What is Incident Management?
Incident management is the process of detecting, responding to, resolving, and learning from production outages and degradations.
Incident management is the process of detecting, responding to, resolving, and learning from production outages and degradations. A mature incident management process includes defined severity levels, escalation procedures, war room protocols, customer communication templates, and blameless postmortem practices.
Why It Matters
MTTR (a key DORA metric) is directly determined by incident management maturity. Organizations with documented runbooks, clear escalation paths, and practiced war room protocols recover exponentially faster than ad-hoc responders.
How to Measure
Track MTTR by severity, number of incidents per sprint, percentage with blameless postmortems completed, and recurrence rate (did the same issue happen again?).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a blameless postmortem?
A blameless postmortem focuses on WHAT happened and HOW to prevent recurrence — not WHO caused it. It creates psychological safety, which leads to more honest root cause analysis and better prevention.
Related Terms
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Richard Ewing is a Product Economist and AI Capital Auditor. He helps companies translate technical complexity into financial clarity.
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