6 posts tagged with "incident-management"

Introduction​

This article is an attempt to list the best incident management material and guides available for free on the internet. If I've missed something you think should be here, do let me know and I'll be happy to add it.

• Introduction
• Reading Material (Articles, Guides, Slides, Books)
• Templates and Real-World Examples
• Conference Talks
• Podcast Episodes

Introduction​

Runbooks are a key part of incident management and preserve institutional knowledge. They can be used for both incident response as well as routine tasks like db maintenance and generating a complex report. We are mostly focused on incident response runbooks here.

• Introduction
• Best Practices
  • 1. Runbook Structure
  • 2. Runbook Content
  • 3. Updating and Maintaining Runbooks
  • 4. Testing Your Runbooks
  • 5. Locating Runbooks
  • 6. Runbook Ownership
  • 7. What Not To Do
  • 8. Dealing With the Unexpected
    • 1. What to do when there is no runbook for an incident or a situation?
    • 2. The runbook steps are wrong, or they don't work, or I don't have access, or the link is broken
• Conclusion
• FAQs

Best Practices​

1. Runbook Structure​

• Establish a standard format that will be used across your organization. This will ensure consistency and help on-call folks to quickly figure out the steps even for runbooks they may not have seen before. It will also help in editing and maintaining the runbooks.
• Get buy-in from your team on the decided format. If you don't have buy-in people might not want to maintain or use them.
• Create the runbooks as decision trees. You don't need a visual guide here but include it if it's easy to create. Don't have too many branches in the tree - that will cause confusion. If you find yourself adding

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
• Benefits of Using an Incident Management Tool
• List of Incident Management Tools in 2024
  • 1. PagerDuty
  • 2. Opsgenie
  • 3. Splunk On-Call
  • 4. Grafana OnCall
  • 5. ServiceNow
  • 6. iLert
  • 7. incident.io
  • 8. FireHydrant
  • 9. Squadcast
  • 10. Better Stack
  • 11. Rootly
• Conclusion

Benefits of Using an Incident Management Tool​

• An incident management tool streamlines the incident management process by helping to define and automate workflows. It can help you create runbooks, alerting and escalation policies, and define and manage on-call schedules.
• Incident Management software often come with integrations with your observability stack. Your observability stack is a key source of incidents. They can also integrate with your existing communication and

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​

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.

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

• Introduction
• Visit the SaaS Provider's Status Page
  • Locate the SaaS provider's Status Page
  • Understanding Status Pages
• Use External Monitoring Services
  • Setting Up a Monitoring Tool
• Check Social Media
• Run Manual Tests
• Incident Communication
• Conclusion
• FAQ
• Popular SaaS Service Statuses

Visit the SaaS Provider's Status Page​

The SaaS provider's status page will have first-hand information about ongoing issues.

How many monitoring tools do you have?

Chances are at least 2-3. One tool usually does not cover all cases, and it’s usually a combination of self-managed and managed tools. Self-managed gives you more control over custom configurations and cost. Managed ones take away the headache of running it yourself.

Prometheus is the de-facto standard for monitoring these days if you have a modern application stack and you want to manage your own monitoring. It is metrics-based, i.e., it uses metrics as the source of data from all the monitored systems. There are ready-made exporters for almost all popular infrastructure components. You can send your application and business metrics to Prometheus too with OpenTelemetry exporters.

This model does not work for all aspects of your service. E.g. If you want to monitor external properties like your website, or use synthetic monitoring to check your customer-facing APIs from global locations, you could use something like Pingdom or UptimeRobot. This becomes another source of data about your service's uptime.