While writing our 2024 recap, we found that teams handled over 2.2 million new incidents. Critical incidents alone tripled, increasing from 3,000 in 2023 to 9,200 in 2024.
Dealing with such a large volume of incidents is not an easy task. And dealing with them manually is definitely not easy.
Your valuable time goes into routine tasks like creating tickets, setting up war rooms, and notifying stakeholders. These keep you from fixing the actual problem.
That’s where Automated Incident Response comes in. It helps you triage, respond, and perform post-incident tasks much faster.
It reduces manual work, fixes issues faster, and makes your incident response process more consistent.
In this guide, I’ll explain what exactly Automated Incident Response is, why you need it, and simple automations you can get started with. I also shared some best practices and tools for you.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What is Automated Incident Response
Automated Incident Response uses predefined workflows to handle parts of the incident response process for you.
For example, you can automate setting severity to alerts, creating Jira tickets, running diagnostic scripts, or updating the status page.
By handling these repetitive tasks, it makes your incident response faster and reduces downtime for your services.
Example of Automated Incident Response in Action
At Spike, we have a Playbook “Investigation Needed,” and here’s how it works:
When an incident strikes, the playbook kicks in and automatically handles five key tasks in sequence.
First, it marks the incident severity as SEV2 to signal the urgency level. Next, it triggers an outbound webhook to dump logs for the last 10 mins. This gives engineers the data they need right away.
Then, the playbook auto-acknowledges the incident so the team know someone is looking at it. It also adds Kaushik as a responder to bring in the right expertise. Finally, it creates a task in the “Engineering” team on Linear to track follow-up work.
All these steps happen instantly. This saves our on-call engineer from routine tasks. They can start investigating the problem right away.
Why is Automated Incident Response Important
When incidents strike, you need to act fast.
But routine tasks like adding responders, setting up Slack channels, or creating tickets eat up precious time. All these delay your response to the actual problem.
The result is longer outages, frustrated customers, and lost revenue.
Automated Incident Response solves this problem. It handles the routine work so you can focus on fixing the actual issue.
“Small automations add up. One script, one link, one trigger at a time—and suddenly your responders are spending less time firefighting and more time solving real problems.”
– Kaushik Thirthappa, Founder of Spike
Key Benefits of Automated Incident Response
- Faster Response Times: Instead of waiting for someone to manually create tickets and add responders, automation kicks in instantly. What takes 15-20 minutes happens in seconds.
- Consistent Process: Be it 3 AM or 3 PM, automation follows the same steps every time. The ticket is always created, people are always notified—No skipped steps, no forgotten tasks.
- Reduced Human Error: Automation removes common mistakes like adding the wrong team member or setting incorrect severity levels. It follows your exact playbook without variations.
- Better Team Focus: Your engineers spend time fixing the actual problem instead of setting up war rooms or updating status pages. This leads to faster resolution times.
- Lower Alert Fatigue: Automation can suppress low-priority alerts or resolve known issues automatically. Your team only gets notified about incidents that truly need attention.
Key Components of Automated Incident Response
An automated incident response system has a few key parts that work together to handle incidents for you.
- Integrations: These connect your monitoring, communication, and ticketing tools. Integrations allow your automation platform to receive alerts from one system and take action in another. For example, an alert from Datadog can trigger a message in a Slack channel.
2. Alert Rules: These are the “if-then” conditions for your automation. You set rules that tell the system what to do when a specific alert comes in. For example, if an alert’s title contains “database down,” then automatically set the incident’s severity as SEV1.
3. Playbooks: A set of predefined steps that run when an incident occurs. For instance, a playbook can automatically add a responder, create a Linear ticket, and start a war room.
4. On-call Schedules & Escalations: Automation still needs to know who to contact when a human is needed. It uses on-call schedules to find the right person and escalation policies to notify a backup if the first person doesn’t respond.
To learn more about on-call schedules and escalation policies, read these blogs:
What to Automate in Incident Response Workflow
You can use automation across these four key areas of your incident response workflow:
1. Triage
- Set Severity and Priority: Automatically assign severity based on keywords in an alert. For example, if an alert contains “payment system down,” set the severity to sev1.
- Suppress Noise: Combine related alerts into a single incident. This stops your team from getting 50 separate notifications for the same server failure.
- Auto-Resolve Fleeting Alerts: Automatically resolve alerts for issues that fix themselves, like a brief CPU spike. This prevents unnecessary wake-up calls.
- Route to the Right Team: Send alerts directly to the team responsible for that service. Database alerts go to the database team, and so on.
2. Response
- Spin Up War Rooms: Automatically create a dedicated Slack or Teams channel for every new incident.
