Incident management in the enterprise is all about being prepared to deal with the unexpected. Often, businesses will encounter unforeseen issues with their IT infrastructure, experiencing service slowdowns and outages until the problem is resolved. This can have a knock-on effect on other co-dependent systems and will act as a source of frustration for your loyal customers and internal staff.
One way to combat these unforeseen problems is with an Incident Management System. These systems keep track of individual incidents, noting down when, what, and how the incident occurred. This allows IT departments to pinpoint the source of the problem quickly and take appropriate action to remediate. Once the incident is resolved, you will have both the cause and the fix available for later reference, allowing you to remediate the problem faster in the future.
At Trianz, we believe that a proactive approach to IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps is vital for all enterprises. Problems are bound to rear their heads from time to time, and tracking these incidents in an Incident Management System will allow you to use previous events to expedite remediation in the future. This system can track anything from performance statistics to internet traffic and login attempts on your network, helping you to get a more comprehensive understanding of your IT infrastructure and services.
The Benefits of an Incident Management System
As explained, an Incident Management System is designed to help enterprises keep on top of ITSM and DevOps. Rather than just fixing and forgetting, an Incident Management System allows enterprises to keep track of problems, as well as the solution that resolved the problem.
There are many benefits to an incident management system, including:
IT Service Desk Agility – Your IT service desk is the point of call for any non-IT employees who encounter a problem with their computer system. They might lack the knowledge to resolve the problem on their own, but IT technicians and IT engineers have this know-how. This highlights the importance of your IT service desk and how they keep everyone productive by managing your IT infrastructure.
Even IT technicians and engineers can encounter problems they have never seen before. These are the moments where service availability suffers the most, as your recovery time objective (RTO) is missed while the team scrambles to figure out a solution. By documenting every single incident on your network, your IT department can stop relying on memory or internet research, and quickly resolve the problem by referencing a proven, successful solution specific to your enterprise.
Assessing Business Services – When your IT department starts seeing an influx of events from a single piece of software, it can be concerning. While these incidents may highlight an underlying problem with your infrastructure, this also helps IT departments to assess the suitability of their chosen enterprise software solutions.
If they discover that a problem lies not with your infrastructure, but with a particular independent software vendor (ISV) application, it may be time for a change. This could be decades-old legacy software or a new solution that is experiencing performance or stability issues. Either way, this will help you determine the long-term candidacy of your enterprise software, and when to cut your losses and move to a new solution.
What to Look for with an Incident Management System
Now, we understand the purpose of an Incident Management System, but choosing the right solution for your enterprise is no easy task. There are many options on the market that Trianz experts recommend, including solutions that leverage bleeding-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
As an example, let us discuss the ServiceNow platform.
Incident Management with ServiceNow
One solution comes in the form of the ServiceNow platform. ServiceNow is an IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) platform for the enterprise. The platform offers a broad range of solutions for managing enterprise IT infrastructure and services holistically, in a software-agnostic and platform-agnostic manner.
Concerning Incident Management, you have the ServiceNow Incident Management module. This module allows support teams to track and fix IT problems, with end-users reporting problems through a dedicated service desk portal. You can also leverage natural language understanding (NLU) to automate virtual support agents, reducing low-level service requests for your helpdesk. ServiceNow also provides self-service portals to help you further reduce incoming low-level service requests with user-facing knowledge databases. This incident management module can integrate with the configuration management database (CMDB) module, cross-referencing live application configurations against the original configuration to identify discrepancies. From here, you can automate the remediation of these configuration problems to bolster your incident management initiatives further, regardless of the architecture or programming language being used.
Incident Management with Trianz
Incident Management is an excellent way to keep track of problems on your network, and the solutions that remediate them. We have a close partnership with ServiceNow, offering a broad range of consulting services that leverage functionality on the platform.
Ensure that IT problems are received, dealt with, and remembered. Get in touch with our experts to start tracking incidents on your network today.
