Incident Management Workflow: Best Practices

Incident management is a critical aspect of ensuring the stability, security, and reliability of any organization’s operations, including information technology, facility management, and emergency response. It encompasses a structured and systematic approach to identifying, assessing, and resolving incidents or disruptions that can potentially disrupt normal business activities.

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, where technology plays a pivotal role in almost every aspect of our lives, having a well-defined incident management workflow is paramount. This workflow is a guiding framework that helps organizations minimize downtime, reduce risks, and swiftly recover from unexpected events.

In this article, we delve into the intricacies of incident management workflows, exploring key components, best practices, and the importance of having a robust system in place to ensure the continued resilience of modern enterprises.

Summary of key incident management workflow phases

Incident management workflow refers to the structured process used for identifying, classifying, responding to, and resolving incidents in an information technology (IT) environment or within an organization at large. The workflow is generally designed to be a systematic, repeatable series of steps taken to handle incidents from the time they are initially reported until they are resolved. The workflow includes a variety of tasks, such as diagnostics, communication, root cause analysis, and solution implementation, among others.

Let’s explore these critical phases from an SRE perspective.

Workflow phase	Description
Incident identification	SREs must identify and document an incident so that this information can be used during the triaging phase.
Incident triage and prioritization	It’s important to triage incidents and prioritize them based on severities that are tied to SLAs.
Incident investigation and analysis	Conduct a root cause analysis using the “five whys” method, identify common contributing factors, and correlate dependencies for troubleshooting.
Incident response and resolution	Use an incident response plan to collaborate with all relevant stakeholders to resolve the incident in a timely manner.
Incident communication and reporting	Define prioritized communication channels and keep all stakeholders and customers updated on the status of the incident with detailed documentation.

Objectives of incident management workflow

The primary objectives of an incident response workflow are as follows:

Quick restoration of service: The main goal is to restore the affected service to its normal functioning state as quickly as possible.
Minimizing impact: By managing incidents effectively, organizations aim to minimize the impact on business operations.
Standardization: The workflow provides a standardized approach to incident resolution, making it easier for team members to follow a unified set of procedures.
Documentation and learning: Proper incident management also involves documentation for future reference, which aids in learning and helps prevent similar incidents.
Accountability and compliance: By creating a standard workflow, it’s easier to identify roles, responsibilities, and timelines, which is important for regulatory compliance and internal audits.
Customer satisfaction: Effective incident management directly impacts customer or end-user satisfaction by reducing downtime and improving communication.
Continuous improvement: The incident management workflow isn’t static; it’s reviewed and improved upon regularly based on metrics, feedback, and lessons learned from past incidents.

Incident management workflow: from identification to reporting

Incident management is an indispensable discipline in the modern IT ecosystem, ensuring that organizations can recover quickly from unplanned disruptions. Efficiently navigating the turbulent waters of system failures and outages requires meticulous planning, prioritization, and execution. This section explores the technical aspects of incident management, including triage, investigation, response, and communication.

Incident identification and recording

In the SRE realm, incidents often first surface in the following ways:

Monitoring and alerting tools: Custom alerts configured based on service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) often serve as the first line of defense.
Dashboards: Real-time data visualizations can show anomalies that require attention.
User feedback: Despite automated systems, user-submitted bug reports remain valuable for identifying incidents.

After identification, the SRE team should log the incident in a centralized system, capturing key data points such as these:

Time of occurrence
Affected services
Incident type (e.g., outage, latency)
Symptoms and error messages

For SREs, it is important to capture incident details accurately, which serves multiple purposes:

Efficient mitigation: The more precise the initial information, the quicker the path to resolving the incident.
Enabling blameless postmortems: Detailed records create a learning culture rather than blaming individuals, an approach that is central to SRE philosophy.
Assessing SLAs: Accurate logs can demonstrate whether SLAs were met or breached, affecting reputation and, potentially, revenue.

