Incident Management Buyer's Guide

Is this guide for you?

If you're a team of more than one on-call engineer and you update your product constantly, you must have an incident management solution in your tech stack. How comprehensive, advanced, or, on the contrary, simple it should be, is the decision to make. But you have to choose something.

This guide is for DevOps and IT administrators who already understand that the pager won't save them in the next downtime and that they can’t afford to oversleep the next critical alert. It aims to help you not drown in the variety of solutions on the market and to choose the best option that will cost adequately and will cover all your needs.

What you can expect to learn from this guide:

• The key differences between real-time incident management platforms and other solutions providing incident-related features
• The critical and non-critical features to manage IT incidents
• Helpful tips on comparing solutions and testing them
• Identify metrics to achieve better uptime with your chosen platform
• Free helpful instruments for solution evaluation

Before we plunge into the deep waters of incident management platforms, we want to leave one more note for the reader. Dozens of platforms emerged in the last several years, and many of them are truly great.

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There is a tendency in the market to move from dedicated tools for one specific incident response stage to platforms that cover incidents from the beginning till the retro. We highly recommend you look at end-to-end platforms, as they are built from the very start as complete incident management solutions.

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Hence, we wouldn't recommend opting in with tools that aim only at the communicational part of incidents or only post-mortem creation.

How incident management is evolving:

Likely, the first time an incident management solution emerged in your attention field was at the time you first learned about ServiceNow or similar IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms. Those were the first to introduce workflows to centralize incident response.

Today, ITSM platforms fall short of providing the agility needed for real-time incident response. While they focus on structured workflows, compliance, and post-incident documentation, the progressive real-time incident management platforms emphasize rapid detection, immediate communication, and automated response.

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Various solutions have emerged to address the dynamic needs of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and IT operations teams. All of them have many similar features but introduce different approaches to resolving incidents faster.

Understanding the key differences between traditional ITSM and modern real-time incident management can help businesses make informed decisions that align with their operational goals and incident response strategies.

Why Choose a Specialized Incident Management Solution?

We know firsthand that managing IT incidents in complex systems is more critical than ever—especially when the high price of downtime can turn sleepless nights into costly lessons. A well-structured incident management solution helps organizations maintain always-on services and meet uptime commitments. It also tracks key metrics like Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).

3 Reasons to Implement Incident Management Platform

Here’s how these platforms will benefit your business:

1. Faster incident detection and resolution
   Modern tools, such as ilert, automatically escalate issues, enabling teams to respond within seconds or minutes. This is much faster than traditional, manual processes.
2. Better team coordination and less downtime
   Features like ChatOps and automated actions help teams work together more efficiently, shortening downtime and avoiding unnecessary delays.
3. Improved customer satisfaction and trust
   Quick problem resolution means fewer service interruptions, leading to a better user experience and stronger customer trust. These tools also boost a company’s reputation for being reliable and responsive.

Defining Incident Response and Alerting Tools

First, let’s take a moment to get familiar with the terms. If you are already familiar with them, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

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Alerting tools are software solutions designed to notify teams when specific conditions are met, signaling a potential problem that needs attention. They act as the first line of defense in managing incidents, helping organizations respond to issues quickly. These tools send real-time notifications through email, SMS, phone calls, push notifications, or collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. With features like customizable rules, escalation policies, and integration with monitoring systems like Datadog, Zabbix, or Prometheus, they streamline identifying and addressing critical issues, reducing response times.

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Incident response tools take over after alerts are triggered. They provide a structured approach to managing and resolving issues flagged by alerts. These tools help teams prioritize alerts, escalate them to incidents if they affect customers, facilitate collaboration, and track resolutions to minimize downtime or disruption. They also support post-incident reviews, enabling organizations to learn from issues and improve their processes.

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Together, alerting and incident response tools create a unified system for managing incidents. Alerts act as the warning signal, while response tools drive resolution, ensuring systems stay reliable and resilient.

