Incident management is a structured approach for dealing with incidents that could negatively impact an organization’s operations and services. The goal of incident management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible while minimizing negative impacts on the business. There are 5 key stages in the incident management process:
- Incident detection and recording
- Classification and initial support
- Investigation and diagnosis
- Resolution and recovery
- Incident closure
Understanding these 5 stages allows organizations to have a consistent, repeatable approach for managing incidents effectively. In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at each of the 5 stages of the incident management process.
Stage 1: Incident Detection and Recording
The first stage in the incident management process is detecting that an incident has occurred and recording the details. An incident is defined as an unplanned interruption to services or reduction in quality of services. Incidents can be detected through a variety of channels including:
- Monitoring systems sending automatic alerts
- Users calling the service desk to report an issue
- Third parties such as vendors reporting an issue
- IT staff noticing abnormalities in systems or logs
Once an incident has been detected, the key is to immediately record it by creating an incident record. This starts the formal incident management process. Key details to capture when creating the initial incident record include:
- Date and time the incident was detected
- Name of the person or group reporting the incident
- Brief symptom description or error message
- Quick categorization based on the type of issue (e.g. network, hardware, application etc)
- Any important business impact known at the time
Recording this information accurately from the start ensures all details are captured for use through the rest of the incident management process.
Benefits of Swift Incident Recording
There are several benefits to detecting and recording incidents quickly:
- Starts the resolution process faster
- Notifies support teams that an issue exists
- Creates an audit trail of events
- May identify growing trends or recurring issues
- Enables incident classification and prioritization of work
By creating the incident record as the first step, organizations can minimize business disruption by kicking off the resolution process right away.
Stage 2: Classification and Initial Support
Once the incident has been logged, the next stage is to classify it and provide some initial support.
Classification involves determining the incident’s priority level and assigning it to the appropriate support team. To determine priority, factors like business impact and urgency are considered. Common priority levels include:
- High – Major business impact and urgency
- Medium – Moderate business impact
- Low – Minor business impact
Assigning the incident to the proper support team ensures that the group with the right knowledge and resources can investigate. For example, a network issue would be assigned to network engineers while an application problem would go to application support teams.
Initial support refers to the first actions taken to start addressing the incident. Examples may include:
- Assigning a specific technician to begin investigating
- Restarting a failed service or performing a reboot
- Rolling back recent changes if applicable
- Escalating to vendors if third party hardware/software is involved
- Temporarily implementing a workaround, if available
Taking these initial support steps can help contain the incident’s impact while diagnosis continues.
Benefits of Proper Classification and Initial Support
Appropriately classifying and providing initial support for incidents has several key advantages:
- Enables prioritization of critical incidents over less severe ones
- Matches each incident to the appropriate IT support team
- Accelerates the start of resolution activity
- May temporarily restore service or mitigate impact while permanent solution is developed
- Keeps users informed on initial steps taken
Overall, this stage puts the incident management process into high gear by getting the incident to the right people and taking immediate actions.
Stage 3: Investigation and Diagnosis
After the incident has been classified and documented, the next stage involves investigating and diagnosing the root cause.
Investigating involves gathering additional information from sources such as:
- Inspecting application logs and event logs
- Examining audit logs and system monitoring
- Interviewing users and other teams to collect details
- Attempting to reproduce the issue
- Reviewing change records for recent updates
- Analyzing performance data and health metrics
Diagnosis represents analyzing all the information to determine the underlying cause of the incident. This requires technical expertise and deep knowledge of the affected systems or services.
Some common diagnostic techniques include:
- Tracing execution paths through code to isolate failures
- Identifying configuration changes that line up with the timing of the incident
- Spotting trends and abnormalities in performance data
- Comparing system logs before and after the incident
- Identifying dependencies and downstream impacts through mapping
Identifying the size, scope and specificity of the cause allows the creation of targeted solutions.
The Importance of Precise Diagnosis
Thorough diagnosis and pinpointing the exact cause is crucial for several reasons:
- Prevents wasting time pursuing false leads
- Avoids broader business impact from misguided efforts
- Narrows down resolution options to address the specific issue
- Enables permanent solutions rather than temporary workarounds
- Speeds up service restoration and recovery
Overall, disciplined investigation paired with precise diagnosis sets up incident resolution to be much more rapid and effective.
Stage 4: Resolution and Recovery
Now that the root cause has been determined through careful diagnosis, the next stage focuses on resolution and recovery.
Resolution refers to eliminating the underlying cause to restore normal service operations. Some examples include:
- Applying a patch to fix a software defect
- Tuning or reconfiguring systems to optimize resource usage
- Rolling back problematic configuration changes
- Rebuilding failed servers
- Implementing a workaround until a permanent fix can be applied
Recovery refers to the steps necessary to restore business processes back to normal functioning after an incident. This may involve actions such as:
- Reprocessing batch jobs that failed
- Redirecting users to alternate systems or resources
- Reprioritizing workloads to handle high priority transactions first
- Reloading data from backups if necessary
- Establishing temporary manual procedures
Effective resolution focuses on targeting the specific cause identified in the diagnosis stage. Strong recovery deals with any ripple effects from the incident that may persist after the initial cause is addressed.
Why Resolution and Recovery Work Together
Resolution and recovery work hand in hand for several important reasons:
- Resolution deals with the source while recovery handles the business impacts
- Recovery can begin even while final resolution is still underway
- Some recovery steps enable faster resolution by mitigating broader impacts
- Resolution alone may not fully restore customer experiences or business productivity
Working these processes in parallel helps minimize disruption and restore stable operations as quickly as possible.
Stage 5: Incident Closure
The final stage of the incident management process is to formally close out the incident by confirming resolution and documenting follow up items.
Incident closure verification ensures that:
- Underlying cause has been fully resolved
- Normal operations have been restored
- No lingering problems remain for the user or business process affected
- Any required recovery actions have been completed
Follow up documentation covers important references for future improvement:
- Summary of the timeline and details of the incident
- Lessons learned from the response and opportunities for improvement
- Recommendations for enhancing detection, response, or prevention
- Acknowledgment of teams involved in resolution
This step provides closure to the event, as well as valuable references for the future.
Why Proper Incident Closure Matters
Completing the incident management process the right way has a number of advantages:
- Prevents reopening of incidents thought to be solved
- Captures knowledge for better handling of future incidents
- Enables continuous improvement of support processes
- Documents impact and cost for tracking and reporting
- Provides recognition to staff involved in resolution
In the hectic rush of incident response, thorough closure and follow up documentation often gets sacrificed or postponed indefinitely. But disciplined closure results in improved support capabilities over the long term.
Conclusion
Incident management provides a structured framework for restoring services and minimizing disruption when unplanned issues arise. By leveraging the fundamental 5 stage process of detection, classification, diagnosis, resolution with recovery, and closure, organizations can optimize response capabilities. This discipline also reduces business impact and improves customer experience during outages.
Understanding the purpose and activities associated with each stage allows companies to prepare appropriate resources, tools, documentation and processes. Well defined procedures for classifying, investigating, resolving and closing incidents also enable more consistent, repeatable results. Embracing the core incident management methodology and customizing it for one’s unique environment is key for rapid restoration of services and productive learning for further enhancement of support capabilities.