Incident Management Software
Improve agent efficiency and user experience through better ITIL incident management
Customers love our Incident Management capabilities as part of their IT Service Management (ITSM) program. Our goal is to help your agents get in and out of tickets as efficiently as possible, while providing the best experience for your endusers.
Incident Management within SolarWinds Service Desk provides better ticket creation, routing, management, and remediation methods. Tightly connected to the Knowledge Base capabilities and powered by AI, it even provides ticket deflection capabilities, helping your end-users self-serve the answers they need.
Resolve tickets before they’re even opened
The easiest incidents to resolve are the ones that never get opened. Agents get inundated with low-criticality tickets every day. Our incident management system leverages AI to integrate with the knowledge base to suggest articles to end-users while they are creating tickets. Our Virtual Agent, an , also helps end-users find knowledge base articles for their most common problems.
End-users receive a better experience when the answers to their common challenges are resolved immediately interruption.
And all are available no matter where and how they work, whether on the web, mobile, slack, or teams.
Boost employee performance - doing more with less
Most companies have more incidents, requests, and tickets than agents can effectively handle, leaving some tickets never resolved, SLAs missed, and employees feeling overworked. SolarWinds Service Desk puts your agents at the center of their work, from agent-customizable incident overview screens, live agent collaboration on tickets, AI-recommended fixes, and multi-ticket resolution.
Now your team can deliver on their commitments, provide a great end-user experience, and still make it home in time for dinner.
Automate IT incident management across your company
Automating IT services will allow your organization to operate more quickly and meet employee service demands in a unified way. The right incident management software gives your service and support teams automated rules to eliminate simple tasks, route tickets to the right people, and resolve incidents faster—and the quicker you get your resources aligned, the faster a ticket can be closed. Automated incident tracking software gives your business time back, so you can focus on what really matters.
SolarWinds Service Desk leverages a powerful Automation engine to bring even more efficiency to your maturing ITSM practices. Our IFTTT (If this than that) automation principles allow easy point & click automation rule creation for nearly anything you need for incidents. Set automation to send notifications, update records, and create a change record, to name a few examples.
Best practices of the ITIL framework through incident management software
Since ITIL is a framework, ITIL best practices adoption varies from organization to organization. Still, best practices can benefit most organizations, including encouraging service requests over break-fix incident tickets and automating the incident creation, updating, routing, and closing processes.
With our software’s help, you can quickly adopt ITIL best practices and assess employees’ needs. Our incident management software will match incidents and impacted assets with relevant solution articles, so your team can keep best practices in mind for every ticket. Our system also helps employees visualize the incident lifecycle, escalate incidents into problems, and associate incidents with upcoming changes.
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What is incident management in ITIL?
Disrupted IT services can have a ripple effect throughout your systems and severely impact overall IT function and security, so it’s crucial to resolve any problems ASAP—and that means leveling up your incident management.
Incidents are unplanned interruptions to IT services that reduce service quality, while incident management is the process of managing and resolving these incidents. Incident management generally involves prioritizing and fixing incidents based on urgency and impact. When done correctly, incident management can minimize the effect of interruptions and return your service to normal as fast as possible, helping avoid an accidental breach of your service level agreements (SLAs).
With the help of a centralized incident management tool that follows Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) incident management protocol, ensuring function and security will be simple. Not only will an ITIL incident management platform serve as an incident tracker and incident report software, but it can also offer analysis and reporting capabilities that make resolving issues easier. Plus, employees will know how to get the help they need, and IT technicians will receive incidents in a more organized way and be able to diagnose and manage problems even faster.
Why is incident management important?
Incident management helps to ensure your business has the IT support it needs to function efficiently. Even with preventative measures like data log security monitors and firewalls in place, various system issues like memory, capacity, or sophisticated cyber threats might slip under your radar. When an employee experiences a problem, you must deploy a tool to respond. That’s where incident management comes in. ITIL incident management is useful and can even be critical. It’s all too possible for an incident to escalate to a much more severe problem affecting security or functionality.
Another important function of ITIL incident management tool is its ability to maintain a foundation of trust in your business. When system errors prevent network functionality, your employees will be uneasy about the privacy and quality of their work environment. Even worse, customers who cannot voice incident complaints are unlikely to trust your business. Trust in your business' safety and reliability can depend on your ability to receive and fix incident tickets in a timely fashion.
What is an incident management system, and what does the incident lifecycle look like?
Incident management platform - what is it?
An incident management system is a tool designed to help speed up and automate the incident management process. Your incident tracker can process tickets, escalate tickets to problems when necessary, and provide recommended solutions to IT managers.
When your network users encounter an issue, you need an efficient channel to connect users with real, human IT managers in an organized way that won’t overwhelm managers of even the largest networks—and that’s exactly what incident reporting software does. Incident tracking software helps consolidate the ticket-to-problem process so IT managers aren’t flooded with individual, ad hoc questions in their inboxes. Essentially, it streamlines and helps automate the entire incident management process.
Incident lifecycle
Your incident management process should begin with the identification stage, which means implementing a ticketing process. The good news is that ITIL frameworks include a ticketing protocol, enabling users to document details of an incident and submit everything through a centralized system. Service Desk can create tickets from information submitted via email or the user portal, direct contact with IT professionals, and Orion modules imports.
After your IT incident management team receives the ticket, it’s time to diagnose and resolve the issue’s root cause. Here, too, your incident management software will come in handy, as it can provide repair and optimization recommendations. Then, your IT incident management team can close the ticket and inform the relevant end-users.
How does Service Desk incident management software work?
SolarWinds Service Desk offers comprehensive incident management using the ITIL framework. Service Desk is a scalable solution that can support service management for large and small organizations.
