In the dynamic landscape of IT service management, ITSM, two concepts reign supreme - Incident Management and Problem Management. They might seem similar, and many use these terms interchangeably, but they serve distinct purposes. Through this article, we’ll navigate the nuanced differences between Incident Management and Problem Management, and apply these concepts in our own approach to incident management.

In the heat of an incident, having a clear and shared understanding of what’s going on is absolutely crucial to effective response. But often what actually happens is that people involved in incidents build their own picture and narrative of the event, shaped by their own expertise, their past experiences, and what they’re seeing and hearing as the incident develops. The pictures and perspective people build is often referred to as a mental model.

For technical teams, the findings from DORA provide a model for measuring and improving performance. With almost a decade of data gathered from more than 33,000 professionals worldwide, the capabilities and frameworks detailed by the research help teams pinpoint areas for improvement and areas to celebrate. The team at DORA categorizes capabilities into three sections: Technical Capabilities, Process Capabilities and Cultural Capabilities.

With the ever-growing landscape of digital technology and the internet of things (IoT), businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on complex systems to monitor and manage their operations. This dependency has resulted in an explosion of alerts and notifications, overwhelming IT teams and affecting overall productivity. It’s never been more critical to have an effective alert management strategy in place to ensure the smooth running of your organization.

One of the most painful parts of incident response is contextualizing the problem and understanding how and where it fits within your organization. If responders are unable to answer basic questions such as: Then you waste valuable time talking to the wrong people or solving the wrong problems — ultimately extending impact and hurting your response. It’s a common issue that, up until now, didn’t have a clear solution or workaround.

Most organizations view their tech and network operations center and their budgets as simply the cost of running their internal and external IT services. However, through IT cost optimization, you can improve how your Ops center team responds to service issues and save valuable resources too. So, what specifically is IT cost optimization?

We’ve long believed that incidents (and technical team cultures) improve when more people are empowered to declare, follow, and contribute to their resolution. But not everyone in an organization needs to be able to manage the processes, rules, and settings a company enforces for their incident programs.

We recently introduced Catalog: the connected map of everything in your organization. In the process of building Catalog as a feature, we’ve also been building out the content of our own catalog. We'd flipped on the feature flag to give ourselves early access, and as we went along, we used this to test out the various features that Catalog powers.

As you may have already seen, we’ve recently released a Catalog feature at incident.io. While designing and building it, we took an approach that’s a tangible departure from a traditional service catalog. Here’s how we’re different, and why.

Managing over 1000 services and applications is daunting for any organization’s IT and Tech operations team. With a diverse mix of on-premises legacy systems and modern cloud stacks, the sheer volume of activity can overwhelm even the most skilled ITOps teams. The task is made more difficult by the fact that observability is fragmented. On average, organizations depend on 21 systems that produce metrics, logs, traces, and alerts for various services.

Cyberattack prevention involves proactive steps organizations take to protect their digital assets, networks, and systems from potential cyber threats. Preventive measures, such as a combination of best practices, policies, and technologies, are employed to identify and mitigate security breaches before they can cause significant damage.

People seem to struggle with the idea that there are no repeat incidents. It is very easy and natural to see two distinct outages, with nearly identical failure modes, impacting the same components, and with no significant action items as repeat incidents. However, when we look at the responses and their variations, we can find key distinctions that shows the incidents as related, but not identical.

BigPanda transforms millions of events into a small number of actionable alerts, no matter where they originate. How? Watch this video to learn more. The video shows how BigPanda allows you to normalize tag values across all tools, aiding event enrichment and correlation. The open integration manager then makes it easy to pre-process the event data helping to filter unwanted events from the feed. The filtering strips out duplicate and low-relevancy events and keeps them from cluttering up the console.

Amidst mounting pressure from macroeconomic headwinds, businesses must prepare for declining consumer spending, less investment, and tighter credit conditions to survive. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) play a valuable role in helping businesses to navigate upcoming economic downturns, from optimizing costs to providing scalable solutions.

Ensuring the privacy and security of sensitive information is crucial no matter your company's size or industry. So when an incident comes up that includes sensitive information — Personal Identifiable Information (PII), financial data, accidental data breaches, or legal matters requiring privileged communication — your response process might need a higher level of security and discretion.

Reliable network connectivity is paramount for uninterrupted communication and efficient data transmission. The ping test is a valuable tool to assess network connectivity, identify potential issues, and troubleshoot them effectively. If you're seeking to troubleshoot network issues or test connectivity between hosts, this comprehensive guide offers step-by-step instructions and valuable insights for performing an effective ping command test.

Managing incidents is already tricky enough, and you want to get to mitigation as quickly as possible. But sometimes it feels like organizing everything surrounding an incident is more difficult than solving the actual technical problem and you end up getting delayed or sidetracked during mitigation efforts. We call that scenario the “people problem” of incident management.

This post will introduce Checkly, the synthetic monitoring solution, and their monitoring as code approach. This guest post was written by Hannes Lenke, the CEO, and co-founder of Checkly. ‍ First, thanks to Birol and the ilert team for the opportunity to introduce Checkly. ilert recently announced discontinuing its uptime monitoring feature and worked with us on an integration to ensure that existing customers could migrate seamlessly. ‍ So, what is monitoring as code and Checkly?

Chasing down critical information in disparate systems of record while trying to resolve an incident can make an already stressful situation even more taxing. Extra clicks, extra logins, copy/paste, socializing that information with other responders–it all wastes time and introduces more room for human error. Now PagerDuty customers can use Custom Fields on Incidents to enrich their incident data.

