🧭 1. Introduction to Incident Management
What is an Incident?
An incident is any event that disrupts or reduces the quality of an IT service. This could include server outages, broken integrations, degraded performance, or security breaches.
Definition of Incident Management
Incident Management is the process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all incidents. Its primary goal is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible while minimizing impact on business operations.
Incident vs Problem vs Change
- Incident: Unplanned interruption.
- Problem: The root cause behind recurring incidents.
- Change: The addition, modification, or removal of any service component.
Importance
- Minimizes downtime
- Improves customer satisfaction
- Enables faster resolution
Goals and Objectives
- Resolve incidents quickly
- Maintain SLAs/SLOs
- Learn from past incidents (via RCA)
🧠 2. Core Concepts & Terminology
Severity vs Priority
- Severity: Technical impact (e.g., data loss, downtime).
- Priority: Business urgency (e.g., VIP customer affected).
| Severity | Description |
|---|---|
| SEV 1 | Complete outage |
| SEV 2 | Major functionality loss |
| SEV 3 | Minor issues |
| SEV 4 | Cosmetic or questions |
SLA, OLA, and SLO
- SLA: External commitments
- OLA: Internal commitments
- SLO: Engineering metrics
Common Metrics
- MTTA: Mean Time to Acknowledge
- MTTR: Mean Time to Resolve
- MTBF: Mean Time Between Failures
- MTTD: Mean Time to Detect
Escalation Paths
Defined procedures to involve higher support tiers or management.
Runbooks and Playbooks
- Runbook: Step-by-step guide to fix known issues.
- Playbook: Broader response strategies.
War Rooms and ICS
- Centralized command structure for managing critical incidents.
🧩 3. Types of Incidents
IT Service Incidents
- Server crashes
- DNS failures
- Email outages
Security Incidents
- Unauthorized access
- DDoS attacks
- Data breaches
Major Incidents
- Affect large user base or critical systems.
Operational vs Functional Incidents
- Operational: Infrastructure-related
- Functional: Feature not working
Performance Incidents
- High latency
- API timeouts
🛠 4. Incident Management Lifecycle
Detection and Alerting
Using monitoring tools to detect issues.
Triage and Prioritization
Classify based on severity and impact.
Assignment and Ownership
Assign incident to responsible team or on-call engineer.
Investigation and Diagnosis
Root cause analysis and hypothesis validation.
Communication and Coordination
Across teams and stakeholders.
Resolution and Recovery
Temporary or permanent fixes.
Incident Closure
Ensure resolution and capture logs.
Post-Incident Review (PIR)
Document what went wrong and how to improve.
🧪 5. Incident Detection and Alerting
Monitoring Tools
- Prometheus: Time-series metrics
- Nagios: Infra and service monitoring
- New Relic: APM and user monitoring
Alerting Tools
- PagerDuty
- Opsgenie
- VictorOps
Best Practices
- Avoid alert fatigue
- Use rate limits and thresholds
🔗 6. Incident Response Team & Roles
Roles
- Incident Commander: Leads the response
- Scribe: Logs all actions and decisions
- SMEs: Deep-dive technical experts
- Communications Lead: Updates stakeholders
On-Call Engineer
- Rotational role
- Uses tools like PagerDuty
🗃 7. Communication During Incidents
Internal
- Slack war rooms
- Zoom huddles
External
- Status pages (Statuspage.io)
- Customer emails
Templates
- First notice
- Regular updates
- RCA summary
📑 8. Documentation & Runbooks
Components
- Description
- Preconditions
- Step-by-step resolution
- Rollback steps
Auto-Triggered Runbooks
Using observability tools or bots to launch them.
🔄 9. Post-Incident Analysis
RCA Techniques
- 5 Whys
- Fishbone Diagram
Blameless Culture
Avoid finger-pointing, focus on process fixes.
Continuous Improvement
Turn RCA into action items.
📈 10. Metrics, KPIs & Reporting
Key Metrics
- Number of incidents per month
- MTTA, MTTR trends
- SLA/SLO breaches
Reporting Tools
- Grafana dashboards
- Jira reports
🔐 11. Security Incident Management
Detection
- IDS/IPS
- SIEM (e.g., Splunk, Wazuh)
Response Plan
- Isolate
- Investigate
- Mitigate
- Notify
Compliance
- GDPR
- HIPAA
- SOC 2
🏗 12. Tools & Platforms
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| Monitoring | Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic |
| Alerting | PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps |
| Communication | Slack, Zoom, Teams |
| Tracking | Jira, ServiceNow, Freshservice |
| Status Pages | Statuspage.io, Better Uptime |
| Automation | Rundeck, StackStorm, Ansible, Terraform |
🧰 13. Incident Automation & AI Ops
Concepts
- Anomaly detection using AI (e.g., Moogsoft, BigPanda)
- Self-healing via scripts
- ChatOps bots (e.g., Slackbots)
Tools
- AIOps: Dynatrace, Splunk ITSI
- Automation: Rundeck, StackStorm
🔄 14. Integration with Change & Problem Management
Change Management
- Link incidents to recent changes
- CAB and freeze windows
Problem Management
- Create problem records
- Eliminate root cause
🔬 15. Industry Frameworks
ITIL 4
- Standard lifecycle-based approach
NIST 800-61
- Cybersecurity-centric guide
Google SRE
- Practical incident handling focus
ISO 27001
- Security incidents within ISMS
🌐 16. Real-World Case Studies
AWS S3 Outage (2017)
- Root cause: human error
- Lesson: dependency on a single command
Facebook Outage (2021)
- DNS and BGP misconfig
- Lesson: communication redundancy
🧭 17. Learning Path and Certifications
- ITIL Foundation: ITSM basics
- Google SRE Udacity: Real-world engineering
- CompTIA Security+: For security focus
- Cloud-Specific: AWS, Azure incident handling courses
📚 18. Practice Scenarios
- Set up Prometheus + Alertmanager
- Use chaos engineering (Chaos Monkey)
- Simulate SEV-1 incident in war game
- Use GitHub repos with mock incidents
🎓 19. Interview Preparation
Common Questions
- Describe MTTR in your org
- How do you handle noisy alerts?
- Describe your role in a SEV-1 incident
Scenario Q&A
- You get a 3 AM alert — walk through your response
🧩 20. FAQs & Troubleshooting
- What if no one acknowledges the alert?
- What’s a good threshold for CPU alerts?
- What if your runbook doesn’t work?
- How to reduce recurring incidents?