Solving Incident Management Challenges for MSPs
In this chapter, we break down the key challenges MSPs face at each stage of the incident lifecycle and provide proven solutions to address them. The recommendations are drawn from real-world feedback from ilert’s MSP customers and incorporate best practices we have refined through years of working with leading service providers.
This guide is designed not just to highlight common pitfalls but to offer practical, battle-tested strategies that enable MSPs to strengthen their incident management processes and deliver top-notch service to their clients.
Top struggles MSPs face at the start of incident management
Lack of a clear incident management policy
Many MSPs operate reactively without a formalized incident response plan. This leads to ad hoc decision-making, confusion during high-stress incidents, and inconsistent customer experiences.
Solution:
Establish a standardized, documented incident response framework—ITIL is a solid starting point—and turn it into a living playbook. ITIL provides a structured approach to IT service management, including defined processes for incident detection, escalation, communication, and resolution. Customize the policy per client where needed, but ensure internal teams follow a consistent structure. A shared understanding of roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, and communication procedures sets the groundwork for faster, coordinated responses.
Inconsistent risk assessment
Without regular and systematic risk assessments, vulnerabilities remain hidden until it is too late. Again, this makes MSPs reactive rather than proactive, which causes a cascade of problems when incidents arise.
Solution:
Introduce recurring risk evaluation sessions for both internal systems and client environments. Tools like vulnerability scanners and configuration audits help identify weak points. Integrate findings into a prioritized remediation plan. Align your assessments with compliance standards relevant to each client’s industry (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001).
Difficulty in SLA management
Each client might have different response and resolution expectations, leading to confusion in prioritization and breach of contractual obligations.
Solution:
Use your incident management platform to automatically prioritize incidents based on client-specific SLA settings and trigger alerts or escalations as deadlines approach.
With ilert, for example, alerts can be automatically escalated according to defined rules.
Breaking the chaos: Challenges when first alerts are received
Duplication of alerts
Alerts from different monitoring tools, often covering overlapping systems or services, can trigger multiple notifications about the same underlying issue. Instead of a clear signal, responders face a flood of redundant alerts. This leads to alert noise, making it harder for teams to identify the root cause quickly.
Solution:
Treat your incident management platform as a central dispatcher. Ensure that all monitoring and observability solutions push alerts directly into your incident management system, which can detect similarities in events and group them.
Diverse monitoring across multiple clients
MSPs often manage a wide range of clients, each using different monitoring tools and infrastructures. Some clients might have sophisticated cloud-native monitoring, while others rely on basic server monitoring or legacy systems. This diversity leads to fragmented alerting workflows, inconsistent incident detection, and delays in escalation, making it difficult to maintain consistent service levels and meet SLA commitments across all clients.
Solution:
By centralizing alerts from all client monitoring systems into a single incident management platform, MSPs can manage diverse environments without losing efficiency. Integrating different monitoring tools into ilert ensures all alerts are routed consistently to the right teams, with client-specific context and runbooks linked for faster resolution.
Manual alerting fails
Clients often report issues manually through phone calls or tickets. Both can be overlooked, which prolongs the time to acknowledge the issue.
Solution:
Bridge the gap between manual and automated alerting. For the tickets, look for the integration of ITSM and PSA systems into your incident management platform. ilert partners with the most used solution-providers on the market, like Autotask PSA, HaloPSA, ServiceNow, and others, and treats tickets as alerts. If needed, you can receive an SMS or a phone call as soon as your customer reports an issue.
For the calls, we have already mentioned hotlines. Let's look at how they work. You provide your client with a dedicated phone number, typically tied to a specific service contract or SLA. When a client calls this number, the system routes the call according to on-call schedules and escalation policies to ensure the right team is reached quickly, even outside regular business hours. An IVR menu helps clients categorize their issue (e.g., outage, technical support), enabling faster triage without manual effort. PIN codes secure the hotline, allowing only authorized contacts to trigger critical incidents.
Resource сonstraints and workload overload
MSPs often operate with limited teams handling high alert volumes, leading to responder fatigue, slower incident handling, and increased risk of errors.
Solution:
Focus your team's energy where it matters most. Use ilert to filter out noise, group related alerts, and escalate only critical issues. Automate repetitive tasks and clearly rotate on-call duties to avoid overloading the same people. Regularly review alert policies and workloads to keep your team sharp, balanced, and ready for real emergencies.
Inadequate access to client environments
When responders don't have the right access to client systems during an incident, it delays investigation, troubleshooting, and recovery, turning small issues into major problems.
Solution:
Prepare before incidents happen. Set up secure, role-based access to critical client environments for your on-call teams. Use tools like VPNs, bastion hosts, or remote management systems that are tested regularly. Clearly document access procedures in runbooks and keep emergency access paths (with client approval) ready. Fast access means faster fixes — and less downtime for your clients.
