IT incidents – network, service, and IT infrastructure failures – can seriously disrupt business processes and jeopardize the stability of a company. Despite the fact that technological progress and appropriate “protection” significantly reduce risks, it is impossible to completely eliminate the possibility of such incidents.
Implementation of ITSM practices plays an important role in ensuring manageability and control over incidents, allowing not only to quickly resolve emerging failures, but also to use them to improve the stability of the IT infrastructure.
In this article, we’ll go into detail about what incident management is and the role it plays in ensuring the stable operation of IT services. We will consider the types of incidents, their processing and prioritization. We will pay special attention to handling significant incidents.
What is incident management?
Incident management is a process used by IT teams to respond to and address unexpected business disruptions that can affect quality of service or service performance. Its goal is to reduce the level of negative impact of incidents by quickly restoring normal IT service operations. Incident management is part of the core ITSM processes to provide an integrated approach to managing all aspects of IT service and support.
«Incidents can cause a multitude of problems for organizations, from temporary downtime to data loss. With the right approach, incident management ensures that incidents are resolved quickly with minimal disruption to services and allows organizations to be more prepared for future disruptions»,
– commented Andrey Vishnyakov, Business Product Director at SimpleOne, ITIL® SL, MP, Expert.
ITIL Incident Management
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an internationally recognized set of best practices that offers a comprehensive set of best practices for incident management within IT service management (ITSM). By following ITIL’s structured approach, organizations can quickly manage incidents while ensuring that IT services are clearly aligned with business needs. Incident management is a core component of service support, one of the most important practices of a service provider.
Typical Incident Management Process
In most cases, the incident management process includes the following steps:
- Identification. Detection and identification of events that can be classified as incidents. Information can come from users or from monitoring systems.
- Registration. After identification, the incident must be logged in the incident management system to allow for documentation and consolidation of data.
- Classification. In this step, the incident is categorized to determine how it should be handled. Classification helps to manage help desk knowledge and form a strategy for resolving the incident.
- Prioritization. Based on the degree of impact on the company’s business processes and the urgency of the incident, the incident is prioritized, which allows you to allocate resources to handle the most critical situations first.
- Primary incident diagnosis. Includes an assessment of the incident to determine if a quick resolution is possible or if escalation is necessary.
- Incident Escalation. If an incident cannot be “resolved” on the first line of support or requires urgent intervention, it is escalated to the next line.
- Investigating and finding a solution to incidents. Finding the best way to manage the incident, including analyzing the causes of the incident and developing a management strategy.
- Resolving incidents and restoring normal operation of the IT service. After the solution is found, its implementation and subsequent testing is carried out to confirm the successful restoration of the company’s services.
These steps provide a structured and consistent approach to incident management, minimize the impact on the business and help in the rapid restoration of IT services.
In the next section, we will delve deeper into the steps of incident identification, logging, and prioritization.
Identifying and prioritizing incidents
Most often, there are two ways to identify incidents:
- User complaints
The most common source of incident information is reports from users of IT services. Users can report issues through a variety of channels such as a self-service portal, email, phone calls, or chatbots.
- Infrastructure Incidents
The second source is incidents detected at the infrastructure level. These are detected by automated monitoring systems that track the availability, performance, and operation of IT services. In addition, incidents can be logged independently by IT professionals.
Once an incident is logged from any source, the next step is to prioritize it. To do this, the Impact/ Urgency matrix is used:
- Impact level (Impact) – the degree of impact the incident has on business processes and users. Usually determined by an IT specialist based on an assessment of the scope and criticality of the affected systems and services.
- Urgency – A measure of how quickly an incident needs to be resolved. It is set by the user when creating the request, taking into account the extent of the disruption.
- Authorization
Based on these parameters, the final priority of the incident is calculated according to predetermined rules, according to which further actions are planned and carried out for their processing. Usually a scale of 3-4 levels is used, for example:
- Low priority:
Incidents with minimal impact and urgency that can be resolved without urgent intervention. Response to such events occurs according to a regular maintenance schedule.
- Medium priority:
Incidents of moderate severity limit some functions or services, but have a small impact on the business as a whole. The response to such incidents is planned and executed in a timely manner to restore full system functionality.
- High priority:
It is necessary to separately distinguish the category of major incidents (Major Incidents) – critical events that lead to the unavailability of key systems, services, affecting many users and directly threaten the business. They are characterized by maximum impact, urgency and priority, and require special escalation and resolution procedures.
The Incident Manager is responsible for the quality fulfillment of all procedures related to the incident management process, including the handling of significant incidents. It is usually this specialist who determines whether an incident is significant.
“Given the maximum impact of an incident on the normal operations of an organization, a dedicated response procedure is required relative to general practice to expedite resolution and minimize business impact, as well as restore service availability. This is what distinguishes a Major incident from a regular incident, which, although it may have a high priority, has less impact on the organization’s business processes and is resolved within standard operational response procedures without the need to mobilize additional resources,”
– commented Andrey Vishnyakov, Business Product Director at SimpleOne, ITIL® SL, MP, Expert.
The objective of an organization is to have an effective and responsive scheme for responding to significant incidents. The procedure for handling significant incidents aims to achieve the following objectives:
- Ensuring that potentially significant incidents are categorized as significant, in order to reduce the risk of the procedure being falsely triggered;
- Ensuring the immediate involvement of all necessary organizational and technical resources to quickly address a significant incident and minimize its consequences;
- Start the process of analyzing the causes of a significant incident;
- Minimize the probability of recurrence of similar significant incidents, improve ITSM processes in the area of incident, change and problem management
Swarming sessions for significant incidents
In the traditional incident management model using request processing, tickets go through several levels: L1, L2, L3. This model creates queues that lengthen response times and result in the transfer of tickets, resulting in the loss of an important component of each group’s work. In complex systems and failures, the ticket is delayed in getting to the right executors. The end result is long response times and user dissatisfaction. In this case, you should switch to swarming.
Swarming is a technique of resource escalation, which allows you to provide the fastest solution to the problem, as well as to involve all possible specialists related to the problematic of the task in online mode (swarming-session). In the process of diagnosing the situation, only the necessary specialists continue to participate in the joint work until a suitable solution to the problem is found.
The Incident Manager ensures the effective conduct of the swarming session, coordinates the involvement of the right specialists, identifies obstacles and requirements for their solution. Swarming participants (if their expertise is related to the area of the significant incident) actively collaborate by providing the necessary information to resolve significant incidents. If a participant’s expertise is not required for the task at hand, he/she has the right to leave the meeting.
Thanks to the SimpleOne ITSM system, it is possible to organize a swarming session directly from the significant incident form. As a result, a group for significant incidents is automatically formed in Telegram, where participants who are not users of the system can also be added. In addition to participants, a router bot has already been added to the group, which will send information about all important changes that have occurred on the incident form.
SimpleOne ITSM
SimpleOne ITSM is an IT process automation system designed in accordance with ITIL best practices. This tool significantly enhances the quality of IT service delivery by effectively automating business processes and improving the quality of work of the IT Department and Service Desk.
The system helps in early detection of incidents, their quick and effective elimination, which helps minimize the impact on business processes. Incidents are categorized based on severity levels and managed according to priority, which ensures continuous and quality functioning of services.
Conclusion
While incident management is necessary for all organizations, it is especially important for companies that actively use technology as part of their business processes. In today’s world, almost all organizations rely on technology to some degree. Therefore, incident management is essential for the smooth running of a company. An effective incident management process helps in several ways: it reduces the impact of incidents on operations, increases the overall efficiency of the organization, and improves the ability to respond to unexpected situations and find the best solution.