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Real-time Incident Management Platforms vs. All-in-one ITSM

When searching for an incident management platform, users often encounter ITSM solutions like ServiceNow that include incident management capabilities. However, ITSM platforms may not be ideally suited for real-time incident response.

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ITSM tools are designed for structured, process-driven workflows, prioritizing documentation, ticketing, and compliance over speed and flexibility.

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On the other hand, real-time incident response requires tools that emphasize rapid detection, immediate communication, and dynamic collaboration among teams.

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Here is the table to help you understand the differences:

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Many organizations combine both solutions. For instance, solutions like ilert handle real-time alerting and ensure the right person is immediately notified during an outage, while ITSM tools like ServiceNow are used to log incidents as tickets, track resolution progress, and ensure compliance with governance standards.

Incident Management Features to Start with

Let's now summarize and have a closer look at the most important features that must be a part of your chosen incident management solution.

Real-Time Alerting and Notifications

• Multi-channel actionable alerts: SMS, email, phone calls, push notifications. By leveraging various channels, incident management platforms ensure no alert goes unnoticed, significantly reducing response times (MTTR) and enabling teams to act swiftly in critical situations. We also recommend checking that notifications are actionable, which means that the first actions can be performed right within the channel (without the necessity to log in anywhere or switch the apps).
  

• Alert customization and filtering to reduce noise. By prioritizing alerts based on severity and relevance, these features reduce the risk of alert fatigue and ensure timely action on high-priority incidents. Filtering out duplicates and low-priority alerts minimizes distractions, while tailored notifications ensure the right team members are informed promptly.

On-Call Scheduling and Escalation Policies

• ‍Flexible scheduling options are a cornerstone of effective incident management platforms. End-to-end incident management platforms, like ilert, this allows you to create dynamic, rotating schedules to ensure 24/7 coverage without overburdening teams. Your team(s) can view and adjust their on-call shifts, helping maintain a fair workload distribution. These features eliminate the need to create manual calendars and maintain manual schedules, reducing the probability of human errors and ensuring seamless incident coverage.

• Automated escalations to ensure no alert is missed. If one team member is not available and does not see a notification, an alert is automatically routed to the next available team member or higher-level support.

Integration Capabilities

Integrations enable incident management platforms to interact with a variety of tools and systems to ensure comprehensive coverage for time-critical events.

Key integration capabilities include:

• Monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus) These integrations allow platforms to directly receive and act on performance metrics and alerts, enabling early detection of system anomalies.

• ITSM ticketing tools: Integration with ITSM tools like ServiceNow ensures that incident workflows and documentation are synchronized, bridging real-time response with structured post-incident processes.
• Manual incident reporting: Platforms support incident initiation through manual inputs, such as incoming phone calls, ensuring that non-automated issues are integrated into the response workflow, too.

Integration with collaboration platforms, like Slack and Microsoft Teams, is worth mentioning separately. ChatOps go beyond simply sending notifications to channels. Modern incident management platforms leverage these integrations to enable users to perform key actions directly within chat environments. Teams can

• Acknowledge, reroute, and perform key actions right from the chat
• Report new alerts via bots
• Check the availability of on-call engineers with the help of commands
• Open private war rooms to avoid exposure to sensitive information
• Use communication from the chats for later postmortem documentation

Incident Response and Collaboration

Incident management solutions should also provide features to streamline incident response and foster effective collaboration. Here are the most critical things to look for.

• Shared incident timelines: All stakeholders can view a real-time, centralized log of incident events, actions, and updates. This ensures everyone is aligned and facilitates better coordination during high-pressure situations. It also serves as a record for post-mortem analysis.

