With the ever-growing landscape of digital technology and the internet of things (IoT), businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on complex systems to monitor and manage their operations. This dependency has resulted in an explosion of alerts and notifications, overwhelming IT teams and affecting overall productivity. It’s never been more critical to have an effective alert management strategy in place to ensure the smooth running of your organization.

One of the most painful parts of incident response is contextualizing the problem and understanding how and where it fits within your organization. If responders are unable to answer basic questions such as: Then you waste valuable time talking to the wrong people or solving the wrong problems — ultimately extending impact and hurting your response. It’s a common issue that, up until now, didn’t have a clear solution or workaround.

Most organizations view their tech and network operations center and their budgets as simply the cost of running their internal and external IT services. However, through IT cost optimization, you can improve how your Ops center team responds to service issues and save valuable resources too. So, what specifically is IT cost optimization?

We’ve long believed that incidents (and technical team cultures) improve when more people are empowered to declare, follow, and contribute to their resolution. But not everyone in an organization needs to be able to manage the processes, rules, and settings a company enforces for their incident programs.

We recently introduced Catalog: the connected map of everything in your organization. In the process of building Catalog as a feature, we’ve also been building out the content of our own catalog. We'd flipped on the feature flag to give ourselves early access, and as we went along, we used this to test out the various features that Catalog powers.

As you may have already seen, we’ve recently released a Catalog feature at incident.io. While designing and building it, we took an approach that’s a tangible departure from a traditional service catalog. Here’s how we’re different, and why.