Learn More About Incident Management Software
What is Incident Management Software?
Incident management software helps businesses preserve the uptime of their digital assets. IT teams use incident management systems to alert them to major problems or downtime, generate reports surrounding the outage or issue, and guide a plan of action in addressing the problem. These service management functionalities can be especially beneficial in situations where companies have numerous assets to monitor at once or a few mission-critical assets to monitor in real time. Regardless of which scenarios, IT service management automation is the key to fast incident response time. This type of software automatically assigns the tasks to the appropriate teams, provides insights into the cases, and generates actionable reports to optimize the IT incidents handling process. For example, a good incident management system will determine if a case should alert the DevOps team or the IT service management (ITSM) teams based on the type of the problem or prioritization.
Incident management solutions ensure critical IT infrastructures have as much uptime as possible. Once an incident is spotted by monitoring software or an end-user report, the tool automates notifications to all relevant team members or personnel via email, text, call, or communication software. By notifying the exact people or teams needed to address an issue and preparing an immediate report of the issue, incident management software helps the IT teams find root causes and deal with them quickly.
The most reliable incident management software for IT teams and system administrators typically combines fast alert delivery, on-call rotation management, and integration with existing monitoring and collaboration tools into a single platform that runs without interruption during critical incidents. Based on G2 reviews, IT operations and SRE teams evaluate incident management software by comparing MTTR reduction, on-call scheduling flexibility, and how cleanly the platform integrates with existing monitoring, ticketing, and chat tools.
What are the Common Features of Incident Management Software?
The following are some core features within incident management tools that can help users maintain their IT system’s uptime:
Self-service portal: Before a ticket is submitted, incident management software should provide a knowledge base to answer common problems of employees. This saves the ITSM team time and streamlines repetitive problems.
Incident assignment: Designate the reported incident to the right team according to the types of problems. Without this feature, the IT team will need to identify the type of the problems first, which slows down the SLA time.
ITIL management: Most incident management software will come with an ITIL, which is a library of volumes describing a framework of best practices for delivering IT services. The software can guide the IT team to follow this framework in their ITSM operation.
Immediate alerting: With incident management systems, users can mail, text, call, or integrate with team communication software to notify all relevant personnel, notifying them of an issue’s occurrence and any pertinent details surrounding it.
Incident tracking: The software helps set different SLA policies to track deadlines based on elapsed time and types of problems. This can be further customized by priority so that the ITSM team can allocate appropriate time for every incident. The software should also automatically notify the support team of unsolved incidents before their SLA breaches.
Standardized workflow: Note what failed and potential troubleshooting steps towards service restoration. Some incident management solutions integrate with monitoring and log analytics software to suggest the root cause of the issue.
Mobile app: Some incident management software offer a mobile app so that cases can be reported and handled on mobile devices.
Reports and analytics: Incident reports detail how on-call workloads are distributed and handled. Some software also have customer satisfaction reports to better understand customer feedback and improve service quality. This is necessary to optimize the ITSM team’s work to prepare for future cases.
Based on G2 reviews, the best incident management software for MTTR automation lets IT engineering teams reduce mean time to acknowledge and mean time to resolve through automated alert routing, on-call scheduling, and pre-built response workflows that page the right responder without manual triage. Reviewers describe the best incident management tools for on-call scheduling and alert routing as those that combine flexible rotation policies, intelligent escalation paths, and direct integration with Slack, Jira, and major monitoring tools, so on-call engineers spend less time managing communication and more time fixing the actual problem. SRE and DevOps teams point to automated response chains and incident timelines built in the background as the features that separate platforms they actively use during outages from ones that add operational overhead.
Other features of incident management software: Ticket Creation, Ticket Designation.
What are the Benefits of Incident Management Software?
Incident management tools can have a variety of benefits, here are a few:
Save costs: Downtime can quickly cost businesses money and clients (both potential and current). Incident management solutions help businesses get back to a full capacity more quickly, minimizing losses from downtime. While incident management tools cost money, a manual incident resolution will decrease customer satisfaction and hurt revenue generation in the long run. For example, without the alerting feature from the incident reporting capability, the help desk could miss a case buried in emails and breach SLA.
Increase productivity: The IT team can follow the ITIL protocols to handle the problem in the best practices. They can also collaborate with other teams depending on the type of the problems. This takes the guesswork out of the ITSM process by knowing what to do and who to work with.
Unify visibility: Both incident reporters and IT managers gain significant visibility to the ITSM process. The incident reporters can track what’s happening to their tickets and when they will be solved. This will keep the end users informed and happy. For IT managers, they can identify what assets are causing the problem (software bugs or hardware malfunction) and fix them appropriately. They can also acknowledge the ITSM team’s performance based on customer satisfaction scores and SLA metrics. This allows them to take action where needed.
Who Uses Incident Management Software?
IT teams: Business’ IT teams will be the strongest users of incident management tools. Since the software is specifically designed for reporting any disturbances to proper workflow, incident management can be used to great effect by anyone from dedicated support teams to digital asset teams (databases, virtual servers, applications, etc.) and beyond. These teams can use incident management software in conjunction with other monitoring tools, service desk tools, and more.