• Create dedicated war rooms for major incidents: Incident management platforms enable easy and fast creation of war rooms for incidents. In tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack, war rooms are typically structured as dedicated channels or group chats with enhanced access controls to ensure only relevant stakeholders are included. Unlike regular chats, war rooms are designed to centralize all incident-related communication and resources, offering specific commands to perform incident-related actions without the need to switch apps.
• Communicate with stakeholders and update your status page using one tool: Stakeholder communication is just as important as resolving the incident itself. The incident management platform should enable teams to send timely updates to customers, partners, and internal stakeholders. The best option is to have status pages as a part of the alerting platform itself. It removes a significant amount of manual work from teams and, as a consequence, reduces the chances of manual errors. With built-in status pages, engineers can respond to issues faster without wasting time switching between various tools.

• Post-mortem analysis: After the incident is resolved, post-mortem analysis features help teams understand what went wrong and how to prevent similar incidents in the future. Post-mortem analysis tools should be able to collect incident-related information from various sources, including chats, alert details, timelines, logs, and monitoring dashboards. They should also be capable of describing the problem and steps taken to resolve it in a concise and clear manner. AI assistance is a great help here. Additionally, the formatting of the final document should be intuitive and easy to use, enabling teams to access and comprehend the data quickly.

Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting are key features of incident management tools. They provide actionable insights into performance, process effectiveness, and recurring issues, enabling teams to continuously improve and make data-driven decisions. Two areas are worth paying attention to.

• Incident trends and metrics: Understanding incident trends and key metrics is crucial for identifying recurring issues and areas for improvement. Look for solutions that provide:
  1. Key incident management metrics, such as the Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and total number of alerts, should be available out of the box.
  2. Customizable dashboards that Allow users to create tailored views of metrics relevant to their teams or roles.
  3. Filtering and segmentation.
  4. Sharing settings to facilitate easy sharing of reports with stakeholders through automated email reports, export options (e.g., CSV or PDF), or direct links to dashboards.
  5. Historical comparisons to identify long-term trends.

• Team performance and response times: Evaluating team performance ensures fairness, prevents burnout, and promotes accountability. This involves monitoring individual and team performance during on-call shifts. It also includes aligning performance data with compensation structures tied to on-call responsibilities. Additionally, identifying disparities in on-call workloads ensures equitable shift distribution.

Incident Management Features You Don’t Want to Overlook

Reliability and Scalability

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These are critical factors to ensure uninterrupted service and the ability to grow alongside your company. To ensure that the chosen solution will fit your company's needs today and tomorrow, pay attention to the following key aspects.

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• High availability and redundancy. To minimize downtime, a reliable incident management tool must offer high availability and redundancy. A modern incident management platform should be built on a globally distributed infrastructure with:
  1. Highly available architecture ensuring service continuity even during infrastructure failures
  2. Multiple geographic regions for data storage and processing to maintain service during regional outages
  3. Distributed system design to handle high loads and maintain performance at scale

When evaluating solutions, look for vendors with a proven track record of uptime and transparent communication about their infrastructure design and reliability measures. The platform should be built to handle mission-critical alerting without single points of failure.

• Provider-level redundancy. Reliability goes beyond infrastructure. Effective tools provide redundancy at the provider level and support diverse communication methods. For example, ilert uses three trusted telecommunication providers for alerting. By partnering with multiple providers, we ensure that if one fails, others will step in to meet customer needs. Simply put, you’ll always receive your alerts.
• Ability to scale with your organization’s growth. As your organization expands, your (chosen) incident management tool should scale seamlessly by handling increasing numbers of incidents, users, and integrations through dynamic resource allocation. It should also offer modular features that enable customization and the expansion of capabilities as your needs evolve while ensuring compatibility with both existing and future tools in your tech stack, such as monitoring systems or collaboration platforms.

Here are key scaling factors to consider when evaluating incident management solutions:

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Team Growth:

• Support for multiple teams and departments with different alerting needs
• Cross-team coordination capabilities
• Flexible user role management and access controls
• Pricing models that accommodate team expansion without dramatic cost increases
• Ability to manage complex on-call schedules across growing teams
• Team-specific views and permissions
• Consolidated reporting across the organization
• Automated user provisioning and deprovisioning

Alert Volume:

• Platform performance with increasing alert volumes
• Alert aggregation and deduplication capabilities
• Intelligent alert routing to prevent alert fatigue
• Alert throttling and rate limiting options

When evaluating solutions, consider not just your current needs but where your organization will be in 12-24 months. Ensure the platform can scale with your growth without requiring significant rework or migration to a different solution.