Advanced incident management platforms offer SRE-specific features for documentation, such as

SLI/SLO integration: Platforms can provide the ability to align incidents with SLIs and SLOs directly within the tool.
Automation: You can automate routine responses, allowing SREs to focus on complex issues that require human intervention.
Collaboration: Features like chat integration help SREs collaborate in real time to solve incidents more efficiently.

Incident triage and prioritization

The first step in incident triage involves determining the impact and urgency of the incident. Automated monitoring tools often provide initial metrics, such as latency spikes or error rates, correlated with SLIs to gauge impact.

Incidents are typically classified into various severity levels, ranging from Sev-0 (most critical) to Sev-4 (least critical). Each level corresponds to predefined actions, escalations, and SLAs.

Once categorized, incidents are prioritized to ensure that resources are allocated effectively. Here, SLOs serve as a guide to match the severity level with the urgency of response needed.

Incident investigation and analysis

There are several steps to this phase of the process.

Conducting a root cause analysis (RCA)

A root cause analysis aims to identify the underlying reasons for the incident. Various tools and methodologies, such as the “five whys” or fault tree analysis, can be utilized.

Here are some examples of “five whys” questions:

Why did the incident occur?
Why did that specific issue or condition happen?
Why did the contributing factor lead to the issue?
Why was the contributing factor present in the first place?
Why didn’t existing preventive measures or controls address the contributing factor?

These questions are used iteratively to delve deeper into the causes of an incident and ultimately identify the root cause.

Identifying contributing factors

Besides the main cause, there are often other contributing factors that exacerbate the problem, like configuration drift, code changes, or even issues related to external services.

Here are some examples of contributing factors:

Configuration drift: The web server configuration drifted from its standard settings due to unauthorized changes.
Code changes: Recent updates to the Python pip package introduced a bug in the Python web server that impacted performance.
External services: A third-party payment gateway experienced intermittent downtime, affecting the checkout process on the website.

Correlating dependencies

Modern applications are built on layers of dependencies. Dependency mapping tools can help illuminate how different components interact and may contribute to the incident.

For example, consider the following scenario. An e-commerce platform experiences a significant slowdown in its checkout process, leading to frustrated customers and a drop in sales. By using dependency mapping, the incident management team can identify the following dependencies within the application:

Database server: The checkout process relies on a database server to fetch product information, customer data, and order details.
Payment gateway service: The application communicates with an external payment gateway service to process transactions securely.
Inventory management API: The platform depends on an internal API that tracks product inventory and availability.
User authentication service: The platform relies on a separate authentication service to verify customer identities.

You can see how dependency mapping helps highlight the various components that interact with the checkout process. This can reveal potential points of failure or bottlenecks, such as a slow database server or issues with the payment gateway service, allowing the incident management team to investigate and resolve the incident more effectively.

Squadcast’s Service Catalog is one tool that can help map dependencies with a single click and meets all the requirements that an SRE on-call engineer might have. For example, when you click on View Dependency on the Service Overview pane, you can see how each service depends on other sets of services.

Squadcast Service Catalog in the dashboard — Squadcast Service Catalog

Incident response and resolution

Having a predefined incident response plan is essential. This plan should detail roles, responsibilities, and action steps based on the severity and type of the incident. Here’s an example of an ideal incident response plan.

As part of this process, it’s essential to coordinate response efforts and engage relevant stakeholders. Incident command systems often facilitate response coordination. The incident commander (IC) leads the efforts, pulling in subject matter experts as needed.

Finally, it’s obviously important to mitigate and resolve incidents in a timely manner. Quick (hot) fixes or workarounds are often deployed to minimize impact while a more permanent resolution is implemented.

Incident communication and reporting

Establishing communication channels for incident updates is an important part of this whole process. Channels such as Slack, internal dashboards, or a dedicated incident response platform like Squadcast are often used for real-time updates.

Informing stakeholders about incident progress and resolution is crucial for keeping stakeholders in the loop. This can range from automated SMS alerts and detailed email updates to status page updates.