To maximize the efficiency of the incident management process, Service Desk includes a unique employee service portal, which informs employees of common issues that might be mistaken for a more serious incident. If an employee is experiencing a problem that can be easily self-corrected, there’s no need to flood the ITIL incident management system with superfluous requests. Instead, they can refer to FAQs within the knowledge base.
As more incidents are processed through Service Desk, SolarWinds AI tools can constantly develop your existing knowledge into more accurate and sophisticated solutions. The longer you use Service Desk, the more precise the incident response solutions will become.
For IT managers, SolarWinds also employs an intuitive visual interface with customizable displays. Service Desk makes it easy to visualize the entire incident management process from beginning to end.
What are incident management best practices?
When it comes to incident management, there are a few best practices you’ll want to follow to save time and make your life as easy as possible.
- First, you’ll want to automate the incident creation process. After all, manually entering data to create incidents can be a tedious and time-consuming task that leaves plenty of room for errors. However, you can save yourself the headache by automating the incident creation process.
- In a similar vein, you can configure your ITIL incident management system to automatically route tickets in the queue to the right group or agents to save time. Automatically updating ticket states and closing inactive tickets can also be a major time-saving move.
- Try to create an environment where users submit service requests rather than break-fix incident tickets, as service requests are less disruptive and generally easier to automate than incidents. They can also be approved in advance, requiring less hands-on work upon ticket submission than incidents, which are usually quite urgent and require resolution ASAP.
- We also recommend creating relationships between relevant areas of your incident reporting software. Connecting incidents with similar issues, useful Knowledge Base articles, and solutions that were helpful in the past won’t take much time, but it can greatly improve the end-user experience. It’s also worth connecting laptop incidents to their assets, as this can create a record you can use to justify a replacement down the line.
What is the difference between Incident Management and Problem Management?
Incident management and problem management are two key processes in IT service management, but they serve slightly different purposes.
Incident management focuses on immediate response and resolving individual incidents or disruptions. Its main goal is to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible, minimizing the impact on users and the business. Incident management is reactive in nature, dealing with incidents as they occur and prioritizing their timely resolution.
Problem management, on the other hand, takes a proactive approach, identifying and addressing the root causes of incidents. Its goal is to prevent the recurrence of incidents and improve the overall quality of IT services. Problem management involves analyzing patterns, trends, and repeating incidents to identify root causes and implement long-term solutions. It focuses on understanding why incidents happen and finding ways to eliminate or mitigate the underlying problems.
While incident management is concerned with immediate response and restoration of services, problem management focuses on identifying and resolving root causes to prevent similar incidents in the future. Incident management deals with individual incidents, while problem management takes a broader perspective to address systemic issues.
Both incident management and problem management are critical to maintaining stable and reliable IT services. Incident management ensures rapid resolution of incidents and minimizes service disruption, while problem management contributes to continuous improvement and prevention of recurring incidents.
What is incident routing, and why is it helpful?
Incident routing is the process of addressing incidents to the appropriate teams or individuals within an organization for effective and efficient resolution. It involves determining the best resources and expertise required to handle specific incidents based on their characteristics. Incident routing is typically done through incident management software or ticketing systems.
Why is incident routing helpful?
- Efficient and timely incident resolution: By addressing incidents to the appropriate teams or individuals with the necessary skills and knowledge, incident routing ensures that incidents are resolved quickly and efficiently. This reduces the time and effort required to reach the appropriate resources, resulting in faster incident resolution and minimized downtime.
- Resource allocation: Incident routing helps in optimizing resource allocation within an organization. By assigning incidents to the appropriate teams or individuals, it helps ensure that the workload is distributed evenly, preventing bottlenecks and overburdening specific support staff.
- Specialized support: Different types of incidents may require specialized expertise to effectively resolve them. Incident routing allows incidents to be routed to support teams or individuals who have the required skills and experience. This process helps ensure that incidents are handled by experts in the relevant areas, leading to more accurate and effective solutions.
- Prioritization and SLA compliance: Incident routing helps prioritize incidents based on their urgency, impact and compliance with service level agreements (SLAs). Automatic routing of incidents according to predefined criteria, such as priority levels or SLA requirements, ensures that high-priority incidents receive immediate attention. This helps achieve SLA targets and quickly resolve critical issues.
- Accountability and tracking: Incident routing provides a clear path of responsibility and accountability. Each incident is assigned to a specific team or individual, ensuring ownership and enabling effective tracking of incident progress. This increases transparency, collaboration and coordination among support staff.
- Reporting and analysis: Incident routing systems often provide comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities. They collect data on the number of incidents, response times, resolution rates and other key indicators. This information helps organizations analyze incident patterns, identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to continuously improve incident management processes.
You can find detailed instructions on how to create an incident and how to configure its routing in our documentation.
What is incident management in ITIL?
Disrupted IT services can have a ripple effect throughout your systems and severely impact overall IT function and security, so it’s crucial to resolve any problems ASAP—and that means leveling up your incident management.
Incidents are unplanned interruptions to IT services that reduce service quality, while incident management is the process of managing and resolving these incidents. Incident management generally involves prioritizing and fixing incidents based on urgency and impact. When done correctly, incident management can minimize the effect of interruptions and return your service to normal as fast as possible, helping avoid an accidental breach of your service level agreements (SLAs).
With the help of a centralized incident management tool that follows Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) incident management protocol, ensuring function and security will be simple. Not only will an ITIL incident management platform serve as an incident tracker and incident report software, but it can also offer analysis and reporting capabilities that make resolving issues easier. Plus, employees will know how to get the help they need, and IT technicians will receive incidents in a more organized way and be able to diagnose and manage problems even faster.
“SolarWinds Service Desk is acting as a multiple solution platform for us. We’ve gone from six different platforms to one. It brings our departments much closer together.”
Gilad Vinitsky
CTO
The BLOC
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