In most engineering organizations, everyone agrees that in complex systems, failure is inevitable. It’s possible to prevent the recurrence of certain incidents, reduce their impact, or shorten the time to resolution. However, it’s impossible to avoid them altogether. In the past, we asserted failures are a result of people’s mistakes. It was all about “the bad apple theory,” focused on finding the “guilty party” and removing them to prevent future failures.

When your organization faces outages, errors, security breaches, and other incidents, you need to have a plan in place to take appropriate actions as needed. However, you also need a capable team of experts filling critical roles and responsibilities to execute those actions and effectively collaborate to resolve issues quickly. An incident response team, therefore should be developed in a way that avoids skills gaps in expertise.

Automated incident management is the process of automating incident response to ensure that critical events are detected and addressed in the most efficient and consistent manner. In incident management, time is of the essence and the primary benefit of automated incident management is speed. With automation, you can accomplish time-consuming tasks much quicker. This brings down the incident response time and allows the team to focus their attention on matters that require their expertise.

Incident response and management (IRM) doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Your ability to respond to issues in a timely manner depends greatly on how well your on-call engineers can use their IRM tooling and observability tools together to understand what changed and why.

SRE and DevOps teams are the backbone of system uptime and reliability. But managing On-Call schedules, alerts, and communication during incidents can quickly turn resolution efforts into burnout. This blog explores the top On-Call management tools in 2024, designed to streamline Incident Response and keep your team ready for action.

At ilert, we are dedicated to providing an effortless, seamless connection between our incident management platform and other popular tools that empower teams to excel in operations. We're excited to introduce two new integrations from the Halo suite: HaloITSM and HaloPSA.