Published on: Aug 16, 2021
What is Incident Management? A Comprehensive Guide
Incident management is your ultimate solution to identify, manage and analyze any unplanned events that could affect the quality of your IT services.
With incident management in place, you'll be able to minimize the impact of any incidents, whether it's a small hiccup or a major crisis. No more scrambling to put out fires; you'll be able to tackle them head-on and even prevent them from happening in the first place.
Let's dive right into it!
What is an Incident?
In the information technology space, the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) defines an incident as any unplanned event that could interrupt or reduce the quality of an IT service.
This includes events that may not disrupt a service completely but impact its quality, e.g. slow internet speed or viruses consuming processing power.
What is Incident Management?
Incident management is the process of identifying, managing, and analyzing such incidents to restore service operations to normal with minimum impact on the business.
Much like how you have your own processes and tools within your own life to prevent theoretical misfortune, such as:
Making sure your phone is plugged in or having a separate alarm clock to keep you from being late for work, or
Installing a smoke detector in your apartment to prevent a fire or reduce the potential damage.
For the IT services in your business, this would include implementing firewalls and detection systems to protect and monitor your systems.
The Need for Incident Management
Incidents can disrupt your business operations, lead to inactivity, and even contribute to the loss of data and production.
Here you have two examples:
In 2010, the Stuxnet worm destroyed multiple centrifuges in Iran's nuclear power plant. It was not a remote attack but spread through an infected USB. A simple unauthorized access led to a huge political and national crisis with losses in the millions.
A more recent incident is that of the exploitation of the printer spool service in windows systems, dubbed as PrintNightmare. A combination of remote code execution and privilege escalation enabled the attacker to take control of the system.
Here is the deal...
Being part of the Incident Management team does not mean only acting when there is a fire to put out, but creating and refining preventative processes to reduce the chances of an incident.
Categorization
From the printer not working, to service being completely down each incident does not carry the same impact level. Each event needs to be categorized in order to be efficiently resolved.
This is done by keeping multiple variables in mind:
Impact: The effect of an incident on your business services or processes
Priority: Variable used to define the importance of an incident. You can usually define it as Low, Medium, or High.
Time period: The agreed expected response time and resolution time of the target event. This is usually incorporated in the SLAs and defined for each phase of Incident Management.
Urgency: How long it takes for an impact to affect your business significantly.
Usually, an 'Impact' and 'Urgency' matrix can help you assign a final level to an incident. A high-impact incident may have low urgency and vice versa and needs to be defined by your organization.
An incident with high impact and high urgency is known as a Major Incident.
Incident Management Life Cycle
There are many standards like ITIL, NIST Incident Handling Guide, PCI-DSS, etc. that define Incident Management processes, but broadly you can divide the multiple phases into three main stages:
Pre-Incident is mostly administrative and focuses on detecting and identifying an incident
Incident Response actually mitigates and resolves the incident that has occurred
Post-Incident wraps up the process and usually focuses on generating detailed reports and lessons learned.
Let's have a closer look at the various stages of an incident.
1. Pre Incident
Identification & Logging
Identification: This stage identifies that an incident has occurred. It is usually carried out with monitoring and detection systems in place. However, this does not necessarily ensure that an incident will always be detected beforehand.
Logging: After identifying an incident, you need to keep track of it throughout its lifetime until the incident is resolved. You can usually generate a ticket against the incident with information like the date and time and its impact.
Logging and documenting help keep track of previous incidents, which you can view later for various purposes like auditing, trend analysis, or forensics.
Classification & Prioritization
Classification: This step is essential in resolving the issue and is usually graded according to the requirements of your organization. For example, an incident can be categorized for hardware or software and further sub-categorized into printers, servers, etc.
Simplicity is key here; if you create too many categories and subcategories, it can quickly become unmanageable.
Prioritization: This step assigns a level to the incident based on both its impact on your business as well as its urgency. An incident with low impact and high urgency has higher priority than an incident with high impact and low urgency.
2. Incident Response
Investigation & Diagnosis
First, you need to investigate who needs to be involved in resolving the incident and performing an initial diagnosis to understand the problem. Can the IT team resolve the incident? Does executive management need to get involved?
Resolution & Recovery
Easier said than done, but this step is as simple as finding a solution to the incident and ensuring that your business services and operations resume as soon as possible. An incident is considered resolved when the affected service resumes functioning in its intended state. This means focusing only on the essential steps required to mitigate the impact and restore normal functionality—no more, no less.
It's important to keep the goal clear: restore service quickly and minimize disruption. Avoid getting sidetracked by unrelated enhancements or optimizations during this phase; stick to what’s necessary to get things back on track. Once the immediate issue is addressed and operations are stable, you can move forward with closure and post-incident activities.
Establishing On-Call Coverage
When it comes to incident response, ensuring someone is always available takes careful planning. Here’s how you can set up a functional on-call schedule and keep your response team ready:
Define Roles and Responsibilities: Start by identifying who will be in the on-call rotation. Specify clear responsibilities for each member so there’s no ambiguity during an incident.
Create a Coverage Calendar: Use a shared calendar or scheduling tool to map out shifts. Tools like PagerDuty, VictorOps, or even a shared Google Calendar can help cover all time zones and minimize scheduling gaps.
Apply Override Rules: Emergencies and personal obligations come up—so build in override rules allowing team members to swap or trade shifts when needed, making sure there’s always a designated responder.
Configure Notification Channels: Choose how alerts will be delivered—via SMS, email, app push notifications, or phone call—and test these methods in advance. This ensures responders know what to expect and how to react quickly.
