This article is outdated. Please refer to The Ultimate Guide to Incident Management Tools in 2025 for the latest guide.

Introduction​

Incident management tools are important for organizations to effectively handle service outages. With so many incident management tools around with different feature sets, it's often difficult to find the one that is right for your needs. In this article, we attempt to make a list of incident management software available in 2024 with their features to help you arrive at the right one.

We have focused mostly on tools that offer incident management capabilities - which include at least incident lifecycle management, on-call scheduling, and third-party integrations.

There are many good tools which are focused only on incident response, or on monitoring and generating alerts, or on the ticketing aspect of incidents. We have not included those to avoid cluttering this article.

Introduction​

Why is Slack becoming so popular in incident management?

Slack is one of the most popular communication tools used in companies. If you're part of a remote team, your team is probably on Slack or something similar like MS Teams. Although IM tools lack the communication nuances that are taken for granted in face to face interactions, they provide many other advantages:

• Access to historical data
• Asynchronous communication
• The ability to share links and documents easily
• Adding anybody in the organization to a conversation

Slack in Incident Management​

One of the trends I've noticed in incident management is the growing rise of Slack in incident response and management tools. I think this is tied to the increase in remote work after COVID-19.

Introduction​

There is a newer version of this article for 2025.

Maintaining transparent communication about service availability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Status pages are an important part of your communication strategy during times of outages and maintenance events.

You can choose to go with a fully managed status page provider, or host an open-source one yourself.

Open source status page providers offer a cost-effective and customizable solution. However, they can come with their own drawbacks. This guide explores open source status page providers in 2024 to help you choose the right tool for your needs.

Introduction​

Last updated on August 11, 2025

Downtime is inevitable but what sets successful businesses apart is how they handle it. A key part of incident management is incident communication with both internal and external stakeholders. A status page is a crucial tool for maintaining clear communication with users during outages or service interruptions. There are numerous status page providers available with different features. This article will guide you through best practices for selecting a provider that suits your needs.

Introduction​

Updated Mar 26, 2025

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintaining the reliability of your own applications. Like many modern teams, Slack might be your communication tool of choice. You can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Slack channel.

IncidentHub has its own Slack app which can be used to push incident lifecycle events to the Slack channel of your choice. It can be used to send incident trigger, update, and resolve events.

Installing IncidentHub's Slack App​

You must have the correct permissions on your Slack workspace to be able to do this.

Follow these steps to configure the Slack app in your Slack workspace.

Introduction​

Last updated on August 8, 2025.

Incident updates on the public status pages of your SaaS vendors and cloud providers are often the first indication that they might have an outage. Providers also post updates about upcoming and ongoing maintenance on their status pages. Monitoring your SaaS and cloud status pages to detect downtime becomes crucial to your business operations. This article will guide you through the process of effectively monitoring such status pages.

There are two ways to monitor multiple status pages:

• The manual process.
• Using a status page aggregator like IncidentHub.

If you are using the second option, which is the recommended approach, you can skip directly to the section on Use a Status Page Aggregator Tool.

In either case you will need to identify your cloud providers and locate their public status pages first.

Introduction​

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. If Discord is your communication tool of choice, you can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Discord channel.

Discord webhooks allow external applications to send messages to specific channels within a Discord server. This article describes how to integrate Discord as a channel in your IncidentHub account using webhooks.

Introduction​

Last updated on August 8, 2025.

Modern businesses depend heavily on Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is not limited to being used by software development teams. Almost all aspects of business operations - accounting, HR, payroll, marketing, IT, sales, support - depend on one or more SaaS applications. Given this dependency on SaaS applications, their uptime becomes tightly tied to a business's uptime. Any SaaS downtime can affect both a business's daily operations as well as the user experience. Measuring the uptime of SaaS providers is a critical part of your incident management process and business continuity plan.

How to check if a SaaS is experiencing downtime? Follow the steps below:

Introduction​

A recent question in an SRE forum triggered this train of thought.

How do I deal with alerts that are triggered by internal patching/release activities but don't actually cause a downtime? If we react to these alerts we might not have time to react to actual alerts that are affecting customers.

I've paraphrased the question to reflect its essence. There is plenty to unravel here.

My first reaction to this question was that the SRE who posted this is in a difficult place with systemic issues.

Systemic Issues​

Without knowing more about the org and their alerting policies, let's look at what we can dig out based on this question alone

A few weeks ago we released a feature on IncidentHub which gives you a historical view of your monitored services' availability.

Why Was This Needed?​

On the dashboard where you can add services and channels, there is an overview panel that shows total incidents in the last 24 hours. You can get into a more detailed view by clicking on the button next to it. This opens up a popup where you can see active and resolved incidents - in the last 24 hours - and filter them by service.

This panel is good enough for a quick view on what's affecting your dependent services. However, sometimes there is a need to look back further. This is what the Availability page gives you - an overview of service health over the last 30 days.

Let's look at a few examples: