1. Detect the incident
Our incident detection typically starts with monitoring and alerting tools. Though sometimes we first learn about an incident from customers or team members.
Since incident alerts can originate from different sources, having a solution that integrates a variety of alerting and reporting tools can be the difference between a disjointed, cumbersome response and a cohesive, collaborative one. A solution like Jira Service Management allows teams to customize and filter alerts across all monitoring, logging, and CI/CD tools to ensure teams swarm incidents quickly while avoiding alert fatigue.
2. Set up team communication channels
An important first step is to set up the incident team’s communication channels. The goal at this point is to focus team communications in well-known places, such as a dedicated Slack channel and video conference bridge.
Within Jira Service Management, coordinating incident responses can be a smooth process. Not only are teams enabled to communicate in ways that work best for them — like Slack and video conferencing — but communicating with customers becomes easier with automation and customization, too. We’ll cover external communication in Step 4.
3. Assess the impact and apply a severity level
Now it’s time to assess the impact of the incident so the team can decide who else to contact and what to communicate with customers and stakeholders. Assigning a severity level not only identifies the impact of the incident, but it also lays the groundwork for resolution plans and external communications. In Jira Service Management, escalating an incident and assigning severity triggers automated actions as well as notifications to responders to stay on top of resolution progress.
4. Communicate with customers
We aim to communicate to stakeholders internally and externally as soon as possible. Communicating quickly and accurately helps build trust with customers and the rest of the organization. Like we mentioned before, the ability to customize the way you communicate empowers your team to work they way they want, facilitating a faster resolution. The ability to customize communication also empowers your team to take control of what message they want to project and when. Moreover, save your team time in the midst of an incident with automated replies from within a ticket, sent directly to the customer.
5. Escalate to the right responders
Initial responders often need to bring other teams into the incident by paging them using an alerting features in Jira Service Management. Bring responders directly to the incident ticket by grouping related tickets and tagging relevant responders directly on the ticket. This way, notifications are coordinated and everyone has the full context.
6. Delegate incident response roles
As additional team members join the response, the incident manager delegates a role to them. This is where it’s helpful to have s proper incident response playbook — developed beforehand — that outlines clear roles and responsibilities. Individuals on the incident response team are familiar with each role and know what they’re responsible for during an incident.
7. Resolve the incident
An incident is resolved when the current or imminent business impact has ended. At that point, the emergency response process ends and the team transitions onto any cleanup tasks and the postmortem.
Ideally, your incident management solution is keeping a robust incident timeline — which is the case when using Jira Service Management. Responders can access crucial incident data afterwards and develop a report that helps teams avoid similar incidents in the future and find the root cause. Postmortems can also act as a resource, on the off chance something similar should happen again.