Employees: When employees are having technical difficulties, they can report the problem on the incident management software. Many external IT problems are also spotted by employees before the customers, so it is important to fix them quickly.
Customers: Customers can report IT problems and track when they will be solved. Incident management is the key to customer satisfaction and revenue generation.
Based on G2 reviews, incident management software with ITIL SLA tracking is a frequent evaluation criterion for mid-size IT teams looking to formalize incident, problem, and change management processes without the implementation lift of enterprise ITSM platforms. Reviewers describe SLA breach alerts, audit-ready incident histories, and structured workflows around incident categorization as the features that move a growing IT team from ad-hoc ticketing into a repeatable service management practice.
Software Related to Incident Management Software
Related solutions that can be used together with incident management software include:
Video conferencing and audio conferencing software: Video conferencing and audio conferencing software help drive troubleshooting efforts by providing an immediate avenue to communicate with all relevant parties. Since incidents tend to require immediate action to maximize uptime, it’s best to begin troubleshooting efforts as soon as possible.
Log analysis software: When something fails, the first place to check for a potential failure explanation is in logging. Application logs, server logs, and other logs are great leads to finding the solutions. Log analysis software assists in sorting through those logs, making it easier to find failure points and restore service.
Service desk software: Internal transparency is critical to incident management, not only because of auditing but also because it is essential to not repeat troubleshooting steps. Repeating the same (failed) steps means extra time spent not fixing an issue. Service desk tools help with transparency by providing a ticketing system where issues and attempted fixes can be tracked.
Challenges with Incident Management Software
Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Minor incident detection: Not all major incidents are going to display an immediate sign that something is wrong. In situations like that, it can be difficult to hit that one "key" factor that’s going to set off an incident alert. For potential issues like those that a company could potentially come across, it’s important to consider setting up some warning alerts for signs of a possible incoming major incident.
Links to known issues: In IT and development, issues that have occurred before or frequently are called known issues. While some of these might be well known among relevant teams, others might be obscure or even previously considered one-off issues. As a result, knowledge surrounding how to address the issue might be difficult to come by at first. Users can pair an incident management solution with knowledge management software to assist their teams in addressing issues more quickly.
ITIL compliant: There is no standard or governance for ITIL. Adopting the ITSM processes that worked elsewhere doesn’t mean the company is complying with ITIL. The best practice is that IT teams should regularly review customer feedback and adjust their processes accordingly. After all, ITIL is all about efficiency and performance rather than compliance. Following ITIL blindly will make the ITSM process inflexible and unfit for others.
How to Buy Incident Management Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Incident Management Software
Whether a company is looking for its first incident management software or trying to replace an existing one, g2.com can help find the best solution.
The company’s needs when searching for incident management software often relate to specifically desired data and metrics. For example, the user may be most interested in analyzing SLA breaches. Buyers should make a ranked list of the features that most directly address the problems they’re trying to solve, then reference G2 reviews to find the right fit.
Prioritizing the desired feature set can help narrow down the potential pool of incident management solutions, allowing teams to then apply further considerations for budget, ease of integration with other systems, security requirements, and more. This holistic approach empowers buyers to move forward with a focused checklist, which can be used in conjunction with G2 scoring to select the best incident management tool for the business.
Compare Incident Management Software
Create a long list
When searching for incident management software, companies need to identify compatibility requirements for existing communication tools, monitoring software, and knowledge management software. Buyers should make a list of important existing software that needs to be integrated, then filter out the incident management tools that can’t be integrated. For example, many incident management software are SaaS solutions that only work with other SaaS solutions on the cloud. If the company's IT operations and incident management process are on-premises, then the company should seriously check if its legacy IT infrastructure fits the incident management software.
Create a short list
It helps to cross-reference the results of initial vendor evaluations with G2 reviews from other buyers, the combination of which will help to narrow in on a short three to five product list. From there, buyers can compare pricing and features to determine the best fit. Some vendors don’t charge implementation costs while some do.
Conduct demos
As a rule of thumb, companies should make sure to demo all of the products that end up on their short list. During demos, buyers should ask specific questions related to the functionalities they care most about; for example, one might ask to be walked through what actionable insights are generated from an SLA breach report.
Selection of Incident Management Software
Choose a selection team
Regardless of a company’s size, it’s important to involve the most relevant personas when beginning the incident management software selection process. Larger companies may include the ITSM teams, procurement teams, IT managers, and engineers who will be working with the software most closely. Smaller companies with fewer employees might just need IT managers to fill the role.
Negotiation
Many vendors offer full software license platforms that go beyond incident management (on-premises) to include knowledge management and observability platforms. While some companies will not budge on the configurations of their packages, buyers looking to trim costs should try to negotiate down to the specific functions that matter to them to get the best price. For example, a vendor’s pricing page where incident management functionality is only included with a robust all-in-one monitoring package, whereas a sales conversation may prove otherwise.
Final decision
After this stage, it is important to perform a trial run if possible with a small selection of IT professionals or developers. This will help to ensure that the incident management software of choice integrates well with an ITSM specialist’s systems setup or an engineer’s day-to-day work. If the incident management tool is well liked and well utilized, the buyer can take that as a sign that their selection is the right one. If not, looking back at the other options may be necessary.
