Murphy’s Law—anything that can screw up, will—applies perfectly to security. It’s impossible to prepare for every possible scenario, so security teams use incident management systems to deal with surprises and cut down risks. This article will lay out the fundamentals of incident management (with the help of no-code, no less) and offer a basic framework to kick things off. Let’s go. 

What is incident management?

Incident management is what development and IT Ops teams do to fix things when something unexpected screws up a service and knocks it out of whack. If something messes up the quality of a service and needs an urgent fix, that's an incident. 

Whether it’s a business app crashing or a web server crawling along, barely functioning, and killing productivity—it’s an incident. The severity of incidents can range from minor annoyances to massive breakdowns affecting global services.

An incident is considered resolved when the service is back to normal, doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, and only the essential tasks to fix the mess and get everything running again have been completed.

What is not, in fact, incident management?

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let’s clear up what incident management isn’t about. An incident doesn’t always mean an emergency—it’s just something that messes up the usual workflow. That could be as serious as a cyberattack or as bizarre as a bird hitting a camera. Tackle incidents by priority, yet even the small stuff gets fixed, logged, and picked apart to spot any bigger risks lurking.

Incident management is its own beast, separate from problem and change management. Problem management is about spotting potential trouble before it hits and setting up defenses. Change management is about smoothing out the bumps when shifting things around in an organization. These are different because incident management is all about dealing with stuff right as it happens and then maybe digging into deeper issues if needed.

Every place needs an incident management system. It helps make sure the right people know what to do when things go south, and it helps keep everyone honest and in the loop. Everyone from the folks on the ground to the communication teams should know how their incident management game plan works.

Why is incident management important?

Incident management is a must. Mess it up, and you're bleeding money thanks to service outages. Teams need a no-nonsense way to keep things running smoothly. They must prioritize incidents, resolve them fast, and make sure users aren't left hanging.

When things go sideways, here's what teams need:

• A solid plan to snap back quickly.
• Clear communication with everyone—customers, stakeholders, service owners, you name it.
• Strong teamwork to tackle the problem and knock down anything slowing them down.
• A mindset geared towards learning from these mess-ups to sharpen their process for next time.

What are the types of incident management processes?

Different companies need different incident management styles—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Some stick with the old-school IT incident management that you see in ITIL certifications. Others go for something more modern, like what you'd find in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or DevOps approaches.

IT incident management steps

Incident management is basically IT teams playing detective to fix service screw-ups and outages. The whole ITIL vibe is about cutting downtime and keeping the work grind from taking a hit. You slap on some ready-made templates and bam, you've got yourself a cookie-cutter process for managing these messes. It logs, diagnoses, and fixes stuff while keeping a trail of breadcrumbs.

As for ITIL, it's the big kahuna for in-house IT squads. Teams pick whatever bits they need from ITIL—which, no joke, has a playbook for almost every disaster an IT crew can stumble into—and ditch everything else. ITIL is great when you’re all about coming up with a solid fix-it-now culture. It keeps things tight with set procedures so you can track every hiccup and fix. Here’s how:

Spot the screw-up and log it

An incident can pop up from anywhere—be it a rant from an employee, a complaint from a customer, a heads-up from a vendor, or just your monitoring systems freaking out. No matter where it comes from, just do two things: spot it and log it. In your incident logs, or tickets, jot down:

• Who cried wolf (the person reporting it)
• When they yelled (date and time reported)
• What's busted (description of the mess)
• Some fancy tracking number (unique ID for the incident)

Categorize it

Slap a logical category (and a subcategory if you're feeling fancy) on every incident. Helps you spot trends and stop the same old issues from party-crashing.

Prioritize that beast

Not all screw-ups are created equal. Assess the damage to the business, how many people are sobbing over it, any service level agreements at stake, and the potential money, security, or compliance nightmares. Stack it against other ongoing disasters to figure out where it stands in the line of urgency. 

Tip: Decide on your severity and priority levels before stuff hits the fan—it makes life easier for the incident managers.

Respond fast

First up, your frontline should try to fix it from start to finish. If they hit a wall, jot down everything important and toss it over to the next tier.

Escalate the headache

Pass the baton (and all that logged info) to the next team for further brain-racking. If they can’t figure it out, up it goes again.

Keep everyone in the loop

Regularly update everyone who's taking the hit, both inside and outside your team.

Dig deep and diagnose

Keep at it until you figure out what the heck went wrong. Sometimes you’ve got to pull in external brainpower or other department people to help get it done.

Fix it and get back to normal

Once you know what’s wrong, do what needs to be done to fix it. Recovery time varies because sometimes you gotta test and deploy fixes (like patching bugs) even after you think you've solved it.

Close it out

If it went up the chain, it ends back at the service desk for a formal shutdown. Make sure the fix sticks by double-checking with the person who reported it.

DevOps incident management process

In the DevOps or SRE world, the same heroes who build the service are on deck to run and repair it when stuff goes bad. It's blowing up big time thanks to our love affair with always-on cloud services, global web apps, microservices, and all that software-as-a-service jazz.

