Incident Management 101

Put simply, incident management is the practice IT and development teams use to respond to unexpected issues, like something crashing, slowing down, or just acting weird, so they can get things back to normal as fast as possible.

Across the ITSM world, an incident is anything that disrupts or reduces the quality of a service and needs immediate attention. If you’re following ITIL best practices, you might call it a major incident if it’s something big and gnarly.

Incidents can come in all shapes and sizes. A critical business app going offline? Definitely an incident. A sluggish server that’s still technically up but slowing down productivity? That’s one, too, because it’s a sign of trouble brewing.

The goal? Resolve the issue and restore service to its normal, expected state. You’re not trying to fix every root cause at this stage (that’s called Problem Management) just contain the impact and get users back on track.

Why Incident Management Matters

Incidents are stressful, but a solid incident management process makes life a lot easier. Here’s what good incident handling looks like:

• Detect: Spot the problem before users do (via monitoring tools).
• Respond: Escalate quickly and efficiently to swarm with alacrity.
• Recover: Things break. The goal is to clean up fast.
• Learn: Run blameless postmortems. No finger-pointing.
• Improve: Make sure you don’t run into the same issue twice by identifying the root cause. 

When things go wrong, teams need a game plan. That means being able to:

• Prioritize and handle incidents fast.
• Communicate clearly with customers and internal stakeholders.
• Collaborate efficiently across teams.
• Learn from each incident and constantly refine processes.

Different Ways to Tackle Incident Management

Incident management isn’t one-size-fits-all. Teams use different approaches depending on their structure, tooling, and culture. The two most common are:

1. Traditional ITIL-Style Incident Management

If you’re running internal IT services or corporate systems, you’ve probably bumped into ITIL-based processes. This approach is all about consistency and structure.

Here’s how the typical ITSM/ITIL workflow looks:

1. Identify and Log

Incidents can come from anyone, users, monitoring tools, support staff. The first step is logging the issue with key details: what’s broken, who reported it, when it happened, and a tracking ID.

2. Categorize

Classify incidents by type and sub-type. This makes it easier to spot recurring issues and improve problem management over time.

3. Prioritize

Evaluate the business impact, how many users are affected, any SLAs, and other risks (like security). Predefined severity levels really help here.

4. Respond

• Initial diagnosis: Frontline support tries to fix it.
• Escalate: If they can’t, bump it to the next level.
• Communicate: Keep stakeholders informed.
• Investigate: Dive deeper, bring in help if needed.
• Resolve & recover: Apply a fix, then restore full service.
• Close: Only the service desk closes the ticket after confirming with the original reporter that things are back to normal. 
  

This structured method works great when teams need clear roles, repeatable workflows, and strong documentation.

DevOps & SRE-Style Incident Management

If you’re running always-on cloud services, web apps, or SaaS platforms, this might be more your speed. In the DevOps or SRE world, the team that builds the service is the one that runs (and fixes) it.

This model has taken off thanks to the rise of global, real-time systems where speed and accountability are everything.

Three core principles define this approach:

• On-call rotation: Everyone shares the on-call load. No one’s stuck being the go-to person 24/7.
• “You build it, you run it”: Engineers who built the service are usually best equipped to fix it.
• Move fast, but own it: Knowing you’re on the hook when something breaks leads to better-quality code.

Even though this method is more flexible, you’ll still want a clear process so everyone knows how to react in an incident. Think: playbooks, runbooks, and structured post-incident reviews.

Tools of the Trade

Incident management isn’t just about people, it’s also about the right tools. Here’s what your stack might include:

• Incident tracking: Tools like Jira Service Management help log, assign, and monitor tickets.
• Chat ops: Real-time messaging tools (like Slack or Microsoft Teams) are essential for quick collaboration.
• Video calls: When chat isn’t enough, jump on a call to talk through solutions fast.
• Alerting: Set up monitoring integrations that ping the right people at the right time.
• Documentation: Use platforms like Confluence to keep track of playbooks, runbooks, and postmortems.
• Status pages: Tools like Atlassian’s Statuspage help keep users and stakeholders informed while you’re working the issue.

Wrapping It Up

Incidents happen, it’s inevitable. But how your team responds can make or break the customer experience and your reputation. Whether you follow a formal ITIL framework or a fast-paced DevOps model, the key is to be prepared, stay calm, and always learn from what went wrong and follow incident management best practices.

At the end of the day, good incident management isn’t just about fixing things. It’s about building trust, improving reliability, and continuously evolving your services. Praecipio includes incident management best practices as a component of all ITSM implementations, let us know if we can help nail yours.