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• Security and compliance are non-negotiable when dealing with sensitive incident data.
  Key considerations include:

1. Data encryption: Both in-transit and at-rest encryption to protect data from unauthorized access
2. Access controls: Role-based access and multi-factor authentication to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data
3. Compliance with industry standards: Adherence to regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 to meet legal and contractual obligations
4. Audit trails: Maintain detailed logs of all actions within the system for accountability and compliance audits

User Experience and Accessibility

Beyond the incident management features, it’s essential to ensure the solution you choose is easy to adopt, user-friendly, and reliable. Well-designed platforms ensure that users can focus on resolving incidents rather than navigating a complex system.

• Intuitive user interface: An intuitive user interface (UI) is essential for ensuring that teams can operate efficiently during critical situations. The solution should have a clean layout, logical navigation, and easily accessible key features. A well-designed UI reduces the learning curve and improves adoption across diverse teams. To evaluate whether a UI is intuitive and clear, users can:

1. Request a product demo: Observe how easily key actions can be performed during a walkthrough. Another option is to check interactive demos that are also often available for many solutions.
2. Explore a free trial: Hands-on experience can reveal whether navigation feels natural and tasks are straightforward.
3. Review user feedback: Check reviews or case studies to see how others have rated the platform’s usability.
4. Assess onboarding materials: Clear documentation, tutorials, and support resources often indicate a user-friendly design.

• Mobile app functionality for on-the-go access: Since most of us have 24/7 access to our smartphones and smartwatches, you should have access to your incident management platform on the go. The mobile app should support all essential features available on the desktop, allowing users to manage incidents entirely from the smartphone. This includes receiving real-time notifications, updating incident statuses, communicating with team members, and accessing shared resources. A mobile app that supports daily usage empowers teams to stay connected and responsive, no matter where they are.

Consider the following points when evaluating mobile app functionality:

1. How regularly the app is updated and whether updates address user feedback.
2. The app’s ratings and reviews in app stores, as they reflect user satisfaction
3. Whether the app is available and fully supported on both Android and iOS platforms.
4. The availability of advanced features like biometric login for quick access and integration with device-specific capabilities like widgets or shortcuts.

APIs and Infrastructure as Code

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The Importance of APIs

A robust API is crucial for modern incident management platforms, especially in environments practicing DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). A well-documented, comprehensive API enables:

• Automation: This will allow your team to programmatically create and manage alerting rules, on-call schedules, and escalation policies, reducing manual configuration work and potential human errors.
• Custom Integration Development: This will enable you to build custom integrations with internal tools and services not covered by out-of-the-box integrations.
• Configuration Management: Changes to incident management configurations can be version controlled and automated as part of deployment pipelines.
• Data Export: Incident data can be extracted for custom reporting, analysis, or integration with data warehouses.
  

When evaluating incident management solutions, look for:

• RESTful API with clear documentation
• Comprehensive API coverage of platform features

Terraform Provider

If your company is practicing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, a native Terraform provider is essential. It would allow your teams to:

• Version Control: Track all incident management configurations in Git alongside other infrastructure code
• Review Process: Apply the same peer review process to incident management changes as other infrastructure changes
• Automation: Automate the creation and updates of incident management resources through CI/CD pipelines
• Consistency: Maintain consistent configurations across different environments
  

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Key Terraform provider capabilities to evaluate:

• Resource coverage (alerts, schedules, escalation policies, etc.).
• Import support for existing resources.
• Data source availability.
• Documentation quality.
• Regular maintenance and updates.

When combined, robust API support and Terraform integration can enable your teams to manage their incident management platform with the same rigor and automation as the rest of your infrastructure.

