Incident Management
The complete lifecycle of how organizations prevent, detect, respond to, and learn from incidents.
The complete lifecycle of how organizations prevent, detect, respond to, and learn from incidents.
## The Big Picture **Incident Management** is the umbrella term for the entire program. It includes: 1. **Preparation**: Runbooks, Game Days, Monitoring. 2. **Response**: The actual firefighting (Incident Response). 3. **Review**: Post-incident reviews (Postmortems). 4. **Analysis**: Weekly operational reviews, MTTR tracking. ### Incident Management vs. Incident Response * **Response**: "The house is on fire! Put it out!" (Tactical). * **Management**: "Why did the house catch fire? How do we build fire-proof houses? Are we buying the right fire trucks?" (Strategic). **Want to understand the difference between incident response and incident management?** [Read our deep dive: Incident Management vs Incident Response — What Teams Get Wrong](/blog/incident-management-vs-incident-response). ### Maturity Levels * **Level 1 (Reactive)**: We fix it when customers complain. * **Level 2 (Responsive)**: We have alerts and fix it fast. * **Level 3 (Proactive)**: We have automated runbooks and defined SEV levels. * **Level 4 (Elite)**: We learn from every failure and our reliability increases over time.
ExThe "Unlucky" Team
"A team felt they were "unlucky" because they had 5 incidents a week."
Why Incident Management Matters
Incident management is broader than response. It includes prevention, measurement, and continuous improvement.
Good incident management turns failures into learning opportunities.