Nowadays, the software you depend on isn’t just chilling on a server down the hall. It’s likely parked in some data center miles away, serving up digital goodness to millions across the globe. Any hiccup can ripple across thousands of orgs, not just yours.

The whole "you build it, you run it" gig has its perks—like making agile teams even more nimble. But it can also turn into a wild goose chase about who's supposed to do what and when. While DevOps squads might thrive in chaos, it’s smart to have some solid ground rules for managing mess-ups. Set up a core playbook for incident management, so when things heat up, everyone knows exactly how to douse the flames and track down what went wrong.

Here are the three commandments of DevOps incident management:

• Take turns on the nightmare hotline: instead of having the same few suckers always on call, DevOps teams play hot potato with an on-call schedule. Everyone gets a fair share of potentially getting kicked out of bed to fix whatever broke at 2 AM.
• Who made it deals with it: the core of the "you build it, you run it" mantra is simple: if you built the thing, you're probably the best bet for fixing it when it goes belly up. Makes sense, right? You mess it up, you clean it up.
• Build fast, but don't screw it up: knowing that you or your buddy will have to handle the fallout of shoddy code means there’s a real reason to keep things tight and right from the start. Speed’s great, but not at the cost of turning everything into a dumpster fire.

Stick to these, and you'll see not just quicker fixes but smarter, more reliable building from the get-go.

What IMS platforms are out there?

Curious about which to pick? Alright, here's the lowdown, no frills:

• Zendesk - Keeps your service disruption headaches to a minimum. Think automated alerts and a slick ticket system that doesn’t need a PhD to use. Costs from $19 to $115 per agent/month, with a 14-day free trial to kick the tires.
• Jira Service Management - Swarming and on-call alerting that doesn’t suck. Solid for folks deep in the Atlassian ecosystem. Costs from free for 3 agents to potentially a lot, with a week-long free trial.
• New Relic - Keeps your tech stack in check with high-level alerts and a dashboard that’s actually useful. Pricing hits $99 to $658.80 per user/month, but no free trial, so buckle up.
• BigPanda - Aims to be your one-stop shop for incident visibility. Good for a quick overview of disasters as they unfold. Pricing is a mystery; you gotta call them.
• Corporater - Focuses on keeping your business from imploding when things go wrong. Custom dashboards and automation are the highlights. No free trial, contact for pricing.
• SolarWinds Service Desk - Does the heavy lifting from incident detection to resolution. Priced between $39 and $99 per technician/month, and comes with a generous 30-day free trial.
• Spiceworks - Free, ad-supported software that manages not to be terrible. Includes essentials like ticket management and custom alerts.
• Freshservice - Tracks, prioritizes, and fixes issues without breaking a sweat. Plans range from $19 to $119 per agent/month, with a 21-day free trial to get your feet wet.
• ClickUp - Not just for project management. Use it to manage incidents if you're feeling adventurous. Free to $19 per member/month.
• ServiceNow IT Service Management - A beast in the ITSM space, great for dealing with high-impact issues. Pricing is on a need-to-know basis, and apparently, they don’t think you need to know without asking.
• ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus - From Zoho’s stable, robust enough for most IT headaches. Pricing is $10 to $50 per technician/month, with a 30-day trial.
• NinjaOne - Tailored for IT and network security, with a focus on infrastructure monitoring. Pricing on request, but there’s a 14-day free trial.
• Uptime by Better Stack - Keeps an eye on your infrastructure with multichannel alerting and more. Costs range from free to $160 per user/month.
• Splunk On-Call - For teams that need real-time monitoring and incident response. It’s $5 per user/month with a 14-day trial.
• PagerDuty - Mixes incident management with some smart tech. Free to $41 per user/month, with a 14-day free trial to see if it fits.

Solid choices, all of them. Except, why try and fit your processes into something pre-made, when you can build it yourself?

Directual for no-code IMS

Directual is a beast for setting up all the logic and data handling your heart desires. Use the API builder and backend scenarios to wrangle the chaos of your incident tracking—from taking reports to updating statuses and pinging people who need to know. Just drag and drop logic blocks to control your data’s every move inside your app. You get a bunch of ready-to-go setups that walk you through common tasks like user sign-ups and data crunching, without you breaking a sweat.

Directual’s web-page builder is your toolkit for making the user-facing stuff. You’re throwing together forms, dashboards, and reports so users can report incidents and managers can keep tabs on them, no sweat. It’s mobile-friendly and comes with ready-to-use components. Mess around with colors, layouts, and more to make it fit your brand. 

Speaking of forms!

Check out our new Multistep Form—it's the latest and greatest. Create complex, dynamic forms easily.  It lets you crank out custom forms before you can even finish saying “incident report.” Need data quick? Bang out a form. Users need to update incident statuses? You’ve got a form for that. It's a plug-and-play solution, ready to handle whatever workflows you throw at it.

Afterword

Want to learn more about incident management systems and how to build one yourself? Head over to our communities to speak to like-minded no-coders—we’ll sort something out together. The links are in the footer below.