Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

From managing issues and resources to keeping customers updated, resolving an incident requires a level of multi-tasking that can be overwhelming for even the most efficient of teams. Automating your processes reduces the time needed to diagnose, mitigate, and resolve incidents, and simplifies communication throughout an incident's lifecycle.

While on-call groups are the perfect solution when you need the right person at the right time to solve a specific problem, there are times when you need to notify everybody all at once. Whether you’re sending an informational message about some upcoming maintenance or an emergency notification about an issue that could affect an entire office, broadcast groups enable you to notify large groups of people at the same time. They can contain more members than on-call groups because there’s no rotation or escalation schedule to work out.

When an incident occurs, teams often perform a known set of steps in a specific order to help identify and triage the incident. For Base and Advanced plan users, the Incidents menu includes a Task Lists section where teams can build out priority lists for different incident types or use cases. For example, a list of failover tasks, or the tasks required to perform a deployment rollback. With task lists, Incident Commanders can be sure that resolvers know exactly what needs to be done to quickly resolve incidents.

Just because Flow Designer is a simple, visual workflow builder doesn’t mean that the flows you build have to be simple, too. In fact, flows can get very complex very quickly, especially as you connect more tools and create your toolchain. To help you build out and handle more complex logic and multiple paths, the Condition step automatically changes a flow’s path based on the value of almost any property in your flow. You can use the Condition step to compare values using AND/OR logic and a range of conditional operators to determine the appropriate path. And if the values don’t match, never fear!

Although not all incidents are the same, resolvers often need similar resources or follow standard processes when responding to them. To save valuable time and effort, teams who frequently reference or attach the same files when sending incident notifications can use the xMatters Document Library to store everything in one place. You can easily add and organize files such as screenshots, maps, or response plans and attach them to incidents from within the library or directly on the incident console. For sensitive documents, set permissions so only certain roles can access, modify, or delete them.