Have you ever quickly worked through an issue with your team and later thought, “Huh. That probably should have been an incident.” It happened to us just a few weeks back. After one of our engineers surfaced a failed build, a few folks chimed in to problem solve and within 30 minutes things were up and running like normal. But we probably should have declared an incident.

Incidents are expensive — and only getting more so. In fact, more than 98% of large companies and 47% of small- and medium-size companies say a single hour of downtime costs at least $100,000, according to the 11th annual Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey.

In any high pressure situation, the key to fast action is preparedness. And that’s true when it comes to incidents, too. Documenting and training your team on your incident response processes is essential to ensuring a coordinated and efficient response effort. And training sessions, or game days, as they’re sometimes called, are one way to get everyone up to speed.

When your incident response process is centered around a service catalog, responders are able to more quickly pinpoint the service or functionality that’s down, bring in the team or experts, and then get to solving the problem faster. Saving even a few minutes can have a big impact on decreasing the costs around incidents and outages, so having up-to-date service details at your fingertips can make all the difference.