Communication challenges
Delayed or inconsistent updates to clients
During incidents, particularly major outages or service degradations, clients expect clear, regular, and proactive updates. Many MSPs struggle with inconsistent timing, vague language, or manual effort that leads to communication gaps, damaging client trust, and potentially breaching SLA obligations.
Solution:
First, define and standardize how often clients should receive updates based on the severity of the incident. For critical incidents, the first client notification should go out within 15 minutes of detection, with subsequent updates every 15 to 30 minutes until resolution. For major incidents, send the first update within 30 minutes and continue updating at least every hour. For minor issues, communicate within the first hour and provide further updates every few hours. For low-priority informational incidents, a response within 24 hours and an update upon closure is usually sufficient. Even if there is no new information, sending a "no change" update reassures clients that the issue is being actively worked on.
Second, MSPs should use structured and proactive communication in every client update. Each message should include the current status of the incident, a clear description of the client impact, actions taken so far, and a promise for the next update (e.g., "We will provide another update in 30 minutes"). It’s important to communicate in concise, clear, and non-technical language unless the client specifically expects technical detail. Avoid vague terms like "working on it" — clients should always feel they are kept in the loop with meaningful updates.
Mismatched client expectations
Clients often overestimate the MSP’s responsibilities, expecting instant resolutions for complex issues.
Solution:
Set clear expectations from the start and reinforce them regularly. During onboarding and contract renewals, walk clients through the scope of your services, standard response times, and what is — and isn’t — covered under their SLA. For major incidents, communicate early about the complexity of the issue, estimated timeframes, and what steps are underway. Never assume clients "know how it works" — proactively managing expectations builds trust and prevents frustration during critical incidents.
Internal communication silos
When different teams — like support, engineering, and security — operate in isolation during incidents, information gets trapped in silos. Critical details don’t flow fast enough between teams, leading to delays in diagnosis, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities to resolve the incident quickly. In high-pressure situations, these inefficiencies can escalate problems and make the MSP appear disorganized to clients.
Solution:
Break down silos by establishing shared communication channels and clear collaboration protocols. Use an incident management platform like ilert to create a single source of truth for incident updates. Regularly practice cross-team incident simulations to reinforce habits of fast, open communication during real events. A connected team acts faster, resolves smarter, and delivers a better client experience.
Multi-tenant incident handling complexity
Managing incidents across different clients with unique environments increases the complexity of status updates and reporting.
Solution:
MSPs need an incident management platform designed for multi-client environments. With solutions like ilert, incidents can be automatically tagged by client, SLA level, and priority, allowing for client-specific workflows without additional manual overhead. Audience-specific Status Pages enable you to provide real-time updates tailored to each client, ensuring that only the relevant audience sees incident notifications related to their environment, infrastructure, or service tier.
The hard part after the incident
Lack of clear root cause identification
In many post-incident reviews, teams stop their investigation too early, identifying the immediate technical failure (e.g., "disk full" or "service crash") without uncovering the deeper underlying causes (e.g., missing monitoring, poor capacity planning, or overlooked maintenance tasks). Without identifying true root causes, similar incidents are likely to repeat.
Solution:
1. Adopt structured root-cause analysis (RCA) methods, such as the "5 Whys" or Fishbone diagrams, to guide a deeper investigation.
2. Involve cross-functional teams in the review to expose technical and procedural gaps.
3. Document both technical root causes and contributing factors (human, process, system weaknesses) in every postmortem.
4. Use incident management platforms like ilert to maintain a complete audit trail, which helps accurately reconstruct incident timelines for RCA.
Blame culture or defensive behavior
If post-incident reviews turn into finger-pointing exercises, team members may hide mistakes or avoid contributing honest feedback. This defensive environment severely limits learning opportunities and creates a toxic culture over time, reducing the effectiveness of incident management.
Solution:
MSP leaders should establish a blameless postmortem process that focuses on improving systems rather than assigning personal fault. Incident reviews should be framed as opportunities to learn and strengthen operations, not to punish individuals. Training incident leaders on how to facilitate constructive, non-judgmental discussions is critical, as is consistently reinforcing the message that mistakes are symptoms of larger system weaknesses.
Lack of a feedback loop into operations
Many MSPs conduct incident reviews but fail to act on the findings. Lessons learned are discussed but not systematically applied to monitoring setups, runbooks, escalation policies, or client configurations. Without this feedback loop, vulnerabilities remain, and the same mistakes are repeated.
Solution:
After every major incident, corrective actions must be documented, assigned to specific owners, and tracked until they are completed. These actions should include updating runbooks, adjusting monitoring thresholds, refining escalation paths, or improving client configurations. Using an incident management platform like ilert helps link follow-up tasks directly to incidents, making them visible and traceable. Regular operational meetings should review the status of open corrective actions to ensure accountability.
