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Incident management tools allow technology and security teams to resolve major incidents faster including urgent issues that may lead to businesses seeing application and site downtime affecting their users.
An incident management solution needs to assist the user in resolving normal operations as fast as possible whilst also providing enough data to allow the user to classify the nature of the incident, perform root cause analysis, view previous actions taken and conduct thorough investigation and diagnosis. All of these vital insights will help inform the planning process towards creating continuous improvement plans necessary for future operations to perform smoothly.
By using incident management systems, services and tools, incidents can be correctly labeled, prioritised and attended to as required by team members responsible for bug fixes, server instances and various other applications that make up your business.
When selecting an incident management tool it is essential that it can be configured to receive and send alerts from any systems you use alongside your processes for security, production and operations.
For example the platform provided by Logit.io for cloud based log management is fully integrated to send alerts to all industry leading incident management software solutions that you may encounter.
With new incident management tools arriving onto the marketplace every year, if you wish to improve your organisation’s incident response management then look no further than our guide for 2021, featuring expert insights from long term users of some of the best solutions available.
Contents
1. ServiceNow
Mollie Newton, founder at Pet Me Twice gave her views on her Incident management tool of choice;
“In my opinion when it comes to incident management, ServiceNow is one of best software tools for this functionality for many years running.”
“ServiceNow allows me to interact with IT 24/7 to address my technological concerns about my services. The platform resolves disruptions and restores service much faster than other tools.”
“What I like the most about this software is that it also increases my work productivity in no time, with minimal charges and need for cost-cutting.” "ServiceNow is also reliable when it comes to monitoring how services are functioning and their impacts on my system’s performance. Their platform assists greatly in helping to prioritise which issues are of the highest concern.”
2. OpsGenie
“With OpsGenie you’ll never miss a critical alert and or the chance to notify the right people immediately”
says Eric McGee, Senior Network Engineer at TRGDatacenters.
“OpsGenie is also focused on increasing revenue to improve operational efficiency. It provides detailed information about the log details and can turn up new numbers easily and quickly. However, due to a complicated user management system, there’s a lot of room for improvement especially in the scheduling user interface (UI).”
3. PagerDuty
“PagerDuty provides real-time collaboration and mobile incident management effectively for team members”
Eric continues.
“It has powerful integration and a good iOS app and includes powerful API and email integration. It also has an easy-to-use and straightforward atomic scheduler.”
“On the other hand, the interface of PagerDuty is also poor, and the documentation and installation are complex, which requires a technically knowledgeable person to run day to day. PagerDuty also has poor support team management and users can find it difficult to turn off alerts.”
4. VictorOps
“VictorOps has efficient on-call schedules and suppressed noise making a massive difference with the on-call feature for clients. It is affordable with a simple workflow and impressive UI and integration mechanism”
says Eric.
“VictorOps has some cons as well, such as the interface is too complicated and seems to require additional training due to the complexity of navigating the platform’s features. VictorOps is also not that flexible for handling and accepting alerts.”
5. xMatters
“xMatters gives users comprehensive features at every tier, practically free.”
Eric added in his response.
“xMatters provides tools designed to meet the customer’s unique demands around incident resolution, alerts and responses. On the other hand, xMatters is limited in its alert escalation since its group customization is less mature.”
6. Jira Service Desk
“I’ve used Jira Service Desk incident management software due to its features such as customer enhanced SLAs and the fact that it includes enhanced reporting on service response times”
says Cristian, Co-founder at Deepstash.
“At the same time, agents are able to reply across a single thread as emails are getting parsed through the system.”
7. NinjaRMM
“NinjaRMM is the ideal solution for SMBs in a range of industries from education through to manufacturing and even IT”
says James Boatwright, CEO of Code Galaxy.
“The other thing that stands out is its price – prices start from $3 per month, per device, on a pay-as-you-go model.”
“There is no catch at this low price – just a dashboard of simplicity and intuition with an interface that is one of the fastest in its class.”
“For us in particular, the ‘Tasks’ feature has made installing software across multiple systems seamless and painless. This is all backed up by fast customer support. And that support is reflected in its organic service offerings – as we grow, NinjaRMM grows with us.”
8. Starting Point
“We service and provide technology solutions and consulting to a large number of SMBs and most organizations are not complex and led by business leaders.”
says Ray McKenzie Founder and Managing Director of Red Beach Advisors.
“The business leaders are mostly non-technical and we need to implement systems with quick implementations and with simple, lean functionality.”
“The best feature of Starting Point for our customers is the service management module and workflow automation.”
“The platform can be configured within a single hour and rule automations makes it easy for additional efficiency to be built into the platform.”
9. StatusCast
StatusCast is a scalable and hosted solution for creating and managing corporate status pages. This tool allows IT departments to schedule maintenance and notify customers and employees promptly of software downtimes using an email status page, SMS, or text message.
A StatusCast status page can be developed and managed privately or publicly using features provided by StatusCast. StatusCast assists companies in reducing help desk tickets, proactively communicating IT outages to employees and customers, demonstrating the uptime availability of critical applications, and assisting in root-cause analysis of IT incidents. StatusCast is also SOC 2 compliant and audited.
We hope you enjoyed this list, think we’ve missed a tool that you love to use for incident management? Then feel free to send your review to [email protected] you enjoyed this article then why not check out our guide on the top free, paid and open source business intelligence tools or our article on defining and explaining DDoS attacks?