FireHydrant has partnered with incredible companies to transform incident response inside their organizations, but our goal has always been to support the full incident lifecycle. That’s because we know that investing in good incident management can kickstart your reliability efforts when it includes both a streamlined incident response process that helps you recover faster and the ability to learn from incidents and then feed those insights back into your system.

Engineers have been managing incidents for as long as they’ve been building software, but the idea of incident management as a strategic practice in its own right is still finding its place. We’re starting to see big shifts in that area, though — more companies are dedicating headcount, resources, and tools to help them better prepare for, respond to, and learn from their incidents.

As a solutions engineer for FireHydrant, I speak with a wide variety of companies about their incident management programs — from start-ups with a handful of employees to large enterprise companies with thousands of engineers. Whether they’re looking to establish their incident management program or mature it, the same questions remain.