We recently launched a new, free tool called Incident Insights. The tool automatically ingests ticketing data from incident management systems and uses machine learning to filter and group issues. Ultimately – it turns your messy ticketing data into easy-to-read patterns and trends.
This helps managers understand the underlying causes of incidents and identify alarms that may be firing when they are not needed. It also helps managers understand the true impact of issues by calculating mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to repair (MTTR) for each incident group identified.
Read on to learn the three reasons why we built this tool — and why we think it's necessary for any on-call team.
1. Cloud ops leaders need better insights
When we talk to cloud ops leaders, we notice a worrisome pattern. Too many leaders struggle to answer important questions about their environment, like:
- What are the most common issues causing downtime?
- What issues take the longest amount of time to resolve?
- Which teams carry the heaviest on-call burden?
Leaders can’t answer these questions because they don’t have the right tools in place to easily analyze the growing mass of ticketing data (which is often messy and contains a lot of duplicates).
To date, analyzing ticketing data has been an arduous process involving scrubbing and aggregating records manually. It’s a time-consuming task that typically takes many hours every time you want an analysis. As a result — the analysis usually never even gets done.
Cloud ops leaders need a tool that can contextualize incident data instantly to provide insights about the issues that occur — instead of just creating a running list of issues to mitigate. That’s exactly what Incident Insights does. It provides leaders with analysis on categorized and filtered data to help them understand what issues occur most frequently, and which ones take the most time to resolve. Some of our customers are seeing this aggregated data across services for the very first time.
2. We understand WHAT insights are most valuable
As former cloud ops leaders ourselves, we understand the difference between data overload and actionable insights. We understand what cloud ops leaders care about and what questions they must answer to increase productivity across teams — especially when time and resources are limited.
Based on our experience, we know that cloud ops leaders need to:
- Prioritize tasks: Incident Insights reports on what issues occur most frequently, and how long they take to resolve. With this data, leaders can prioritize the most frequent and burdensome issues for automated remediation or root cause repairs (depending on the type of issue), and invest time/money into those root causes instead of low priority issues.
- Manage the team’s workload: Incident Insights provides data about team health — outlining which team members are carrying the heaviest burden and where there are individual performance gaps. This data helps leaders distribute work consistent with individual and team bandwidth.
- Determine ROI of investments: Historical trend data within Incident Insights tracks key metrics over time to determine if new initiatives are having expected impact. With this data, cloud ops leaders can determine ROI and make better decisions about where and when to invest in root cause fixes, security initiatives, team expansion, productivity tools, and more.
We built Incident Insights for on-call management to focus on the areas that matter most to most to cloud ops leaders and help deliver insights to better manage their teams and environments.
3. Other Solutions Don’t Fill This Need
Our final reason for building Incident Insights? Put simply, we couldn’t find anything like it on the market. There are no other tools that easily aggregate data to provide a broader perspective on incidents. This important task has to be fast and easy, or it won’t happen nearly enough.
Too many platforms center on alerting teams to issues or distributing work to different team members. Those tools don’t integrate a layer of intelligence to contextualize the data in a way that empowers leaders to create efficiencies within their teams. Incident Insights closes that gap.
Try Incident Insights Today
Incident Insights is available now — and it’s free (no commitment). Within minutes, your team can connect its ticketing data to Incident Insights and start getting valuable information about the source of issues and your team’s response time. Check out this self-guided demo or simply sign up with your email or Google, connect your ticketing system, and see it in action on your own data.