PagerDuty Study Shows Organizations Employ a Reactive Approach to IT Service Incident Management

A recent study conducted by Forrester on behalf of PagerDuty, an operations performance management provider, has found that traditional “reactive and tactical” incident management practices is resulting in critical gaps within the incident lifecycle. These gaps can lead to poor system reliability, magnifying the need for businesses to adopt an intelligent incident resolution strategy. 

-55 percent of business and IT decision-makers experienced IT service problems at least once a week.

- 53 percent of these decision-makers found out about these problems from business users or external customers rather than internal monitoring tools.

- 54 percent of respondents said their companies lacked adequate incident and problem management processes or did not provide enough information to identify where the problem comes from.

The study also describes how these poor experiences often stem from a “reactive and tactical” incident management approach that results in several issues:

- Companies use multiple non-integrated monitoring tools, resulting in overlapping notifications and multiple sources of information.

- Information overload makes it hard for engineers to quickly identify where the problem comes from.

- Disorganized incident resolution culture encourages teams responsible for different aspects of the underlying technology to focus on self-exoneration rather than collaboration.

The study further shows how a “strategic” incident resolution approach that focuses on resolving incidents by linking people, processes and technologies can impact an entire organization. It recommends that companies create a unified IT operations center that owns the entire lifecycle of incident resolution, leading to the following improvements:

- Reduced impact on business operations due to faster incident resolution

- More effective incident management due to proactive fixes

- Reduced stress for engineers responsible for ensuring reliability

- Greater satisfaction with IT among business users and customers.

PagerDuty’s operations performance management solution helps companies adopt a strategic approach to incident resolution by integrating across infrastructure and monitoring tools to provide visibility across their global operations and resolve the right problems faster. It also provides people and system analytics, which help companies make proactive fixes to reduce future incidents and improve mean time to resolution.