Picture this: you're knee-deep in resolving a P1/P0 incident, urgently seeking answers. What if you could tap into past incidents to get important incident insights and streamline your troubleshooting process? In this blog, we pitch into the practical aspects of leveraging Squadcast's Past Incidents feature to help you enhance your Incident Management process.

The Challenge: Reacting vs. Proactively Preventing

Incident resolution can be akin to navigating a maze blindfolded. Without a comprehensive understanding of Past Incidents, you risk reinventing the wheel each time. The absence of a systematic approach often leads to 

• Prolonged downtimes
• Repeated firefighting
• Drain on resources
• Potential knowledge gaps
• Ambiguity in performance evaluation
• Gaps in documentations like runbooks & playbooks
• Reactive Incident Management 
• Uninformed decision-making during new incidents
• More context for stakeholder communication

The Solution: Utilizing Past Incidents Feature  

Past Incidents hold valuable insights that can revamp your Incident Management process. With Squadcast’s Past Incidents feature, you gain access to a wealth of historical incident data. Past occurrences are laid out in a way, allowing you to discern patterns—whether it's a recurring issue or a one-time incident.

Read more: Suppressing Alert Noise during Scheduled Maintenance

How to View Past Incidents in Squadcast?

To access Past Incidents related to a parent incident, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Incidents List page and select the desired incident.
2. In the Incident Details page, navigate to the Details section and locate the Past Incidents tab.

3. By default, you will be shown 5 of the most relevant incidents that have previously been resolved.

4. If you want to review Past Incidents from a specific date, click on the corresponding date square on the heat-map. 

Here are the details shown for the relevant incidents:

Use Cases: Past Incidents Applications

Past Incidents can be useful in various cases:

1. Repetition Analysis: Instantly gauge the frequency of similar incidents over defined periods – be it the last seven days, the previous quarter, or beyond. This information becomes your compass, helping you decide whether you're dealing with a persistent headache or a rare anomaly.
2. Automated Resolution: For recurrent issues, Past Incidents guide you towards automation. As you troubleshoot, consider implementing CI/CD pipelines or Jenkins scripts that proactively address the identified problem. So you can skip manual intervention and let automation be your first responder. Read more on how Squadcast Workflows can help.
3. Post Mortem Replication: Hunt into Past Incidents with high activity levels. You may uncover post-mortems that hold the key to swift resolutions. By replicating successful resolutions, you sidestep the need for exhaustive troubleshooting, resolving current incidents at an accelerated pace.

Benefits of Squadcast’s Past Incidents

• By learning from the past, you eliminate the guesswork and reduce incident resolution times. 
• You can strategically fine-tune your infrastructure. Proactively make changes to prevent future incidents, ensuring a more robust and resilient system.
• Paves the way for creating automated runbooks and mitigation pipelines. You’ll be able to respond to repetitive incidents with predefined actions, such as server backups or Prometheus pod restarts, executed seamlessly through outgoing webhooks.

Practical Path to Agile Resolutions

Information is power. Squadcast's Past Incidents gives you the ability to glance back before moving forward. By extracting actionable insights from historical incidents, you not only resolve current issues faster but also fortify your infrastructure against future disruptions. Afterall, in the tech world, foresight often outshines hindsight. 

This feature is available to everyone who takes Squadcast on a spin via our 14 day free trial!