Improve Incident Resolution with Context-Rich Alerts and Incident Management Software

A frequent challenge faced by on-call engineers during critical outages is pinpointing the exact cause of the failure. Even though modern monitoring tools and incident management software provide some context around each alert, there’s still room for improvement.

One relatively simple solution is to add labels to your alert payloads. This can significantly improve the time it takes for your team to respond to incidents using incident resolution software.

How Context-Rich Alerts Can Enhance Incident Resolution with Incident Management Software

As an on-call engineer, you’ve probably encountered a situation where a major alert took a long time to investigate because the alert payload lacked crucial information, such as hostname or cluster details in a Kubernetes setup.

By incorporating labels into important information within the payload, you can reduce the Mean Time To Respond (MTTR). Labels act as a way to classify the payload data and identify critical information.

For instance, consider an alert payload without labels. As an on-call engineer using incident management software, you’ll need additional details about the alert, such as IP address, hostname, or cluster identification. Without this information in the payload, you’d have to manually fetch it to troubleshoot the issue.

Context-rich alerts, on the other hand, can include details like IP address, hostname, application name, severity level, and environment name. This empowers you to:

• Diagnose problems faster by having all the relevant information upfront.
• Ignore alerts from test/staging environments based on environment-related labels.

Adding Labels to Alert Payloads for Improved Incident Management

You can add labels to your payload using your preferred monitoring tool. This article uses Prometheus Alertmanager as an example.

A Prometheus Alertmanager configuration file can include labels for context-rich alert payloads. Here’s an example:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: pubsub
namespace: laddertruck
labels:
name: "laddertruck"
language: "ruby"
language-version: "3.0.0"
framework: "rails"
framework-version: "5.2.1"
team: "xyz"
developed-by: "diane"
service-owner: "john"

The example above shows various labels you can use to provide context within an incident management software solution.

How to Decide Which Labels to Use for Effective Incident Management

The labels you choose will depend on your technology stack and on-call team structure. The on-call team, as the first responders to critical outages, should decide on the type of labels to use for most effective incident management.

Here are some common labels to get you started:

• owner: Identifies the service owner.
• language: The programming language the service is written in.
• framework: The framework the service is built on. This is vital if you have services written in the same language but using different frameworks.

Configuring Incident Resolution Software with Labels for Efficient Incident Management

Once you have labels in your alert payloads, you can leverage incident resolution software to route alerts to the appropriate person or team.

The article uses Squadcast as an example of incident resolution software. Squadcast routing rules can be used to efficiently manage and route incidents based on labels in the payload, optimizing your incident management process.

Benefits of Context-Rich Alerts for Streamlined Incident Management

Having context-rich alerts offers several advantages in terms of incident management:

• Faster Incident Resolution: Labels in payloads allow you to route alerts to the right people quickly, reducing MTTR.
• Improved Collaboration: Context-rich alerts provide all the necessary information for teams to collaborate effectively on resolving incidents.
• Simplified Post-Mortems: Context-rich alerts aid in creating detailed incident timelines, simplifying post-incident reviews within your incident management software.

Conclusion

The combination of context-rich alerts and intelligent routing, as facilitated by incident resolution software, can significantly reduce MTTR and MTTA. This approach allows you to scale your infrastructure while maintaining efficient incident response and overall incident management.

We welcome your thoughts on how incident response and incident management can be improved in your organization. Feel free to leave a comment or reach out to us on Twitter.