‍Steps to Shortlist Vendors

Choosing the right incident management platform starts with a thorough understanding of your team's and company's unique needs and objectives. This process requires a balance of introspection, research, and analysis to ensure the shortlisted vendors are well-suited to your requirements. We don't recommend starting this process vendors-first. The list of solutions on the market is extensive and constantly growing, so it's better to drop the services that don't work for you from the beginning. We are also providing a helpful checklist to score chosen vendors later in this guide. 

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Outline your pain points

Start by identifying the basic and essential features that prompted you to look for an incident management platform.

• Are you managing on-call schedules manually?
• Are you missing alerts and suffering from high-impact incidents?
• Is your business succeeding, and you need to find a scalable solution?

Describe the most painful areas and list the sources of alerts or notifications you rely on, such as monitoring tools like Prometheus or Datadog or manual reporting channels like phone calls.

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Setting up a platform that integrates your tools out of the box is much easier. Otherwise, you will have to invest time in setting integrations yourself.

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Identify your company type

As the next step, consider your company type. For instance: 

• If you are a managed service provider (MSP) handling multiple clients, look for a solution that supports multi-tenancy, audience-specific status pages, and alternative manual channels for triggering alerts, like a hotline. Otherwise, your costs may rise drastically as you will have to manage several independent accounts for different clients. 
• If you are a fast-growing startup that ships and introduces many code changes regularly, look for Deployment integrations that will connect your CI/CD pipelines with an alerting system. You will enrich alert contexts and will have more tools at hand to root the cause of incidents.
• If you are a mature, established company with thousands of engineers, you should look for comprehensive support of teams, roles, and advanced administrative features. You will also need access to advanced reports that will help you not only see the load distribution across teams but also arrange on-call compensation properly.

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Talk to stakeholders and users

Third, clarify who within your organization will use the platform. Engaging with key stakeholders from across the organization ensures a holistic perspective on the requirements. Engineering teams might prioritize technical integrations and platform reliability, while operations teams might focus on ease of deployment and streamlined workflows. Leadership, on the other hand, often values cost-effectiveness and strategic alignment with long-term goals. This collaborative approach guarantees that all critical viewpoints are taken into account.

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Check legal requirements

Don't forget to identify compliance requirements, which may vary depending on your organization’s location and industry. Here are a few examples. 

• EU-based companies must adhere to GDPR and sometimes ePrivacy, which requires strict controls over data storage, access, and breach notification processes to safeguard user and data privacy. 
• US-based organizations may need to comply with CMMC for federal contractors, which focuses on securing defense-related information. There is also CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) relevant to businesses operating in California, enforcing data transparency and the right to delete personal information.
• Managed service providers (MSPs) often face such requirements as ISO/IEC 27001 for information security management or SOC 2 to demonstrate trust and service integrity across multiple clients.
• The finance sector must comply with the DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), which enforces risk management, incident reporting, and ICT security measures to enhance operational resilience.
• Telecommunication companies often need to adhere to ISO/IEC 20000 for IT service management and may have additional standards, such as TL 9000 in the US, specific to the telecom industry.

Identifying regulatory requirements early can help avoid legal or financial penalties and narrow the list of potential vendors.

Where to Search

Once you have a clear understanding of your needs, begin researching the market for potential solutions.  Customer reviews on sites like Capterra and Gartner Peer Insights can provide an outlook into real-world usage and satisfaction levels. You can check what users are sharing about ilert on Capterra website. 

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For mobile applications (that you will definitely need for better alerting), you can always check reviews directly on the App Store or Google Play. 

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Additionally, vendor case studies and testimonials can help you assess how well a platform has performed for organizations with similar requirements. Read ilert case studies and learn what ilert customers such as IKEA, REWE, and Adesso are saying.

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Investigating which platforms your peers or competitors use can also provide a helpful benchmark.

