Incident management for MSPs

Crafting a strategy for incident response

Crafting the incident management strategy for MSPs

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By investing in an incident management strategy, MSPs can ensure higher levels of service availability, faster resolution times, and improved client satisfaction. It also positions them as reliable partners capable of managing complex IT environments efficiently.

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If you're outlining the strategy for your team, we at ilert recommend dividing your approach by stages, where every stage reflects the time before, during, and after an incident. This will help you better understand your vulnerable areas and what tools you are still lacking to achieve better results.

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Stage 1: Laying the groundwork for resilience

Effective incident management begins long before an issue arises. MSPs must establish clear processes and ensure their teams are equipped with the right tools and training. Preparation also includes setting up monitoring systems, defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and creating runbooks for known issues. Here's a checklist to help you evaluate your current state.

Monitoring setup

Implement proactive monitoring for servers, networks, applications, databases, and cloud environments. Consider established solutions with a proven track record in the MSP realm, like N-able N-central, ConnectWise, Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, Zabbix, etc.
Set up alert thresholds for critical systems and customer environments.
Deploy synthetic monitoring for key user journeys (optional but recommended). Again, choose tools that are well-fit to MSPs’ needs, for example, Pingdom, Datadog, Site24x7.
Integrate monitoring tools with incident response platforms that are adapted to multi-tenant environments, for example, ilert.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Define SLAs for different service categories (e.g., response time, resolution time).
Document SLAs clearly and ensure customers have signed agreements.
Map SLAs to monitoring and alerting systems (auto-flag SLA breaches).

Runbooks and knowledge base

Create runbooks for all known and recurring incidents (e.g., "Disk Full," "Server Down," "VPN Connectivity Issues").
Standardize the runbook format and include detection steps, escalation contacts, and recovery procedures.
Maintain an accessible and up-to-date troubleshooting knowledge base, and ensure that all team members have access to the runbooks.

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Stage 2: Rapid detection and initial action

When an incident occurs, a timely and accurate response is critical. This involves incident detection, classification, and escalation. MSPs need a streamlined process for logging incidents, assigning them to the right teams, and initiating recovery procedures. Automation and alerting systems reduce response times and prevent escalation.

Alerting setup

Define clear, actionable alert thresholds in both your monitoring stack and your incident-management platform.
Map each threshold to a specific response play so that every alert demands a concrete action—otherwise, suppress or downgrade it. Use severity tiers, smart grouping, and time-based suppression windows to surface the truly critical signals while guarding your teams against alert fatigue.
Define escalation workflows based on response times and severity.
Provide your team with various alerting options so that they can receive notifications via the most commonly used channels. Solutions like ilert can alert engineers via SMS, phone calls, push notifications through a mobile app, messengers, etc.
Offer a 24×7 client hotline for manual incident reporting and instant alert creation.
Use a dedicated phone number that feeds straight into your incident-management platform, auto-logs caller details, and triggers the correct escalation policy. Equip responders with a quick “5 Ws” script (who, what, when, where, why) to capture complete context, and set up voicemail-to-ticket failover plus secondary numbers to ensure no call or customer gets lost during an outage.

Hotlines for MSPs

Some incidents can be detected and reported only by humans. This is even more true for environments where engineers have only remote access. Hotlines, also known as call routing, can and, in the best scenario, should be part of your incident management system. Built-in hotline routes calls based on on-call schedules and escalation policies, allows callers leave voice mails or report incidents to AI voice agents, and automatically creates alerts.

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ilert provides one of the most advanced call routing systems for MSPs on the market. If you want to learn more about it, book a demo or watch an introductory video on how to use Call routing in ilert.

Define on-call duty

Decide on the on-call model (individual rotation, team-based, follow-the-sun, etc.).
Set clear shift schedules, such as 24/7 coverage, weekends only, or night shifts.
Establish shift handover procedures, and document open incidents and context before handing off.
Rotate on-call duties fairly among qualified team members.
Monitor on-call workload (track how often people are paged).
Offer compensation, time-off, or other benefits for on-call duty.

Automation

Automate basic recovery steps whenever possible, such as restarting services or scaling resources. In ilert, you can do that by creating alert actions.

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Stage 3: Transparent client and team communication

Incident lifecycle schema — Incident lifecycle

Clear communication with both internal teams and clients is crucial for faster resolution. MSPs should provide regular updates, explain the scope and impact of the incident, and manage expectations. Transparent communication builds trust and reduces client frustration.

For internal communication within your company

Integrate your incident management platform with your chat tool for real-time updates. The most common solutions are Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Ensure you have a backup channel for communication, such as commenting directly within the incident management platform, in case your chat tool experiences downtime.
Employ ChatOps practices, such as automatically creating a dedicated incident chat and performing key incident actions from chats.
Define rules for posting incident updates.
Post all major actions and decisions for the audit trail.

For external communication with clients

Ensure your client, who is experiencing downtime, has access to the status page.
Update the status page manually or automatically as incident stages progress (investigating → identified → monitoring → resolved).
Communicate proactively to clients within agreed SLA timelines (e.g., within 15 minutes for major incidents).

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Communication during major incidents affecting multiple clients

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Of course, this sounds like a nightmare, but this happens. There are tools that can help you communicate with multiple clients. For example, you can create a single status page for a few clients and display only relevant services based on the visitor's ID or email domain. Audience-specific status pages dynamically present services and metrics tailored to each user's team assignments, ensuring that everyone sees only the information relevant to them.

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You can learn more about the capabilities of audience-specific status pages in the ilert documentation.

Stage 4: Post-incident analysis and reflection

After the incident is resolved, it's important to conduct a post-incident review. This helps MSPs understand the root cause, evaluate the effectiveness of the response, and identify areas for improvement.

Agree on how and where you document incident summaries. All team members involved should be familiar with the structure and have access to the postmortem templates.
Ensure everyone uses a "blameless" approach: focus on systems and processes, not individuals.
Check how you conduct an SLA compliance status. Prepare a template of the report for clients.
Update SLA terms as necessary (e.g., new thresholds or commitments following client discussions).

Automate postmortem document creation with AI

Automatic creation of postmortems with AI

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ilert AI simplifies post-incident analysis by automatically generating draft postmortem documents based on incident data. It collects key information like incident timelines, actions taken, communications, and resolution steps directly from the incident history and audit trail. Using this data, ilert AI creates a structured postmortem draft that includes the incident summary, impact analysis, root cause, and lessons learned — helping teams save time, ensure consistency, and focus on continuous improvement instead of manual documentation.

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Learn more about this feature in the blog post “Enhancing Postmortem Reports with AI.”

Stage 5: Continuous enhancement

The final step involves implementing the lessons learned. MSPs should update their documentation, improve their tools or workflows, and provide additional training if needed. Continual improvement strengthens the overall incident management process and helps prevent similar issues in the future.

Establish regular reporting on key metrics, such as Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), Number of SLA breaches, etc.
Run regular incident response training sessions for technical and support teams. You can use previous incidents as example scenarios for training.
Review and tune monitoring thresholds and alert policies, relying on the key metrics and feedback from engineers on the noisiness of solutions.

After running through the checklists for each stage, you will have a better understanding of how well you and your company can handle unexpected interruptions. Adjust recommendations to your scale and organization structure.

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In the next chapter, we will dive deeper into the common challenges that MSPs and IT Service Providers face when outlining a structured incident management process for the first time.

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