Rootly's End-to-End Guide to Incident Response (2024)

Phases of Incident Response

The lifecycle of an incident spans beyond identifying and resolving the problem. In the guide, we cover incidents holistically across the following phases:

1. Prepare

We’ll give you tips for maintaining and improving incident response capabilities and preventing incidents by ensuring that systems, applications, and data handling processes are sufficiently secure and reliable.

2. Identify

Discover, triage, validate, scope, and prioritize suspected incidents. We’ll guide you through best practices for categorizing incidents by their impact, ensuring prompt and appropriate responses.

3. Assemble

We’ll go over the roles that should be assigned for every incident and share how to coordinate your team effectively using tools like Slack to ensure swift and organized response.

4. Contain

During containment, the goal is to take immediate action to minimize customer impact, financial and or reputational loss, theft of information, or other disruption. We’ll cover incident communication methods for effective containment to ensure minimal damage.

5. Resolve

After the incident has been contained to minimize impact, efforts should focus on eliminating any elements of the incident from the environment to restore systems and recover normal operations as quickly as possible.

6. Reflect

Learn how to effectively conduct blameless retrospectives and implement improvements based on lessons learned.

Incident Response for Modern Teams

We've helped hundreds of customers manage over 150,000 incidents. We use the lessons learned to push the craft of incident response forward into a new, modern era.

Incidents are people problems that require human responses

Incidents impact real people—customers, employees, shareholders—requiring human responses rooted in empathy. AI and automation are valuable tools, but they serve to support human judgment, not replace it.

Incident response isn’t solely reactive

Incident response is a skill to be honed continuously, not just during crises. Regular game days, risk identification exercises, and chaos engineering strengthen your team's readiness and foster a safe environment for skill development.

There’s no such thing as “done” when it comes to your incident management program

An incident response program is dynamic, adapting to your environment and business needs. It’s not a static document but a living process that evolves to meet new challenges.