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Pricing Models

Pricing models for incident management platforms can vary significantly, and understanding these options is essential for budgeting effectively and avoiding unexpected costs. Here are the common pricing structures and considerations:

• Per-user pricing: Many platforms charge a monthly or annual fee based on the number of users. This model is straightforward and predictable but may become expensive for larger teams.
• Usage-based pricing: Some solutions charge based on usage metrics, such as the number of incidents managed, notifications sent, or API calls made. This can be cost-effective for smaller organizations but may lead to high costs during periods of heavy usage.
• Add-ons and optional features: Vendors often offer additional features, such as advanced analytics, status pages, 24/7 customer support, and a dedicated customer success manager, as paid add-ons. Ensure that these extras are factored into your budget if they are critical to your operations.

Be mindful of potential hidden costs that can significantly impact your budget.

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For example, some platforms may impose limits on the number of alerts or phone calls included in your subscription, and additional fees may be charged for exceeding these thresholds. Similarly, storage limits for incident data or logs might result in overage charges if your organization’s usage exceeds the allotted capacity.

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Another example is call routing pricing: some companies charge per minute which makes budget allocation very complicated and most of the time unpredictable. By the way, at ilert, we pride ourselves on offering 100% transparent pricing with no hidden fees.

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Clarify these potential costs with vendors during the evaluation process to ensure there are no surprises after committing to a solution.

Maximizing Value from Product Demos

Preparing and sharing relevant information with the vendor is crucial to getting the most out of a demo session for an incident management platform. This ensures the demo is tailored to your needs and provides actionable insights. Consider sharing the following:

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1. Number of users within your company;
2. The challenges or limitations of your current system and what you aim to achieve with a new platform;
3. Overview of how your team currently manages incidents, including tools and processes;
4. Existing tools (e.g., monitoring systems, ticketing software) you need the platform to integrate with;
5. Incident volume;
6. Budget and timeline for implementation.

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All demos are usually built around a common scenario. You will be shown how alerts are received and escalated, how to communicate incidents to internal and external audiences, how to resolve incidents, and how to prepare post-mortem documentation.

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Here are a few additional questions that might help you better understand the reviewed solutions.

• How does the platform handle alert prioritization and noise reduction?
• What customization options are available for escalation policies?
• How does the platform support remote teams or distributed environments?
• What analytics and reporting features are included, and can they be customized?
• What features does the mobile app support and not?
• What are the best practices followed by clients in the same industry or of a similar size who already use this vendor?

Testing Platforms Yourself

A trial period is your opportunity to evaluate whether a platform aligns with your team’s workflows and needs. Follow these steps to ensure a comprehensive test:

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Step-by-Step Guide for Testing

1. Establish an account:

• Sign up for a free trial or demo account.
• Review the signup process for simplicity and clarity.
• Check if you receive immediate access or if additional steps are required.

‍2. Explore the onboarding process:‍

• Assess the quality and relevance of onboarding guides, tutorials, and videos.
• Note whether the platform includes default configurations to help you get started quickly.
  

3. Invite team members:

• Add users to the platform and assign roles based on your team structure.
• Test role-based permissions and access levels.‍

4. Integrate with existing tools:

• Connect critical tools (e.g., monitoring systems, collaboration platforms) to the trial account.
• Verify that data flows seamlessly between systems.

5. Simulate incidents:

• Create test incidents to understand how alerts, escalations, and resolutions work in practice.
• Check how incidents are logged and tracked within the platform.
  

6. Test notifications:

• Experiment with notification settings across different channels (email, SMS, push notifications).
• Verify that messages are delivered promptly and without errors.
  

7. Review reporting features:

• Generate reports to analyze incident trends and team performance.
• Assess the usability of dashboards.
  

8. Evaluate collaboration features:

• Test how well the platform supports communication and collaboration during an incident.
• Test the capabilities of integrations with Slack or Microsoft Teams.

9. Perform a retrospective:

• Conduct a mock post-mortem to evaluate tools for documenting and learning from incidents.
• Check for templates or guided processes within the platform.

