that require immediate attention.
• Improve productivity and efficiency—Automated alerts ensure ITOps teams are notified at the right time, every time. Relevant groups can start addressing the event. Team collaboration is enhanced.
• Reduce response time—Alert automation eliminates confusion and human error. Slash response time to critical alerts and get teams to work as quickly as possible to remediate incidents.

2. Triaging Incidents to the Right Team and Generating Incident Reports

As mentioned, automation can triage incidents to the appropriate respondent and eliminate inefficiencies from manual handoffs. Teams can configure digital on-call schedules via an ITSA system to assign incidents to relevant respondents. This introduces much-needed efficiency and order to critical event management. 

ITSA systems automatically generate reports to provide insight into event resolution. Managers can view the performance of ITOps members to better understand what needs to improve in the future. Actionable insights further enhance the productivity and efficiency of incident groups.

3. Determining the Cause of Critical IT Events

In ITOps, teams set up metrics in observability platforms. Common metrics are configured for load averages and web page response times. If these metrics cross their threshold levels, observability tools will automatically trigger push notifications on mobile. Simply put, observability platforms capture abnormalities and help teams identify issues.

At its core, automated incident management assures application uptime and ensures that IT environments are functioning normally. 

This is how the automation of an observability platform works:

1. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and thresholds are established within an observability tool. Determine what is considered an abnormality based on the established thresholds. 
2. Observability tools trigger alerts based on presence-absence issues. Presence issues typically include application crashes and extended disk space usages. When teams cannot pull logs or recognize that the host is down, they are experiencing critical absence issues.
3. Observability systems integrate with ITSA platforms to trigger notifications to the respondent’s mobile device. The right individuals immediately manage and remediate the time-sensitive issue.

4. Driving the Automation of Repetitive High and Low-Priority Incidents

ITOps teams can configure high or low-priority incidents through intelligent ITSA systems. Respondents know they will be immediately apprised when a high-priority event has occurred. Persistent, intrusive mobile alert tones grab the attention of respondents to accelerate the remediation of high-priority issues.

Low-priority alerting is designed for non-urgent messaging, casual communications and non-critical status updates. Respondents will not receive the persistent mobile alert tone. Priority alerting allows teams to focus on time-sensitive events first and push less severe incidents to the side.

Conclusion

Aligning departments, processes and tools significantly reduces mean time to repair (MTTR). Through automated incident management, ITOps teams can effectively collaborate to combat time-sensitive issues and assure that IT environments are operating normally. 

As incidents become more frequent and difficult to juggle, teams look toward automation to eliminate waste and streamline incident response workflows.

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