For teams who deploy software to users around the world, every second counts when responding to outages and other incidents. It’s important that you have tools in your arsenal that are up to the challenge. Service monitoring, alerting, collaboration, and visibility are all essential components of a well-implemented incident response plan.

Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.

Inevitably, organizations that use technology (regardless of the extent) will have something, somewhere, go wrong. The key to a successful organization is to have the tools and processes in place to handle these incidents and get systems restored in a repeatable and reliable way in as little time as possible.

With the rising complexity of our digital ecosystems, incidents are occurring at an unprecedented rate. To combat the additional strain, incident responders are looking to software to help them establish a scalable, repeatable incident response process that reduces toil and noise and gets the right people on the scene at the right time. The best incident response software addresses the entire lifecycle of an incident.

When building an incident response process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving parts. Less is more: focus first on building solid foundations that you can develop over time. Here are three things we think form a key part of a strong process. I’d recommend taking these one at a time, introducing incident response throughout your organisation. Just being honest: we’re a startup selling incident management software.

Downtime—especially in customer-facing services—can cost businesses thousands of dollars an hour and incalculable customer trust. No company can afford to pay this price. To reduce downtime, software engineering teams must act quickly and decisively. But that’s easier said than done. With Lightstep® Incident Response, generally available from ServiceNow today, we're unlocking speed, agility, and productivity for your engineers and your software-powered business.