What is incident management software?

As incident management becomes increasingly complex, identifying the appropriate features in your incident response tools is paramount. These features can significantly impact your team's ability to respond swiftly and effectively to incidents. Outlined below are a selection of key features to consider.

Automation and orchestration

In the dynamic landscape of incident response, the ability to automate repetitive tasks and orchestrate complex workflows can be a game-changer. Imagine a tool that not only identifies and alerts your team to an incident but can also initiate predefined responses automatically. This not only saves crucial time but ensures consistency in your response actions. When evaluating incident management tools, consider how customizable the automation workflows are and how well they integrate with your existing systems.

Automation and orchestration are pivotal features in incident response tools, and Jira Service Management excels in this area. JSM offers customizable automation workflows that seamlessly integrate with existing systems, allowing teams to not only identify and alert to incidents but also initiate predefined responses automatically, ensuring both time savings and response consistency.

Collaboration and documentation

In the heat of an incident, seamless collaboration among team members is critical. Look for tools that not only provide a platform for real-time incident communication but also facilitate collaborative documentation. Picture a scenario where multiple team members can contribute to incident details simultaneously, creating a comprehensive and accurate record. Version control for incident documentation ensures you have a clear timeline of actions taken and observations made, which is crucial for post-incident analysis and learning.

For effective collaboration and documentation during incidents, Jira Service Management provides a robust platform for real-time communication among team members. Additionally, JSM integrates with Confluence, Atlassian's collaborative documentation tool, allowing multiple team members to contribute simultaneously to incident details. This integration ensures comprehensive and accurate incident records with version control, facilitating post-incident analysis and learning.

Reporting and analytics

Understanding your incident response performance is key to continuous improvement. A robust tool should offer analytics on various aspects, from resolution times to root causes. Consider tools that provide insightful reports, allowing you to identify patterns and trends in past incidents. The ability to customize and export these reports ensures you can tailor your analysis to meet specific organizational needs.

JSM's reporting and analytics capabilities contribute to understanding incident response performance. With insightful reports on resolution times and root causes, teams can identify patterns and trends in past incidents. The flexibility to customize and export these reports enables organizations to tailor their analysis to specific needs.

Scalability

As your organization grows, so does the complexity of incidents. Your chosen incident management tool should be scalable and capable of handling incidents of varying sizes and complexities. Consider how well the incident management tool adapts to the growth of both incidents and your team size. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, the tool should seamlessly integrate into your incident response workflow.

Scalability is a key consideration, and Jira Service Management adapts well to the growing complexity of incidents and team size. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, JSM seamlessly integrates into your incident response workflow, providing the scalability needed for evolving organizational requirements.

Security and compliance

Security is paramount in incident management, and your tools should reflect this priority. Look for features that adhere to best security practices, ensuring the protection of sensitive incident data. Additionally, features such as audit trails and compliance reporting can be crucial for organizations operating in regulated industries.

Security and compliance are critical, and Jira Service Management prioritizes these aspects with features adhering to best security practices. This includes robust protection of sensitive incident data and features like audit trails and compliance reporting, making JSM suitable for organizations operating in regulated industries.

Mobile accessibility

Incidents don't wait for you to be at your desk. Choose a tool that offers mobile applications, allowing your team to respond to alerts and collaborate on incidents on the go. Check if critical features are accessible through mobile applications and if the mobile version ensures secure remote access and authentication.

Recognizing the dynamic nature of incident response, Jira Service Management ensures mobile accessibility through dedicated applications. This allows teams to respond to alerts and collaborate on incidents on the go, ensuring that critical features are accessible securely and remotely through the mobile version of JSM.

How to choose incident management software

There is no single, one-size-fits-all tool for incident management. The best-performing incident teams use a collection of the right tools, practices, operating systems, and people. Some tools are specific to incident management, while others are more general-purpose tools your team uses for other tasks. Some tools might be a bespoke experience built upon layers of integrations and customization.

No matter the use case, good incident management tools have a few things in common. The best incident management tools are open, reliable, and adaptable.

Open: In a high-pressure environment like an incident, it’s vital that the right people have access to the right tools and information immediately. This not only goes for incident responders but also for company stakeholders who need visibility into response efforts.

Reliable: There are few things worse during incident response than having your essential response tools go down. Utilizing cloud tools, like Slack and Opsgenie, minimizes the risk of an outage on your infrastructure, taking down your response tools.

Adaptable: Integrations, workflows, apps, customization, and APIs all open up the possibilities behind the product. You may want to get started with an out-of-the-box configuration, but as your practices and processes mature, you’ll want your tools to be flexible enough to support changing needs.

Before the incident

Monitoring

Monitoring systems let DevOps and IT Ops teams collect, aggregate, and trigger alerts from data from thousands of services in real-time. These are critical to providing full visibility into the health of your services and often trigger the first alarm bells during an incident.

Benefits

Monitoring tools give your team constant insight into the health of the infrastructure. Modern monitoring tools also proactively trigger alerts during unexpected activity.

Service desk

Service desk software gives customers and employees a place to both report issues and manage incidents and potential incidents.

Benefits

Along with their many other use cases (service requests, IT help desk), service desks empower your team to quickly learn about incidents from the people who matter most—your customers.

Features

Alerting and on call

Prompt and reliable alerting and on-call management is a critical step in incident response. This is how teams ensure the right people are aware of an incident.

Benefits

Alerting tools notify designated on-call responders through a sophisticated combination of scheduling, escalation paths, and notifications.

Features

Leveraging a configuration management database (CMDB) for a faster resolution

Understanding the interdependencies of key processes within your infrastructure is key to determining the full impact of the incident and reaching a faster resolution.

Benefits

A CMDB helps you understand the relationships and dependencies within your IT infrastructure. If something goes down, this map lets you rapidly find:

• Potential causes of the incident. For example, determining which host a service is running on at the click of a button.
• Trickle-down effects of the incident. For example, discovering other services running on the same troublesome host.

This means you can quickly investigate and communicate all aspects of the incident.

Team communication

Clear and reliable incident communication is undeniably critical during incident management.

Benefits

A solid communication platform helps teams communicate, share observations, links, and screenshots in a way that’s timestamped and preserved. This brings the right information and people together during an incident, and creates a rich record to learn from after the incident.

Features

Customer communication

Customer communication tools help keep customers informed during an incident.

Benefits

There’s no getting around it, incidents are typically a bad experience for your customers. Keeping customers informed builds trust and speeds up response efforts. Communicating with customers lets them know you’re aware of the incident and working on a fix.

Features

Incident command center

Your canonical record of the incident and its key details live in an incident command center. This could be an incident tool like Opsgenie or an issue-tracking tool like Jira.

Benefits

A command center tool offers one place to get everyone up to speed during and after an incident, listing key details like incident status, associated alerts, updates, and more. It also provides a historical record of the incident and its associated response effort.

Features

Postmortem and analysis

Postmortems are a written record of what happened during the incident and any follow-up actions taken to prevent it from happening again.

Benefits

After an incident is resolved, teams still often don’t know the root causes and are at risk of the same incident happening again. Postmortems help to prevent that by bringing the team together for a post-incident analysis.

Features

Issue tracking

An issue tracking tool helps the team map out future remediation work that needs to be done.

Benefits

Resolving the incident often brings the service back online without addressing the root cause. Typically, more engineering work needs to be done to remediate root causes and ensure the incident doesn’t repeat itself. Issue and work tracking tools — which your team is hopefully already using for other development work — help ensure this work is prioritized and doesn’t fall through the cracks.

Features