Document Escalation Procedures: Not all incidents are created equal. Define what counts as a critical incident and detail whom to contact if the primary on-call doesn’t respond. This could mean escalating to a second-level engineer or management, depending on incident severity.
Communicate the Schedule Clearly: Make the on-call rotation accessible and transparent to everyone involved. This avoids confusion about who’s on duty and helps prevent missed incidents.
Solid on-call scheduling means fewer surprises, faster response times, and less burnout for your team—keeping your incident management process reliable and resilient.
3. Post Incident
Incident Closure
After the incident has been successfully resolved, you can close the ticket. Next, you can generate reports to ensure that it is not a recurring incident. Finally, you can set meetings with required members of your organization accordingly.
Pros and Cons of Various On-Call Management Approaches
Managing on-call schedules is a bit like choosing the best route for a road trip—each path has its own twists, turns, and traffic jams. Different organizations gravitate toward various on-call setups based on their size, resources, and culture. Let’s unpack the upsides and downsides of the most common ones:
1. Rotational On-Call Schedules
Many IT teams rely on fair rotation, where the on-call duties are equally distributed among team members.
Pros:
Spreads the workload evenly, reducing burnout.
Builds collective team knowledge since everyone takes a turn.
Cons:
Can disrupt sleep patterns and work-life balance, especially for small teams.
If handoff procedures aren't clear, critical information slips through the cracks.
2. Dedicated On-Call Teams
Some organizations establish a specific group whose main responsibility is responding to incidents.
Pros:
Higher specialization and focused expertise for rapid response.
Regular teams remain undisturbed, minimizing “alert fatigue.”
Cons:
The dedicated team may be overburdened if incidents spike.
Can create knowledge silos if they’re too insulated from the rest of the organization.
3. Follow-the-Sun Model
For companies with global footprints, this model hands off on-call duties to teams in different regions as time zones change.
Pros:
Reduces night and weekend pages, promoting better rest and morale.
Faster response in local time, increasing customer satisfaction.
Cons:
Requires extensive coordination and robust documentation for smooth transitions.
Not practical for smaller businesses with limited global teams.
4. Outsourced or Third-Party On-Call
Bringing in an external provider like PagerDuty or hiring managed service providers can supplement or even replace internal on-call rotations.
Pros:
Frees up internal resources for other priorities.
Often brings mature processes and 24/7 coverage without exhausting your staff.
Cons:
Potential knowledge gaps about unique systems or company culture.
Can be costly and may introduce compliance concerns.
No single approach is foolproof—your ideal on-call framework depends on your organization’s needs, size, and culture. Many teams blend models, using technology to automate handoffs, streamline alerts, and ensure nobody gets stuck with the midnight shift too often.
An Incident Management Plan ensures customer satisfaction through quick and efficient response, analysis, and logging of an incident. This makes it an essential tool for any service-based organization.
What are the Steps Involved to Set Up On-Call Coverage
Establishing On-Call Coverage
When it comes to incident response, ensuring someone is always available takes careful planning. Here’s how you can set up a functional on-call schedule and keep your response team ready:
Define Roles and Responsibilities: Start by identifying who will be in the on-call rotation. Specify clear responsibilities for each member so there’s no ambiguity during an incident.
Create a Coverage Calendar: Use a shared calendar or scheduling tool to map out shifts. Tools like PagerDuty, VictorOps, or even a shared Google Calendar can help cover all time zones and minimize scheduling gaps.
Apply Override Rules: Emergencies and personal obligations come up—so build in override rules allowing team members to swap or trade shifts when needed, making sure there’s always a designated responder.
Configure Notification Channels: Choose how alerts will be delivered—via SMS, email, app push notifications, or phone call—and test these methods in advance. This ensures responders know what to expect and how to react quickly.
Document Escalation Procedures: Not all incidents are created equal. Define what counts as a critical incident and detail whom to contact if the primary on-call doesn’t respond. This could mean escalating to a second-level engineer or management, depending on incident severity.
Communicate the Schedule Clearly: Make the on-call rotation accessible and transparent to everyone involved. This avoids confusion about who’s on duty and helps prevent missed incidents.
Solid on-call scheduling means fewer surprises, faster response times, and less burnout for your team—keeping your incident management process reliable and resilient.
Best Practices for Incident Management
Define Incident Management procedures, policies, and protocols for communication during an incident. Also, define guidelines for detecting, assessing, documenting, reporting, and responding to an incident.
Develop an Incident Response Checklist that can help guide an employee or customer in identifying an incident.
Establish an Incident Response team with skilled members. You have to define roles and responsibilities for each member. The team should have representation from other departments as well.
You have to create a process to inform involved or impacted parties with the cooperation of the legal team.
You can automate the classification and ongoing status of incidents to reduce the chances of errors and save time. Besides being efficient, this also helps your keep track of multiple active incidents.
You should develop a training program to test your Incident Management plan and practice security procedures. It would be best if you also created an awareness campaign for your employees.
An analysis of past incidents can help you identify any recurring events and narrow down any vulnerable areas of your organization. You could also establish forensics (or third-party services) for the analysis and investigation of incidents.
An Incident Management Plan ensures customer satisfaction through quick and efficient response, analysis, and logging of an incident. This makes it an essential tool for any service-based organization.
Don't wait for an incident to occur before taking action.
Implement incident management as a key component of your Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) program today.
By proactively identifying, managing, and analyzing unplanned events, you can minimize the impact on your business operations, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and protect your reputation.
Do you need a GRC tool to help you with incident management? Contact our team and book your free demo.
