When it comes to incident management, having a superb incident response plan is never enough if your team isn’t equipped with the right tools to mobilize on-call responders to critical incidents. During these high-pressure events, having a streamlined notification process makes all the difference, ensuring that prolonged response times are eliminated and normal business operations are always restored promptly. So, I wanted to share this guide that will help incident teams redefine their response plan by implementing the best notification tool for their organization’s goals.
Why do I need an incident alerting tool?
If your monitoring tools send out email alerts or your support team has a process in place to call/text your responders during incidents, you might be asking yourself, why do I even need an incident notification tool when I have such processes in place? The answer is simple, those types of alerts don’t work. Just face it. Have you ever gotten an email that says “just bumping this up, in case it got buried in your inbox” or has your friend ever emphasized their text when you haven’t answered due to distraction? That’s just what I’m talking about, urgent system outages or code breaks cannot be an email that gets buried or a notification that gets swiped away and forgotten about. Incident alerts have to be loud, disruptive and truly motivate teams to respond ASAP. Now that it’s clear incident alert management tools are an essential part of the incident response plan, we can get into the evaluation guidelines.
How to: Select the Best Notification Tool for Your Team
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer here (or really anywhere), and you have to be sensitive to the needs of your specific team, goals, and objectives. However, these are the essential elements teams should think about when evaluating incident alerting solutions for their team:
Alert Prioritization - Without sufficient alert prioritization capabilities, we are right back in the same boat, dealing with excessive notifications, alert fatigue, and missed messages. So, when deciding to implement an incident alerting solution, look for those that differentiate between high and low priority alerts, delivering urgent messages with distinctive notification sounds and the ability to bypass Do Not Disturb and the silent switch. This empowers teams to respond fast to critical incidents by reducing alert noise and improving job satisfaction.
Scalability - When investing in software services, teams must consider scalability. It is important that your solution grows with you and that teams can easily add or remove users as their business needs change. So look out for solutions that accommodate the needs of your organization and projected growth.
Collaboration - Just receiving the alert doesn’t cut it, your incident alerting tool must have collaboration features that make it easy for teams to effectively resolve the issue at hand. Some of these capabilities may include audit trails, message tracking, and two-way communication, eliminating the need for app switching and streamlining coordination and collaboration.
Integrations - Many incident alerting tools, like OnPage, integrate with your existing IT solutions. Key integrations your team may want to look out for are with chat collaboration apps (Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.), ticketing solutions (ConnectWise, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, etc.) and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Datadog, etc.).
Best Practices for Incident Alerting
Set effective alert rules - Setting the right thresholds is essential for incident alert management. Teams must evaluate their monitoring tools’ thresholds to ensure that only the most critical notifications are elevated to teams, especially after hours to avoid alert fatigue.
Establish an incident response team - During critical incidents, having an organized team with evenly distributed roles and responsibilities can significantly ease the incident management process and simplify task management.
Complement alerting with mass notifications - Teams should complement their internal incident alerting tools with a mass notification solution that delivers critical notifications via SMS, email, and voice call to all internal and external stakeholders simultaneously. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and teams can focus on resolving the incident at hand rather than updating all stakeholders individually.
Establish effective on-call rotations and escalations - Many incident alerting tools enable teams to take advantage of digital scheduling that ensures that alerts are routed to the right person and escalated when necessary. So, teams must establish equitable on-call rotations that allow their engineers to maintain productivity, whether that’s a follow-the-sun schedule, bi weekly schedule, or something completely different. Finding a policy that works for your team is essential for their success.
Conclusion
Incident notification tools are paramount to a good incident response plan, and choosing the right one can be a game-changer for your team. I hope these guidelines can help you begin your search and identify the needs and goals of your team when it comes to incident alerting.
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