Empower your IT team to respond to more incidents in less time, maximize uptime, and minimize interruptions
Better incident management is key to minimizing the impact of disruptive incidents.
But many IT teams are inundated with operational responsibilities, so their time gets tied up responding to incidents and performing routine maintenance. This results in technical debt and a rise in operational issues.
By using automated incident management, you can reduce technical debt, keep up with peers in your industry, and minimize the number of disruptive issues. Also, with automated incident management, you get a streamlined, less labor-intensive support model. As a result, your IT staff is freed up to invest their energies into projects that help your organization advance.
Using Gartner's best practices for automated incident management, we will help you better understand what automated incident management is and how to prepare your business to take advantage of it.[1]
What is automated incident management?
Automated incident management combines technology (including AI) and automated processes to identify and respond to incidents. An automated incident management system handles some of the more laborious and time-consuming tasks that an IT team has to tangle with.
Shifting from manual to automated incident management can drastically improve response times and boost efficiency. For a small or midsize business (SMB) leader, this equates to a higher return on your IT investment. These automated tools empower your staff to respond to more incidents in less time, maximize uptime, and minimize business interruptions.
What are the benefits of automated incident management?
Many companies struggle with both business-interrupting IT incidents and overworked IT staff. System downtime often results in the loss of thousands of dollars of revenue. Employee productivity plummets when they can't access the digital processes they depend on.
By automating your incident management, you both minimize the chances of these issues disrupting operations and relieve much of the burden off the backs of your IT personnel. By using an automated system to handle incidents, you decrease the chances of your staff suffering from alert fatigue and the kind of burnout that sometimes hits those with the heavy responsibility of maintaining the health of a business’s network.
Automated incident management can create a positive ripple effect that spreads through your risk mitigation system—as well as to your employees and customers that depend on your infrastructure's uptime.
Increased operational efficiency
When you use manual incident management processes, you expose your IT system to a number of human errors. People often miss alerts or inadvertently minimize the severity of serious issues. Even when a human team identifies an issue accurately, it may take several phone calls and emails to initiate the next action step.
Automated incident management, on the other hand, takes much of the human judgment element out of the incident identification process. And because the system can automatically send communications about an issue and take corrective action, you can shave precious minutes—or even hours—off the time it takes to mitigate a problem. As a result, your entire IT operation becomes more efficient.
Reduced incident resolution time
If you're relying solely on employees to initiate incident resolution, your time to resolution can easily get out of control. For instance, if someone is new to the job, gets distracted by something else, goes on a break, or is away from their desk or mobile device, action may be delayed. When you use an automated system to perform these and other functions, you eliminate the delays that come from having humans do them.
Automated incident management can give you quick and concise responses to problems without forcing people to stop their work to address the issue. For example, if a service needs to be restarted, your automated system can do that for you. In some instances, all you need to do to address a problem is run a certain script.
Enhanced triage capabilities
With automated incident triaging, you don't have to worry about prioritizing and categorizing issues because the system takes care of them for you. This is particularly helpful when a single incident affects many workstations or endpoints across your network. Instead of manually triaging each endpoint’s problem, you can sit back and let your automated system handle it.
This gives you more time to focus on how to get the system back up and running. You can also invest more energy in getting the best professionals to handle each incident. For example, if you need to outsource a specific category of incidents to an external team, you have the data they need collected, organized, and ready to send out.
Improved IT service speed and quality
Because an automated incident management system can quickly detect incidents and automate mitigation measures, you get the speed and quality you need to significantly reduce service interruptions.
For example, suppose you have an automated incident management solution that can mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The system can first identify a DDoS attack by studying the patterns of requests sent to a web server. Then, once it has detected an assault, it can automatically use blackholing to mitigate it. With blackholing, the system automatically diverts traffic coming from suspected IP addresses away from your server. Even though this may not "stop" the attack, it neutralizes it by protecting your web server from the malicious traffic.
An automated system can do this in moments and with a high degree of accuracy. Since the system uses straightforward attack data, the chances of a false-positive identification—or missing the attack altogether—are extremely low.
Risk mitigation
An automated incident management system mitigates risk by giving you a more proactive approach to preventing serious issues. The system continuously monitors your system and acts quickly in response to issues. In this way, you have enhanced, real-time visibility into issues, which enables you to respond to them before they become full-blown, business-interrupting problems.
What are the key features of automated incident management?
Even though each automated incident management system is unique, here are some of the more common features you can expect from a system:
Keyword routing. This automates a specific action once the system sees a certain keyword. For example, if the word "installation" appears, the issue can be routed directly to a customer support team that handles install issues.
Skill routing. Skill routing assigns tickets according to the individual or team that's best qualified to handle them.
Workload balancing. With workload balancing, you can decide the maximum number of incidents each agent has to deal with at any given time.
Escalation. Automated escalation involves leveraging rules to escalate issues to the appropriate people or mitigation systems. For example, if a server doesn't respond to legitimate requests for three continuous minutes, the system can automatically escalate the problem to the server management team.
Automated triage. With automated triaging, your system examines incident data, then uses it to categorize issues, assign a priority level, decide who should handle it, and even send that person instructions regarding what they should do.
Check out Capterra's incident management software directory, where you can filter the list by the software features that your IT team needs.
Prepare your business for automated incident management
To make sure your company gets the most out of an automated incident management system, take the following five steps:
Gather IT incident data. For instance, you may choose to collect 90 or 120 days of incident tickets.
Analyze your incident data. This involves classifying incident data using parameters such as how often the incident happens, the number of systems it impacts, or the number of employees or customers it affects.
Identify automation candidates. In this step, you pinpoint the types of incidents and mitigation steps you'd like to automate. In this phase, you’d also want to identify knowledge gaps your automated system could help circumvent.
Quantify the outcomes. While quantifying outcomes, you should use key performance indicators (KPIs) and then map your automation candidates to your KPIs. For example, you could map automated triaging to a KPI of "reduce the time it takes to assign tickets by 50%."
Prepare reinvestment strategy. This is where you decide how to reinvest the extra capacity you get, thanks to your automated incident management system. This may include giving IT staff that suddenly have a few extra hours a day the opportunity to work on specific value-adding projects.
Find the right tool for your automated incident management
Using the information and steps outlined above, you can prepare for a system that eases the burden of an IT staff that's buried with operational responsibilities. They can spend less time responding to incidents and performing routine maintenance. Your team can reinvest that energy in tasks that help your business progress.
Your next step is to start shopping for incident management software, which gives you a platform to log incidents and track, prioritize, and assign them. Our buyer's guide will help you weigh your options.