We’ve all been there. You’re working through some rather frustrating blockers during an incident only to discover that you don’t own the dependency at fault. Or, you’ve been pounding away at an issue when a fellow engineer reaches out and asks if your service is affected by some particularly gnarly database failure they’re seeing. But then what? Do you merge efforts and work in parallel or head for a coffee break while the issue gets attacked upstream?

A major incident represents a critical event that poses a real or potential threat to an information system's confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Major incidents can disrupt normal operations, impact your customers, and may compromise the security of sensitive data.

Automation has become a game changer for businesses seeking efficiency and scalability in a rather unclear and volatile macroeconomic landscape. Streamlining processes, improving productivity, and reducing incidence for human error are just a few benefits that automation brings. However, as organizations embrace automation, it’s crucial to ensure modern security measures are in place to protect these new and evolving assets.

When we detect a problem with your site, we can notify you via mail, a Slack message, a webhook, or any of our other notifications channels. This is enough for most of our users, but those who work in larger teams often need more flexibility. Today, we are launching our PagerDuty integration. PagerDuty is a cloud-based incident management platform that helps organizations improve operational reliability by providing real-time alerts, on-call scheduling, and incident tracking.

In the fast-paced world of software development, every minute counts. When disruptions occur, whether there are minor or major system failures, organizations need to bounce back to maintain seamless operations. That's where MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) steps onto the stage as a game-changing metric. Are you ready to unlock the secrets behind reducing downtime, boosting performance, and ensuring software reliability?

Are you tired of dealing with IT incidents that seem to pop up at the worst possible times? Do you find yourself struggling to keep track of all the moving pieces involved in resolving incidents? If so, it’s time to revitalize your incident management strategy. In this article, we’ll explore the key pillars of incident process management, best practices, and how technology can help streamline your process.

IT-Incident Management - a hot topic and more important than ever in the digital age. Companies are increasingly relying on technology to maintain their operations, as any downtime can have catastrophic consequences. On average, one minute of downtime costs $9,000. ‍ Therefore, an efficient and especially organization-specific incident management system is essential. However, there are many components and options in incident management, so what software stack should you use? ‍

Recently, Ron DeSantis used Twitter Spaces to launch his presidential campaign. At least, he tried to. As you may have heard, the event was marred with technical difficulties, resulting in false starts, confused hosts, glitches, echoes, and the “melting” of servers. Of the more than 600,000 Twitter users who initially tuned in, less than half remained by the time they relaunched the event using a different account.

We’ve all been there: Sleeping peacefully in bed over the weekend, finally getting rest after a long week at your computer making AI-generated memes writing code. Then at 3 a.m., your phone makes an ungodly sound, and you wake up startled, frazzled, and confused. When you finally type in your passcode to unlock your phone (because facial recognition doesn’t register your bleary-eyed, squinty face), you see an alert, and all dreams of sleep are over.

With the growing popularity of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform powering the microservices revolution, comes greater complexity with managing, monitoring, and responding to incidents at scale. Challenges with real production environments include full visibility into your clusters and environment’s health, alongside real-time incident management and response.

Here's what you can expect to learn from this article: Raise your hand if you like shipping changes quickly. (Yes, let's assume that everything you're shipping has value and isn't a vanity project). Chances are, you, the person reading this now, agreed with the above. When you start on a project, big or small, you want to keep any changes moving along and avoid getting stuck. The less time between the beginning and end of a project, the faster you can shift your focus to other things.

At the beginning of 2023, I had a great conversation with Carlos Casanova, a Forrester Principal Analyst, in a recent webinar about how AIOps can help drive successful organizational change. According to our conversation, Carlos has divided the AIOps market into two camps: technology-centric (primarily APM/Observability players) and process-centric. PagerDuty is a process-centric solution leveraging multiple technologies.

In the complex world of Kubernetes, logs serve as the backbone of effective monitoring, debugging, and issue diagnosis. They provide indispensable insights into the behavior and performance of individual components within a Kubernetes cluster, such as containers, nodes, and services.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process designed to uncover the fundamental, underlying issues that lead to IT incidents. These 'root causes' are often masked by surface-level symptoms, making them challenging to identify without a systematic approach. Root Cause Analysis serves as a metaphorical excavation, drilling past the initial problems to discover deeper, hidden issues.

Incidents and accidents can occur in various domains, from information technology and cybersecurity breaches to workplace accidents and transportation mishaps. When faced with such incidents, it becomes crucial to conduct a thorough analysis to understand the underlying causes and implications. Incident analysis goes beyond problem-solving; it offers valuable insights into preventing future occurrences and improving systems and processes.

Grafana Incident, Grafana’s powerful incident response tool, comes with a range of integrations out of the box, including Zoom and Google Meet spaces, GitHub and JIRA issues, and even a Google Doc template for post-incident review documents. However, every team has unique needs and workflows, and you may need to integrate with other systems not currently on our roadmap or even use your own in-house tools.

In today's business environment, the continuity of IT systems is crucial to the success of an organization. Unforeseen disasters, such as infrastructure failures or cyber attacks, can severely impact the productivity of your organization. To mitigate these risks, IT departments must develop and implement robust disaster recovery (DR) plans. But, how can you ensure that these plans work effectively in times of crisis?

When it comes to keeping your business’s lights on, you need to manage and orchestrate your operational activities, prioritize high-impact and urgent work, and maintain day-to-day precision. Trust is paramount during mission-critical, time-sensitive crisis response and the narrow margin for error means there is little room and low acceptance for generative AI hallucinations or false positives.

The first moments of incident response can be among the most crucial, which in turn can also make them among the most stressful. There are many ways to ensure incidents are kicked off smoothly, but a recent focus of ours was to ensure they could be kicked off quickly. After all, the faster you're able to start mitigating your incident, the more successful you'll be!