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How StatusHub Complements Incident Management Process?

2018-10-10

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Category:Incident management

How StatusHub Complements and Extends Your Incident Management Process?

Although the main focus of StatusHub is incident communication, it compliments each 5 activities of Incident Management: Identification, Categorization, Prioritization, Response and Communication with the user community through the life of the incident.

Effectively communicate the incident process internally and externally

When a company faces an IT incident - unplanned interruption or quality reduction of an IT service, a set of IT service management practices is used in order to restore an IT service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the impact on a company and on end-users. In ITIL strategy this process is called Incident Management.

Although the main focus of StatusHub is incident communication, it compliments each 5 activities of Incident Management: Identification, Categorization, Prioritization, Response and Communication with the user community through the life of the incident. Following the correct steps of these activities can be very difficult for tech or incident team when the pressure from the end-users and impacted staff is on and people are waiting for information. StatusHub opens the opportunity to focus on solving the problem with automation of workflow. Let's consider in more detail each of the stages and determine what role the StatusHub plays in each of them. In each paragraph below you will find a table with a short explanation.

Identify, Categorize, Prioritize

First of all, when an incident occurs or when the tech team is planning a maintenance event the first thing to do is Identify the service disruption. It means that the responsible person should register:

  • Name of a person who found or will set up the disruption;

  • Date and time;

  • Description of the event;

  • Identification number for tracking.

Currently, to minimize the human error, in most cases, companies use monitoring tools or incident management software.

Next activities: Categorize and Prioritise can be completed by the service desk. At first, a logical and intuitive category should be assigned to the event and then decide how much impact or pain the incident is causing and how urgent the problem should be solved, in some cases there may be several incidents at the same time. StatusHub gives more options to the tech or incident team as it integrates with your monitoring tools. When a problem is detected by a monitoring system connected to StatusHub it automatically creates an incident event and posts it to StatusHub. Events can be created or edited in StatusHub manually as well. StatusHub instantly sends notifications about the start of downtime with the short description of Impacted service and its status to all subscribers. If monitoring tools are not connected to StatusHub, they only notify the tech or incident team.

Incident Management Process activities: Identify, Categorize, Prioritize.

In Response: Monitoring tools, Incident Management software or Tech team / Incident team.

Role of Statushub: When a problem is detected by the monitoring system it automatically creates an incident report and posts it to StatusHub. StatusHub instantly sends a notification about the start of downtime with a short description (Impacted service and its status) to all subscribers.

* Tech team can create incidents in StatusHub manually.
* If monitoring tools are not connected to StatusHub, they notify the tech or incident team directly.

Respond

When the incident is Identified, Categorised and Prioritised the next step is Respond. This activity includes five phases:

  • Initial diagnosis - the tech team forms a quick hypothesis around what is likely wrong;

  • Incident escalation - if more technical support is needed the right 3. information should be documented;

  • Investigation diagnosis - tech team check the hypothesis;

  • Resolution and Recovery - Executing or carrying out the actions to restore the service;

  • Incident closure - after all systems are restored to normal operation the information about an incident passed back to the service desk.

This is the most intense and stressful step and StatusHub reduces the pressure on your tech and support team during all five phases. All ongoing notifications about incident status are available on the status page. It is so much easier and time-saving to post the update than repeat the same information over and over to the all impacted staff and users on a 1-1 basis. Moreover, StatusHub provides an opportunity for all interested parties to subscribe for notifications using the self-service interface on the status page. If preferred the StatusHub administrators can import subscribers and manage subscription options.

Incident Management Process activities: Respond (Initial diagnosis, Incident escalation, Investigation and diagnosis, Incident closure).

In Response: Tech team / Incident team.

Role of Statushub: Ongoing Notifications about incident status are available on the status page.
StatusHub provides an opportunity for all interested parties to subscribe for notifications (self-service).

Communicate

You can be so focused and caught up in an incident that you may defolt to only responding to internal communication. However, you also need to ensure that communication is shared with everyone affected throughout the life of the incident. Ideally, end-users should have information about the start of the downtime, a short description of the known cause, it’s impact, estimated time for restoration and an estimate of the next scheduled update.

The goal of StatusHub is to help you to improve communication during the IM process. It takes the pressure off a support team by reducing the need to maintain 1-1 communications with all end-users.

  • In addition to a status website, all subscribers will be kept informed with notifications, such as SMS, email or WebHooks.

  • StatusHub provides a number of ways to embed status information in your own app or website, so end-users are more likely to see the information when and where relevant. For example, we recommend including a widget on a support portal or contact page.

  • In some cases, monitoring tools can generate tech and heavy descriptions, that will be hard for understanding by the end-users. The tech or incident team can use the Draft Mode feature to make them more clear and human-friendly.

Incident Management Process activities: Communicate with the user community through the life of the incident.

In Response: Support team.

Role of Statushub: StatusHub is a broadcast, system that takes the pressure out of the support team by relieving them from "help” requests. Impacted staff and end users keep updated with the use of Hosted Status Page and personal notifications (SMS / email / WebHooks).


Please feel free to contact us with any questions!

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