Finally, document incident details for post-incident analysis. Every incident should be meticulously recorded, capturing timelines, actions taken, root causes, and lessons learned for future improvement and post-incident reviews.

Incident management workflow best practices: a technical overview

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT and software services, incidents are not a matter of if but when. Managing these incidents effectively is pivotal for business continuity and customer satisfaction. This section explores best practices in incident management workflows, focusing on documentation, collaboration, continuous improvement, challenges, and the role of automation and tools.

Clear documentation and standardization

Proper documentation is not just a regulatory requirement but also a cornerstone for effective incident resolution. It aids in real-time decision-making and post-incident analysis, helping teams understand what went wrong and how to prevent similar incidents in the future.

The importance of a standardized incident management workflow can’t be overstated. By using established protocols, teams can ensure a consistent and effective approach to incident resolution.

Incident templates and checklists can be incredibly helpful as part of the documentation and standardization process. They serve as guides for collecting essential information and executing routine tasks, thus speeding up the resolution process and minimizing human errors.

Custom content templates empower users to define personalized incident messages and description templates by utilizing the payload of a configured alert source for this service. If there is a template configured, the incoming Incident will have a customized message and description.

Shown below is an example of a custom template from Squadcast.

Squadcast custom templates using alerting tools as sources

Collaborative incident management

Promoting effective communication and collaboration among teams is essential because siloed information can result in duplicated effort and prolonged downtime. Teams should be encouraged to openly share updates and challenges.

Modern incident management platforms offer features like real-time chat, status updates, and collaborative editing. Leveraging incident management tools can significantly expedite the resolution process.

Finally, encourage cross-functional involvement during incident resolution: Having a diverse set of skills and perspectives can be incredibly beneficial. Engineers, product managers, and even customer support agents can contribute to resolving an incident more effectively.

Continuous improvement and learning

A detailed post-mortem analysis should be done after each incident. This involves reviewing what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved.

Every incident provides an opportunity for learning and improvement. Lessons learned should be integrated into revised workflows and checklists. Constructive feedback from team members can offer valuable insights into possible areas for improvement.

Challenges and considerations: handling high-impact and time-critical situations

Not all incidents are created equal. Some may require immediate attention and swift resolution, necessitating a dynamic and flexible workflow.

Incident resolution must often be balanced with other tasks. Prioritizing effectively is key to managing resources without compromising service quality. The incident response workflow should be adapted to fit the organization’s size, complexity, and specific operational requirements.

Squadcast offers customization capabilities across all its tools and exposes developer APIs to be able to accommodate all sorts of requirements and integrate with a wide variety of both open source and proprietary monitoring solutions

Incident management automation and tools

Automation can handle repetitive tasks like alert routing, escalation, and even some types of resolution. It frees up human resources for more complex problem-solving tasks.

Squadcast has an outgoing webhook feature that an SRE team can use to design automation solutions. Functions such as opening up relevant communication channels on Slack, incident documentation, noting SLO-violating incidents, and status page updates can be automated using this webhook. Detailed documentation is provided here.

Creating custom webhooks in the Squadcast platform

Note that while automation and tools bring efficiency and speed, they also require proper configuration and regular updates to adapt to evolving needs and challenges. This involves proper API support for the tools that are being integrated. Squadcast supports all major monitoring and communications tools.

Case study: How XYZ Corp streamlined its incident management with best practices

Let’s consider a hypothetical global ecommerce platform, XYZ Corporation, that recently faced a critical incident—a sudden outage in its payment gateway. This section will explain how the company might have utilized incident management best practices to address the crisis effectively and efficiently.

Clear documentation and standardization using immediate logging, categorization, and templates

As soon as monitoring alerts flagged anomalies in the payment gateway, an incident was logged in the firm’s management tool: Squadcast. The incident was categorized as Sev-1 (Critical Impact), affecting the company’s core business functionality.

