What is incident management?
10 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:
- Define a major incident
- Describe each stage of incident management
What are incidents?
Incidents are unplanned events that disrupt or reduce the quality of your service (or threaten to do so).
A major incident is a critical disruption to a service that requires an emergency response.
👇Click the tabs below to see incident examples.
👉 For example: Hakim, a Customer Service Manager, has received several emails from customers saying that they can’t access some of their account information.
This is an example of an incident.
Service outages and downtime can result in:
- Additional expense
- Lost revenue
- Loss of customer confidenceÂ
- Low customer satisfactionÂ
- Damage to organizational reputation
Teams running technology services today are expected to maintain 24/7 availability. You need to ensure your critical business applications and services are always up and running.
Incident severity
Incidents can vary from minor inconvenience (low severity) to major outages (high severity).
👇Click each tab to learn more about the different levels of incident severity.
A minor incident has a low impact on customers.
👉 For example A product bug causing a minor inconvenience to a few customers. Typically, these can be resolved by a front-line customer service agent.
Incident management
Incident management is responding immediately when something goes wrong and restoring service to its operational state. An incident is resolved when the affected service resumes functioning normally. Responding to and resolving major incidents is an ongoing, complex challenge for organizations of all sizes.
These are the goals of incident management for major incidents.
- Faster incident resolution. The faster incidents are resolved the better the service for users.
- Reduced costs. Reduced costs deliver value to customers at a lower cost to your organization.
- Better communication during incidents. Communication is key when dealing with incidents, both internally to affected teams and externally to your customers.
- Continuous learning and improvement. Each time an incident occurs, you need to understand how to fix it quickly and why it happened.
- Reduce future incidents. You can't completely eliminate future incidents, and trying to do so can slow your organization down. However, you can reduce the number of incidents and the time it takes to resolve them with a good incident management process.
Effective incident management
Effective incident management requires a combination of guiding practices, a strong team culture, and the right tools. These will all enable your teams to resolve incidents as fast as possible.
👇Select the icons below to explore the components of effective incident management.
Have a strong process
Establishing a solid incident management process is critical to reducing the impact of the incident and restoring services quickly. The image below shows the key stages of the incident management flow of work. Most stages fall within the service outage, followed by service improvement.
👇 Click the boxes below to learn about each stage of the incident management flow of work for major incidents.
How was this lesson?
next lesson
Create incident management teams in your service project
- Add users to your ITSM project
- Add responders to incidents
- Configure responder alerts in your ITSM project
- Create and manage an operations team
- Notify your incident response team
- Use contact methods to add alert notifications
- Set up your notification rules
- Respond to a major incident