5 Easy Steps to Automate Incident Management

Whether it’s a jammed printer or a massive social engineering attack, incident management helps IT teams act fast and minimize disruptions. A fundamental best practice, incident management is ripe for AI automation because it involves a lot of moving data-driven, repetitive tasks like categorizing related incidents, noticing a pattern based on past knowledge, etc. These operations can easily be handled by AI, leaving the human agents free to focus on the complex problem-solving needed to resolve incidents.

How automated incident management benefits IT teams

Every second counts when it comes to managing incidents that are critical and have a high impact. Using AI in incident management, your incident response team can save time spent on categorizing, prioritizing, and performing ticket updates so they can focus on incident analysis and problem identification.

So, whether you're an IT professional keen to streamline your operations, or a business leader looking to stay ahead of the curve, read on to discover how automated incident management can revolutionize your approach to IT incidents.

1. Auto-identify and link related incidents

When similar incidents are detected by Atomicwork, Atom will notify the administrators on Slack and Microsoft Teams, either personally through a DM or post the alert on a channel, so that they can immediately mobilize the incident response team.

Administrators can acknowledge the incident right from Slack and Microsoft Teams so that Atomicwork will group all related incidents into a primary request and start linking all new similar incidents to this primary request. Admins can even set up an auto-response with a workaround so that all affected users—post the acknowledgment—receive the response.

Atom can also intelligently prioritize incidents that admins can review even as the incident response team springs into action.

2. Get a quick overview of incidents

When a new teammate comes on board, they need to get up to speed because when it comes to incidents, especially of the urgent kind, every second matters.

Agents can quickly manually scan related incidents right from the primary request’s page and get a gist of the impact of the incident and all affected assets.

3. Notify all stakeholders

Few things are more painful than having to copy-paste updates to every stakeholder and affected user when a major incident is in progress.

As soon as an incident whose impact is high is detected, administrators can set up a workflow to create an incident-specific comms channel and post the channel creation message to the global incidents channel. This way, all stakeholders can keep an eye on incident progress and all updates can be posted to the channel automagically.

Atomicwork also lets administrators broadcast updates to all grouped incidents so that IT admins can focus on fixes and not thumb exercises.

4. Perform bulk actions

Perhaps, if we had to pick one thing that is more painful than Ctrl C + Ctrl Ving a message to stakeholders, it’d be performing request updates and changing status to closed for all the incidents that came in.

In Atomicwork, all an IT admin really has to do is select all linked requests and change the status to “Closed”.

5. Dig deep into incident metrics

Diving into incident metrics can be a goldmine for any IT team aiming to level up their incident resolution game. Automated incident management systems are like your personal treasure map, guiding you through a myriad of metrics and highlighting valuable insights key to continual service improvement. Be it the number of incidents reported, the average time to resolution, or the tally of incidents resolved within the agreed SLA, it's all there at your fingertips.

That’s all from us for now, folks! If we’ve missed out on an essential, automatable feature, make sure to let us know by writing to explore@atomicwork.com.

If you’d like to see our incident management features in action or would just like to chat, please sign up for a demo. We’re always excited to talk ITSM.

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