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Incident Management: 5 Best Practices for Seamless Operations

Website incidents happen at any time for any reason. Your website might stop responding to customers. Performance may slow down. Main pages start giving client or server errors. And when they do strike, it brings frustration and confusion to your customer, leading to lower trust and engagement.

Of course, everyone wants to avoid these types of incidents as much as possible, but you can never fully predict what will happen and why, which is why incident management is essential to addressing these issues as fast and directly as possible.

In this article, we will explore what best practices you can follow to seamlessly detect and resolve incidents to reduce negative consequences to your business reputation and services.

What Is Incident Management?

Incident management is a DevOps team process that lists out the steps for tackling incidents that affect the quality of your business. In this case, it is tied heavily to how well your teams react to issues with your website.

Why Is Incident Management Important?

With a great incident management process, you can reduce the level of chaos, anxiety, and confusion by clearly defining what is to be done and by whom. Without it, you could run the risk of too many people (or not enough) trying to resolve an issue, giving mixed messages to the customers, or slowing down the resolution time in general.

Best Practices for Seamless Operations

Below are some best practices for managing incidents that can lead to faster detection and resolution with the least amount of resistance and confusion.

1. Catch Incidents Fast

The first step in addressing issues is to identify them in the first place. This is where website monitoring enters the scene. First, you’ll want to set up an alert monitoring system that automatically detects incidents and escalates them to the correct contacts.

You can create alerts from different types of monitoring checks that continually monitor the health of your website. For instance, you can set up a basic HTTP(s) health check to track the health of your most important URLs and create an alert that will automatically send an email, text, call, or message to a third-party platform like Slack or to certain contacts if the uptime is below a specific threshold.

Other alerts can be based on site performance, virus/malware detection, page speed, SSL certificate expiry, DNS failures, and many more check types.

2. Assign Incidents Automatically

It is crucial to preemptively determine who will be responsible for addressing incidents and when. A useful tool here includes escalation policies and escalation schedules.

The schedules determine which developers are in charge of triaging on a regular cadence so that the responsibility is distributed evenly and fairly.

Policies determine who would be responsible for what type of incident. We’ll want to assign developers who know how to handle a specific type of error rather than someone unfamiliar with the product.

Escalations are necessary for when a developer may not respond in time to an incident, in which case you’ll want to alert another contact to ensure the incident is assigned to someone and does not go unnoticed.

3. Understand Incidents With Detailed Analysis

Your ability to resolve an issue relies heavily on your ability to understand it. The best way to do that is to get as much information about it as possible. Luckily, you can automatically set this up. Alerts should have technical details so the addressee knows where to begin their investigation.

Tools such as root cause analysis can easily determine the exact step that created the incident in the first place because it will give you response time metrics of each step completed before the failure, along with helpful screenshots and notes. Developers can easily look at header information, elements, URL paths, HTTP (s) response codes, and response bodies to piece together sources of issue.

4. Communicate With Clients

Incidents take time to resolve, so it is important to communicate with your customers about the status of the issue. A great way to do that is through public status pages.

Status pages can be static web pages that include messages, metrics, historical uptime data, and notifications. The best use of a status page during incidents would be a clear message that you are aware of the incident and the resolution progress. It will build a sense of trust between you and your customer, which can lead to higher brand loyalty and less frustration.

Uptime.com provides branded status pages with the ability to manually or automatically update incident status on the status page.

5. Prevent Incidents Before Users Are Affected

It is better to be proactive than reactive, which is why the last best practice of incident management is being proactive about catching incidents before users are even aware of or are affected by them, which brings us back to alerting.

Companies like Transcetpa have used Uptime.com to create alert notifications whenever their portal access performance fell outside their thresholds, leading them to look into the issue before it became an incident.

A good way of doing this is to set up alerts based on certain thresholds that could indicate an upcoming incident, for example, performance metrics that are starting to climb at a faster and higher rate than normal for your site, or a spike in sudden traffic to a specific API being monitored. These could be earlier indicators that an incident could occur.

Follow Best Practices for Seamless Incident Management

A well-created incident management process reduces resolution time and customer frustration with your business, which increases trust and loyalty to your brand. The above best practices will lead you to a great starting point, but you can use many more tools to automate incident detection and resolution. A great way to learn is to try it yourself. Uptime.com offers a free trial to get you started in learning all the different ways you can protect your website.

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