Common incident management challenges and how to overcome them
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Common incident management challenges and how to overcome them
Josiah Tillett
Published on 10 November 2025
10 min read
Josiah Tillett
Published on 10 November 2025
10 min read
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Common challenges
Effective incident management
Why technology matters in incident management
Tool up to manage incidents effectively
Running into the same incident management problems? Find out what works to fix communication gaps, documentation disasters, and team coordination issues.
When something breaks, the last thing you need is chaos. But that's exactly what happens when incidents hit. Teams scramble, messages fly everywhere, and somehow nobody knows who’s supposed to be doing what.
Sound familiar?
Here's why: most organisations face the same common obstacles when managing incidents. The bad news? Poor management can lead to big issues. The good news? These problems are totally fixable. Here, we walk through what typically goes wrong and – most importantly – what you can do about it.
Common challenges when dealing with incidents
At its core, incident management is about getting things back to normal as fast as possible when something goes sideways. Done right, it keeps your systems running, your customers happy, and your team from burning out. But there’s usually some stuff standing in the way.
These are the eight most common challenges organisations are up against when it comes to dealing with incidents:
1. Communication breakdowns
We’re sure you’ve been there. Someone knows something important, but the right people don’t hear about it until it’s too late. Or everyone’s getting pinged on five different platforms, and critical updates get lost in the noise.
Without a clear status page and regular, relevant updates, customer-facing teams get flooded with communication. Meanwhile internal stakeholders can be left out in the cold, creating miscommunication and unnecessary escalations.
2. Inefficient or insufficient process documentation
Without a pre-established, documented, and enforced response process, your teams will waste time rediscovering procedures during incidents, causing delays and inconsistent responses. And without post-incident retrospectives and meaningful metrics, they will miss out on important improvement opportunities.
3. Resource constraints
If you’ve struggled with a lack of staff, the wrong tools, or being in a time crunch, you’ll know all these things can prevent incidents being handled effectively and in a timely manner.
In general, resource issues can be addressed through incident prioritisation, automation of repetitive tasks, and establishing clear escalation paths to make the best use of what resources you do have.
4. Lack of coordination
Your culture can have a big impact too. Siloed teams, where information gets stuck, disparate tools that involve manual hand-offs, and unclear ownership often prolong incident resolution. This all places a high cognitive load on responders, who are forced to tool switch, figure out context, and decide for themselves who’s doing what. You need a single source of truth for an incident and automated channel creation and escalation.
5. Lack of training
A lack of training in your incident management processes (even if you have them) means people will respond inconsistently and make preventable errors. Regular drills, tabletop exercises, and access to learning resources ensure your response team is confident, aligned, and capable of following procedures under pressure.
6. Slow incident detection, coordination, and resolution
Time is of the essence when incidents occur. It’s vital they can be spotted and fixed fast and consistently. But with suboptimal on-call schedules and alert routing, it’s not always clear who’s responsible and what step they should take next.
You need tools that help you find issues before they escalate, make it easier for teams to coordinate to resolve the problem, and then support post-incident reviews so that improvements can prevent repeat incidents in the future.
7. Inefficient on-call processes
If you don’t have clearly defined on-call rotations, escalation plans, and roles, your people will get burned out pretty quickly. On-call burnout can also be caused by clunky tooling where responders have to waste time setting up meetings or channels rather than solving the problem.
You need tools that put responders first, designed around your existing tools and for their everyday workflows.
8. Overly complex ecosystems
Your engineering teams are using an increasingly large number of tools – incident management shouldn’t add to this. Some tools require resource-intensive custom builds, rather than integrating into your existing toolset. Rather than introducing another silo, seamless integration helps your teams work together and adopt processes faster.
How effective incident management makes a difference
Here are six typical use cases where best-practice incident management can be applied to transform the way you prevent, respond, and resolve incidents.
The obvious
The obvious
These are the everyday essentials included in most incident management tools, from automated tracking alerts and issue progress updates to paging responders. These fundamentals ensure that incidents are captured, prioritised, and resolved efficiently. They help your teams stay focused on resolving problems instead of juggling notifications and manual tracking.
On-call scheduling and escalation
When you’ve got global customers, incident management helps you schedule on-call rotations, which define who gets paged and in what order, and control escalations, ensuring 24/7 coverage. And the schedule takes into account holiday calendars and implements back-up responders.
Coordinated response
Effective incident management depends on coordination – not just among people, but across systems. If your platform experiences a database outage, it means an incident is created in seconds and your responders are automatically looped in, status updates sent, and remediation tasks tracked.
AI features like incident summarisation, suggested fixes, AI chat, and root-cause identification help too. Leveraging automations, both out-of-the-box and user-defined, ensures that tasks, alerts, and updates happen in sync, reducing the lag between detection and action.
