With every job I have, I come across a new observability tool that I can’t live without. It’s also something that’s a superpower for us at incident.io: we often detect bugs faster than our customers can report them to us. A couple of jobs ago, that was Prometheus. In my previous job, it was the fact that we retained all of our logs for 30 days, and had them available to search using the Elastic stack (back then, the ELK stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana).

Runbooks are a key part of incident management and preserve institutional knowledge. They can be used for both incident response as well as routine tasks like db maintenance and generating a complex report. We are mostly focused on incident response runbooks here.

The higher education industry is experiencing significant transformation. Colleges and universities have embedded digital tools across their academic environments to provide exceptional experiences for students, faculty, and staff. As technology becomes more integral to education, maintaining efficient, secure IT operations while ensuring 24/7 availability presents new challenges for institutions to manage.

Handling IT alert data can feel like you’re drowning in information. The average BigPanda customer uses more than 20 observability and monitoring tools. Between system logs and user reports, an overwhelming amount of information is coming from all directions. That’s why normalizing data is such a critical part of IT operations. Data normalization in IT incident management involves putting data from various tools into a standard format.

SLA vs SLO vs SLI, what’s the difference anyway? Workplace success relies on clear expectations to help leaders and employees thrive together. As such, the partnership between customer and provider requires the same clarity to maintain service satisfaction. This is why Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) exist in the first place.

The primary objective of an IT incident response plan is to clarify roles and responsibilities, communication protocols, escalation scenarios, and technical steps to minimize further damage and safeguard business operations. The plan formally defines guidelines, procedures, and activities for identifying, evaluating, containing, resolving, and preventing IT incidents. Whether they cause intermittent errors or global service crashes, IT incidents can severely disrupt service quality and cause outages.

Incident management plays a critical role in ensuring service reliability, customer satisfaction, and overall business success. Effective incident response is not a static process but one that benefits from constant refinement and optimization. As organizations grow and evolve, so must their approach to handling incidents.

There is no doubt about it: How you handle incident communication can make all the difference. Picture this: your organization experiences a major incident that disrupts services and affects users. Customers are anxious, internal teams are scrambling to resolve the issue, and the clock is ticking. This scenario underscores the importance of a solid incident communication plan.