How to use the Vendor Scorecard

How to use the Vendor Scorecard:

• Assign Weights: Assign weights to various criteria that align with your priorities or use the default weights.
• Assign Scores: Evaluate the vendor on each criterion and assign a score from 1 to 5.
• Repeat: Duplicate the scorecard and repeat the steps for the different vendors.
• Compare: Use the scores to compare the vendors objectively.

Questions to Ask about Potential Vendors

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1. Core Functionality

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1. Alerting: Does the vendor offer reliable alerting on the various channels you support?
2. On-call management: Can the solution offer on-call management and escalations?
3. ChatOps: Can the team collaborate on incident in Slack or Microsoft Teams?

Weight: 25%

2. Advanced Features

1. Call routing: Does the solution offer a hotline for on-call teams?

1. Customized status pages: Does it offer public, private, and audience specific status pages?
2. AIOps: Is AI integrated to accelerate and simplify the incident response process?

Weight: 10%

3. Integration Capabilities

1. Compatibility with Monitoring Tools: Can it integrate with existing monitoring systems?
2. Collaboration Tools Integration: Does it integrate with chat platforms (e.g., Slack, MS Teams)?
3. ITSM Tools Integration: Does it integrate with ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira)?
4. 2-way integrations: Does it allow 2-way integrations?

Weight: 20%

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4. Usability and User Experience

1. Ease of Setup and Configuration: Is the initial setup straightforward?
2. User Interface (UI) Design: Is the interface intuitive and user-friendly?
3. Learning Curve: How easy is it for new users to get started?

Weight: 10%

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5. Security & Scalability

1. Security: Does it offer SSO, MFA and data encryption?
2. Scalability: Can the solution handle growing teams and incident volumes?
3. Availability: Does it have secure and reliable infrastructure?
4. Availability: Is it hosted in multiple EU data centers and has collaborations with diverse telecom providers?

Weight: 15%

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6. Support and Documentation

1. Availability of Support: Is 24/7 support available?

1. Quality of Documentation: Is the documentation comprehensive and easy to follow?

Weight: 5%

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7. Cost and Value

1. Pricing Structure: Is the pricing model transparent and flexible?
2. Value for Money: Do the packages justify the cost?
3. Trial/Free Tier: Is there a free version or trial for evaluation?

Weight: 15%

Incident Management Metrics to Track

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

To achieve continuous improvement, it is essential to identify the key metrics the team needs to monitor. While these metrics will vary based on your specific needs and priorities, there are several commonly used metrics that serve as industry benchmarks.

These metrics can be grouped into four distinct categories: operational performance, stability, on-call metrics, and throughput.

Operational Performance Metrics

Operational performance reflects how effectively a service meets user expectations, ensuring it is available when needed and performs at its best. The main metric used to measure operational performance is Uptime, which calculates the percentage of time a system remains functional within a specified period, such as a month or a year.

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The table below outlines standard uptime goals and their corresponding allowed downtime per year and month:

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^{Source: DORA Accelerate State of DevOps report 2024}

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Other metrics include:

• Latency: The time required to process a request or the response delay, both of which should be minimized to ensure an optimal user experience.
• Performance: Typically measured using metrics such as response time, throughput, and error rates to ensure the system operates efficiently.
• Scalability: The system's capacity to handle increased loads without compromising performance or user experience.

Stability Metrics

Stability reflects the system's resilience and its capacity to adapt to changes without triggering compounding failures. The main metrics that help identify issues and understand the system’s behavior post deployment are Change Failure Rate (CFR) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).

• MTTR measures the average time required to resolve an incident.
• CFR quantifies the percentage of changes that lead to failure and is measured as follow: CFR=Failed Deployments/Total Deployments

On-call Metrics

On-call metrics assess the responsiveness and efficiency of the incident management process.

These metrics include:

• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA): measures the average time required to acknowledge an incident. 
• Incident Response Time: measures the duration from when an incident is reported to when it is routed to the right team member, including the time taken to acknowledge and provide an initial response.
• On-call Time: measures the time spent on-call to ensure a balanced workload and prevent burnout.