XYZ Corp used a pre-designed incident template to quickly capture all relevant details. A checklist was also used to guide initial diagnosis and containment actions, ensuring that nothing crucial was overlooked.

Here’s a sample template for microservice incidents:

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Incident Template: Microservice Outage

Incident Details:

Date and time: [Insert Date and Time]
Description: [Briefly describe the microservice outage and its impact]

Affected Microservice:

[Specify the name or ID of the affected microservice]

Affected Components:

[List the components or services that depend on this microservice]

Initial Diagnosis:

[Any initial observations or error messages]
[Alerts generated concerning the microservice or its dependency ]

Troubleshooting Steps:

Verify microservice status:

Check if the microservice is responsive.
Confirm any error codes or status messages.

Review microservice logs:

Examine the microservice logs for error details.
Look for any unusual or unexpected behavior.

Check dependencies:

Identify any dependencies (e.g., databases, external APIs) and ensure they are operational.
Verify network connectivity to dependent services.

Monitor resource usage:

Check CPU, memory, and disk usage for the host running the microservice.
Investigate resource bottlenecks or spikes.

Test API endpoints:

Test the microservice’s API endpoints for known issues.
Validate input and output data.

Communication plan:

[Provide guidelines for notifying stakeholders, including internal teams and external users, and providing regular updates]

Escalation procedures:

[Specify steps to escalate the issue to higher-level support or management if necessary]

Resolution and documentation:

Root cause: [Document the identified root cause of the microservice outage]
Steps taken: [Detail the actions taken to resolve the incident]
Resolution time: [Record the time taken to resolve the incident]

Collaborative incident management using real-time collaboration tools

XYZ Corp immediately activated its “War Room,” a real-time communication channel on Slack where cross-functional teams congregate. An incident commander (IC) was assigned to lead and coordinate the efforts.

Squadcast’s real-time collaboration features enabled the IC to delegate tasks effectively, track progress, and maintain a centralized record of all actions taken, as shown in the figure below.

Real-time collaboration for incident response on Slack

Post-incident review, continuous process improvement, and learning

Within 24 hours of incident resolution, a post-incident review was conducted. All key stakeholders, including engineering, product, and support, participated in a blameless postmortem based on the documentation using Slack and Squadcast from earlier collaborations.

The review highlighted a need for better database indexing and stricter SLAs with third-party services. These findings were logged for future improvements, and a follow-up meeting was scheduled to track implementation.

Challenges and considerations

Given the high-impact nature of the outage, quick resolution was imperative. However, to avoid unintended consequences, the team had to balance this against the need for thorough analysis and careful implementation of the payment gateway fix.

Due to the critical nature of the incident, the company’s CEO and COO were directly involved, which isn’t a standard practice. The existing workflow had to be adapted to include executive-level reporting and consultation.

Automation and tools

Automated scripts were used to reroute traffic temporarily while the issue was being fixed, reducing customer impact. Squadcast’s automation features helped alert and escalate the incident based on predefined rules.

The use of automation and a robust incident management tool like Squadcast streamlined the incident resolution process. This contributed to reducing the mean time to resolve (MTTR) significantly.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the different phases of incident management workflow, triaging, and assessing the urgency of incidents. We emphasized the importance of communication and collaboration across different teams whenever an incident occurs and provided guidelines on the classification of incidents using checklists and templates. We also provided guidelines on developing an incident response plan and post-incident analysis and explored avenues for continuous improvement using detailed documentation.

We summed up all the learnings in the article and applied them to a sample real-world incident response encountered at hypothetical XYZ Corp. In the example incident portrayed, XYZ Corp’s efficient handling of the payment gateway outage demonstrated the effectiveness of incorporating best practices in incident management. The systematic approach—structured documentation, collaboration, continuous improvement, and the strategic use of automation—ensured that a crisis was turned into a learning opportunity, reinforcing the company’s commitment to operational excellence.