Stakeholder communications
If your consumer-facing product suffers performance degradation, it’s crucial you can keep all your stakeholders informed. Timely updates help maintain trust with your audiences and prevent confusion. Tools with built-in communication channels, including automated email, SMS, and public status pages that update automatically, make this so much easier.
Post-incident reporting
To reduce the recurrence of certain incident types, it’s vital you track mean time to resolution (MTTR), derive root causes, and measure how effective your changes are over time. That documentation and reflection time help you improve response strategies and prevent similar incidents happening in the future.
Automated event tracking, timeline generation, and summaries make reporting faster and more reliable. Tools that consolidate technical data and communication logs, simplifying root-cause analysis and enabling more actionable postmortems, are really useful too.
AI site reliability engineering
By harnessing AI tools you can reduce the impact of incidents on your business. They can analyse patterns and suggest likely causes or next steps to help your people diagnose and recover faster. Leveraging AI capabilities can help you accelerate resolution time while improving accuracy and consistency across all responses.
Why technology matters in incident management
You don’t need a dozen different tools to manage incidents – you need the right one that brings everything together, from communication and coordination to documentation.
It means your team isn’t juggling 10 different apps while trying to fix a critical issue. And they can work in the same communication tools they’re already used to, like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Endless context-switching becomes a thing of the past with a clearer focus on finding the issue and fixing it quickly.
Introducing Rootly.
Rootly is a comprehensive incident management platform that streamlines how you manage technical incidents. You get an improved on-call experience for your people and a standardised approach, leading to a faster MTTR. And it scales too – so as your product or organisational complexity grows, you can continue to have structured incident management at its core.
For teams currently using OpsGenie (which Atlassian ended sales of in June 2025) or exploring alternatives to traditional ITSM platforms, Rootly provides a modern, purpose-built solution.
Frequently asked questions about incident management challenges
How can we improve communication during incidents without overwhelming our team?
The key is centralisation and automation. Instead of broadcasting updates across multiple channels, establish a single source of truth for each incident – typically a dedicated Slack or Teams channel. Use automated status pages to handle customer-facing communications, and set up clear routing rules so only relevant stakeholders receive notifications. This reduces noise while ensuring critical information reaches the right people. Regular cadenced updates (even if there's no change) also help prevent check-in messages that can distract responders.
What metrics should we track to measure incident management effectiveness?
Beyond mean time to resolution (MTTR), track mean time to detect (MTTD) to understand how quickly you spot issues, mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) to measure response speed, and incident recurrence rate to gauge whether you're learning from past incidents. Also monitor responder burnout indicators, like on-call load distribution and after-hours incidents. Customer impact metrics, such as affected users and revenue impact, help prioritise improvements that matter most to your business.
How often should we conduct incident response training and drills?
Aim for quarterly tabletop exercises that walk through realistic scenarios, with monthly mini-drills for critical systems. New team members should complete incident response training within their first two weeks. After major incidents, conduct targeted training on lessons learned. Regular practice ensures your team stays sharp and familiar with procedures, making actual incident response feel like muscle memory rather than panic.
What are the signs that our incident management process needs improvement?
Watch for recurring incidents that never get properly resolved, increasing MTTR over time, responders regularly working outside defined roles, stakeholders complaining about poor communication, postmortems that don't happen or lack actionable outcomes, and on-call team burnout. If your team dreads incidents more than usual or you're spending more time coordinating than fixing, it's time to revisit your processes.
Can incident management tools integrate with our existing technology stack?
Modern incident management platforms are built with integration in mind. They typically connect with communication tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams), monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, PagerDuty), ticketing systems (Jira, ServiceNow), and collaboration tools (Confluence, Notion). The best solutions work within your existing workflows rather than requiring teams to adopt entirely new systems, reducing friction and increasing adoption.
How do we balance speed with thorough documentation during incidents?
Automation is your friend here. Use tools that automatically capture timelines, log actions, and track communications as the incident unfolds. This means responders can focus on resolution while documentation happens in the background. After the incident, AI-powered summaries can compile this information into coherent postmortems, requiring only review and refinement rather than writing from scratch. The goal is to make documentation a byproduct of good process, not an additional burden.
Tool up to manage incidents effectively
If incident management issues keep cropping up, we can help. We’ve supported a wide range of teams to improve their incident management efforts, taking them from total chaos to complete control. Whether you want to overhaul your processes or implement a new tool, we’ve got the experts to make it happen.
Get in touch to tell us what’s tripping you up and we’ll work on a plan together to solve it. No generic playbooks – just practical solutions tailored for your organisation.
Written by
DevOps Consultant