Throughput Metrics

Throughput metrics enable the team to assess the efficiency of the workflow and process within the incident management framework. This helps understand the pace at which changes move through the pipeline and how well the team is managing incidents and alerts.

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The main metrics to keep an eye on are:

• Change Lead time: measures the duration from when a change is committed to when it’s live in production, reflecting the efficiency of the deployment process.
• Deployment Frequency: the count of deployments to production over a given time period. 

Other metrics to track are the number of incidents and alerts*:

• Number of Incidents: measures the count of incidents in a given timeframe which may reveal trends and patterns enabling proactive incident management.
• Number of alerts: measures the count of alerts in a given timeframe, which helps reduce false positives and alert overload.

* On the difference between incidents and alerts: 

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IT incidents are events which lead to a disruption or deviation from the regular operating standards of a computer system or network. On the other hand, IT alerts are system notifications to administrators, network operators, incident commanders, or on-call teams that an IT incident has happened or is about to happen, if no action is taken.

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Below you find a summary of the key metrics to track:

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Once calculated, the following benchmarks can be used to assess performance:

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‍^{Source: DORA Accelerate State of DevOps report 2024}

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Regular analysis of these metrics will provide your team with real-time data to identify recurring issues, bottlenecks, and opportunities to streamline the incident response process, enabling more informed decision-making. 

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Now that you've identified the key metrics to monitor, it's equally important to gather feedback directly from your team, since feedback loops are crucial for driving continuous improvement in system performance and operational efficiency.

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Feedback & Optimization

Feedback Loops‍

Collecting feedback during and after incidents ensures continuous improvement in incident response.

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Step 1

Real-time Feedback: Gather input from developers, operations, and support teams during incidents to gain crucial insights, make informed decisions, and apply immediate fixes.

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STEP 2

Post-Incident Reviews: Hold post-mortem meetings to assess what went well, identify root causes, and refine processes or tools to prevent future incidents.

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Step 3

Ongoing Refinement: Regularly collect and analyze feedback to fine-tune workflows, enhancing resilience and reliability over time.

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With these insights documented, the next step is to use them for continuous, iterative improvement.

Iterative Optimization

Whenever possible, leverage the insights and learnings gathered to address identified bottlenecks and gaps in your processes, workflows, and tools.

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By systematically monitoring key performance indicators and collecting and incorporating input from your team members, you can create an environment where system performance is continuously monitored, incidents are managed more effectively, and teams can make ongoing improvements to enhance the overall reliability and efficiency of their operations.

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Final Thoughts

Selecting the right incident management solution is critical for maintaining system reliability, minimizing downtime, and ensuring seamless incident response. A well-implemented tool enhances operational efficiency by streamlining alerting, on-call scheduling, collaboration, and post-incident analysis. By choosing a platform that aligns with your company's needs, you can improve response times, reduce alert fatigue, and maintain high service availability, ultimately strengthening customer trust and business resilience.

Now that you have a clear understanding of what to look for in an incident management platform, it’s time to take action. Evaluate your current incident response process, identify pain points, and use the insights from this guide and the checklist card to shortlist potential vendors. Conduct demos, explore trial versions, and assess how different solutions integrate with your existing systems. By taking a structured approach, you can ensure that your chosen tool meets both immediate and long-term operational needs.

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that our solution ilert is an all-in-one incident management platform designed to help teams respond to incidents faster and more effectively. With robust real-time alerting, on-call scheduling, and seamless integrations with monitoring and collaboration tools, ilert ensures that critical incidents are handled with minimal disruption. Our focus on ease of use, competitive pricing, and exceptional customer support makes ilert a reliable choice for organizations of all sizes looking to enhance their incident response capabilities.

For more information on how ilert can support your incident management needs, visit our website at ilert.com or contact us at support@ilert.com. Our team is ready to assist you in finding the best solution for your team.