Address major incidents with Atlassian tools
15 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:
- Identify what everyone’s role is during a major incident
- Describe the tools used at each stage of a major incident
Explore the lifecycle of an incident
A team moves through several stages when they address an incident. They’ll use different tools for different stages.
Tools for the detect stage
In the detect stage, the team notices a new service disruption. Customers can submit incidents through the portal.
👉 For example: A customer tries to make a payment on the main company website and it fails, so they create a ticket on the customer portal. The request type is Report a system problem, which will appear as an incident in Jira Service Management.
👇Here’s an example of the ticket created by the customer.
Tools for the classify and respond stage
In the classify and respond stage, the service agent:
- Chooses a parent incident, if there are multiple related incidents
- Identifies the service
- Assesses the impact of the incident
- Classifies the incident using fields in Jira Service Management
👉 For example: Janice is a service agent working in the Open incidents queue. She can see that there are many incidents reporting the same problem with making payments on the website. She picks one incident to be the main or parent incident. Janice then links all the other incidents to this parent incident so anyone viewing the child incidents can click a link to quickly see the parent incident. She confirms that the incident impacts the payment service and determines it’s a critical and widespread problem. Janice updates the fields on the parent incident to document this.
👇 Click the icons below to explore how to address an incident in Jira Service Management.
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Additionally, you can use Jira Service Management features for your on-call schedule, rotations that define when different team members are responsible for handling incidents and alerts. You can customize schedules according to your team’s needs, like timezone settings and rotation types.
Agents can see their shifts and who’s currently on call in the On-call section of the service project.
As soon as an agent marks an incident as major, Jira Service Management sends an alert to the on-call responder for the incident response team that owns the affected service.
👉 For example: Di is on call for the Payment team, who owns the payment service. She receives a text that there’s a major incident for her team’s service. She acknowledges the alert, so she stops receiving notifications. Jira Service Management automatically adds Janice, the incident’s assignee, and the Payment team as responders to the incident. Di reviews the incident and adds Morris as a responder because he’s a principal engineer on the Payment team.
👇Watch the video below to learn how to link and escalate incidents.
Tools for the communicate stage
In the communicate stage, the incident response team communicates with customers and stakeholders.
👇Click the boxes below to see how the incident response team uses Atlassian tools to communicate with customers.
Tools for the investigate and recover stage
In the investigate and recover stage, the incident response team focuses on identifying and fixing the incident.
👇Click the boxes below to see how the incident response team uses Atlassian tools to investigate and recover from an incident.
Tools for the learn and improve stage
The learn and improve stage is where the organization focuses on learning and improving from each major incident. Once the major incident is closed, the incident commander creates a post-incident review. You can use the post-incident review to determine why the incident happened, what its impact was, what the team did to resolve it, and how to prevent it in the future. You can create a post-incident review in Jira Service Management or Confluence and link any relevant Jira Service Management reports or work items.
👇Watch the video below to learn how to close multiple incidents and create a post-incident review.