Automating Incident Response: Tips and Strategies for Modern SRE Teams

It’s 2024: no company is shipping its business software to production by manually copying and pasting files from a local machine into a server. In fact, it’s been about ten years since automated pipelines like CI/CD became the norm for delivering software at scale.

Manually deploying code is a slow process with a huge error margin and is impossible to coordinate at scale. That’s why organizations invested in automated deployment: no matter how complex CI/CD can get, it’s still more reliable and simpler than trying to coordinate dozens of teams pasting their code into a server.

Incident management has also evolved to a point where organizations need faster resolution times and deal with more complexity. Automation in incident management is a necessary practice for performing SRE teams of any scale as it helps hit SLOs, cuts down time on repetitive tasks, and prevents human errors.

Why Automate Your Incident Response?

1. Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

Using automation can reduce your MTTR by up to 78% because it dramatically changes how your responders handle incidents. Your on-call engineers can focus on addressing the incident at hand instead of having to come up with a process to collaborate or figure out what actions to perform.

Modern incident management tools like Rootly set up all communication and collaboration channels for you, without taking your team out of Slack or Microsoft Teams. Your SRE team can set up workflows to automate tasks like fetching data from Datadog or notifying leadership based on certain triggers, so your responders avoid context-switching and are laser-focused on resolving the incident.

2. Minimize Human Error

Incidents are high-stress tasks where you have to deal with a lot of complexity and do so as quickly as you can. No matter how experienced your responder is, mistakes can slip their mind when dealing with especially tricky incidents.

Some companies and incident types are especially susceptible to human errors. For example, if your company operates in a highly regulated environment, your responders have to keep track of many tasks and perform checks with each incident that they can automate instead.

Your responders free up space in their memory to perform more meaningful tasks, knowing that all logs and key events are being tracked automatically for them.

3. Scale Your Reliability

As your company grows, so does the complexity of your infrastructure and the volume of incidents you have to manage. Automation lets your SRE team manage more incidents without having to hire and train exponentially, even though the services they support are growing. It’s not even a recruitment budget limitation: there are few SREs in the market, and training them to work independently in your tech ecosystem requires significant time.

Furthermore, once you have to manage several incidents at the same time as part of your daily routine, automation is the only way to move forward. You need your incident management practice to mature across the organization and form repeatable (and improvable) processes. Only by delegating repetitive tasks can you ensure you scale that process.

5 Steps to Automate Your Incident Management Process

1. Identify Key Processes to Automate

A common mistake when introducing automation to any process is doing it in the wrong places. Start by taking a good look at your current incident response process. Identify the tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming, or where errors are often found. These are the prime candidates for automation. For example, you may find that automating the initial alerting and notification process could be a good place to start, or automating the gathering of diagnostic data to kickstart an investigation process.

2. Standardize Your Processes

Before you jump into automation, it’s important to make sure your processes are known and repeatable. This means having clear, well-documented steps for how to handle different types of incidents, including who needs to be involved, what actions should be taken, and how communication should be managed. By standardizing these processes, you make it easier to automate them and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

3. Integrate Your Tools

To get the most out of automation, your incident response tools need to work well together. Make sure that your monitoring, alerting, and communication tools are all integrated so that information can flow smoothly between them. This way, when an incident occurs, your automated workflows can kick in without any manual hand-offs, ensuring a faster and more coordinated response.

4. Set Up Automated Workflows

With your tools integrated and your processes standardized, you can start setting up automated workflows. These are essentially predefined sequences of actions that are triggered when certain conditions are met. For instance, if a service goes down, an automated workflow might send out an alert, create a conference call for the response team, and start collecting logs for analysis. By automating these steps, you can ensure that incidents are handled quickly and consistently every time.

5. Choose the Right Tools

Not all incident response tools are created equal, so it’s important to choose ones that fit your needs. Look for tools that offer robust automation features, such as automated alerting, workflow orchestration, and incident tracking. Also, consider tools that are easy to integrate with your existing systems and offer flexibility as your needs evolve. Tools like Rootly, which can integrate with Slack, Jira, and Datadog, provide a comprehensive solution for automating incident management and are a good example of what to look for.

Leveraging AI in Incident Management

Given the amount of data involved in each incident, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a more prominent factor in incident management automation. AI can be adopted at several stages of the incident management process. For example, Google uses AI mainly to write incident summaries while Meta is experimenting with speeding up the root cause analysis with AI.

How Rootly Helps Modern SREs Automate Incident Response

Rootly is a modern on-call and incident management solution that automates much of the process for your responders. Rootly provides no-code automations for many use cases, from simple to complex workflows connecting up to 70 tools like Jira, Notion, and Zoom.

Rootly is trusted by leading SRE teams around the world, including LinkedIn, NVIDIA, and Tripadvisor. Book a demo with one of our reliability experts to find out how Rootly can help your organization automate your incident management process.

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