Incident management is a critical part of any observability stack. When things break, stress levels rise, time feels compressed, and communication can easily spiral out of control. Without proper coordination and clearly assigned roles, even small incidents can snowball.
To make this process smoother, efficient, and blameless, every engineering organization should implement a structured approach. Over time, this will reduce your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and build a culture where everyone focuses on resolution—not blame.
This framework breaks incident management into four key stages.
1. Notifications
When an incident is triggered, communication speed and accuracy determine how fast you can respond. The goal is to alert the right people, in the right channels, at the right time.
Here’s how to set it up strategically:
General Incident Channel: A shared space where everyone across the company can stay informed. Transparency builds trust and awareness.
Dedicated Incident Channel: A focused chat for real-time communication, troubleshooting, and decision-making between responders.
Stakeholder Alerts (Optional): For high-severity incidents, specific leaders or stakeholders should be notified directly to ensure alignment on business impact and response strategy.
This tiered notification setup ensures that communication stays clear and organized throughout the incident lifecycle.
2. During the Incident
Once the response begins, chaos can sneak in unless clear roles and responsibilities are defined upfront. Each person should know their mission to maintain focus and avoid duplication of effort.
Key roles include:
Incident Commander (IC): The decision-maker. The IC oversees the entire operation, makes judgment calls, and ensures progress continues—without diving into technical work.
Scribe: The recorder. This person logs events, decisions, timelines, and next steps. Accurate documentation is essential for the postmortem.
Communication Liaison: The bridge between responders and others. They send concise updates to stakeholders and prevent unnecessary distractions for the technical team.
Responders / Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): The technical experts investigating and resolving the incident. They work closely together to identify root causes and execute remediation steps.
Well-defined roles lead to calm, coordinated action rather than reactive chaos.
3. Follow-Up (Stabilization Phase)
Once production is stable again, the work isn’t over. The stabilization phase focuses on ensuring the underlying problem is fully understood and properly fixed.
This includes:
Creating follow-up tickets for permanent fixes.
Validating the production environment after recovery.
Running a quick internal review to confirm that monitoring, alerts, and runbooks worked as expected.
This phase transitions the team from firefighting to prevention.
4. Resolution & Learning
After the system is stable and follow-up actions are completed, take time to learn. Every incident is an opportunity to strengthen the system and team.
Two critical outputs:
Postmortem: A timeline-based narrative of the incident. What happened, why it happened, what went well, and what didn’t. Keep it factual and blameless.
Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Store all findings in an accessible place so others can learn from the experience and avoid repeating mistakes.
With consistent practice, teams become more confident, incidents resolve faster, and the overall reliability culture improves.
Final Thoughts
Incident management is not just about technical recovery—it’s about coordination, communication, and continuous learning. By mastering these four parts—Notifications, During the Incident, Follow-Up, and Resolution & Learning—you will transform stressful incidents into structured, teachable moments that strengthen your engineering culture and reduce MTTR over time.
Top comments (0)