- Add Responders: Invite the on-call engineer and other relevant team members to the incident channel.
- Create Tickets: Automatically create a Jira or Linear ticket with all the alert details filled in.
- Run Diagnostic Scripts: Gather logs, check server status, or run other diagnostic scripts to get more context on the problem.
3. Communication
- Update Status Pages: Automatically update your public and internal status pages when an incident is created, updated, and resolved.
- Notify Stakeholders: Send regular updates to stakeholder email lists or dedicated Slack channels so everyone stays informed.
4. Post-Incident Actions
- Generate Timelines: Create a complete incident timeline with every action, message, and alert logged with a timestamp.
- Create Postmortems: Automatically create a post-mortem document with all the incident data pre-filled. This saves time and provides a consistent format for every review.
- Schedule Meetings: Automatically schedule the post-mortem meeting with all the incident responders.
Simple Automations to Start With
You don’t need to automate your entire incident response workflow all at once. Start with a few simple automations to see quick wins.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Auto-set severity: Use alert rules to automatically set the incident severity based on keywords. If an alert contains “payment gateway down,” it can be set to SEV1.
- Auto-create incident channels: Set up a rule to automatically create a new Slack or Teams channel whenever a critical incident is declared.
- Auto-create tickets: Connect your incident response tool to Jira or Linear. Automatically create a ticket with all the key details from the alert.
- Auto-update status pages: For non-critical incidents, you can automatically update your internal status page. This keeps other teams informed without manual work.
Best Practices for Automated Incident Response
- Start with simple, low-risk automations. Automating Jira ticket creation is a great first step. This gives you quick wins without much risk.
- Your automation system can also fail. Set up health checks to monitor your webhooks and playbooks. Get an alert if your automation itself is not working.
- Design scripts to be idempotent. This means they can run many times without causing new problems. A restart script should first check if the server is already running.
- Use dynamic variables from alert data. Avoid hardcoding values like hostnames. This makes your playbooks flexible and reusable across different services.
- For risky actions like restarting a database, add a manual approval step. The automation can prepare the command, but should wait for a human to confirm it.
At Spike, we have a Playbook for restarting services. The Playbook automates the restart command, but it only runs when a team member manually triggers it. This prevents accidental restarts while still making the process fast and consistent.
5 Best Automated Incident Response Tools
*For pricing, I chose business/standard/Pro plans because they typically include the automation features
| Tool | Best for | Price* |
|---|---|---|
| Spike | Teams wanting powerful, built-in automation without high costs | $14/user/month |
| PagerDuty | Enterprises that have the budget for automation add-ons | $25/user/month |
| Incident.io | Teams that manage incidents entirely within Slack or Microsoft Teams | $25/user/month + $20/on-call user/month |
| Squadcast | Reliability engineering teams needing advanced alert routing | $19/user/month |
| Zenduty | Teams looking for structured workflows that connect with broader ITSM processes | $16/user/month |
1. Spike
Spike is a modern incident management tool with powerful, built-in automation.
You can create Alert Rules with simple if/then logic to handle incidents automatically. For example, you can auto-acknowledge an alert or set its severity based on keywords. Spike also offers ready-to-use Alert Rule templates to get you started quickly.
It also provides powerful Playbooks. You can create a Slack channel, add responders, or create a Jira ticket automatically. You can even run one playbook from inside another.
A new feature, Resolve by Timer, lets you set a timer on incidents. When the time is up, the incident automatically resolves. This helps keep your dashboard clean.
2. PagerDuty
PagerDuty is an industry veteran in incident management.
It offers basic automation with Event Rules. However, more advanced features like AI-powered automation are locked behind very expensive plans like AIOps, which costs $799/month.
Key automation for creating war rooms or tickets also requires higher-priced tiers. This can make it a costly choice if you need more than basic automation.
3. Incident.io
Incident.io is a chat-native platform built for teams that work mostly in Slack or Teams.
It offers strong workflow automation within your chat tool. You can automate status page updates, create war rooms, and assign roles without leaving Slack.
However, some key automation features like auto-acknowledgment are not available.
4. Squadcast
Squadcast is an incident response tool focused on reliability engineering.
It offers automation through runbooks. These can handle common tasks like creating Jira tickets or running diagnostic scripts for you.
Squadcast also uses machine learning to help with alert routing.
5. Zenduty
Zenduty is a good fit for teams that need structured workflows. It connects well with broader IT service management processes.
It allows you to auto-acknowledge incidents and create postmortems with AI. You can also build workflows to automate parts of your incident response.
Its workflow triggers are somewhat limited, which may not fit every team’s needs.
Conclusion
Automated Incident Response can transform how your team handles incidents. It takes care of routine tasks so you can focus on fixing actual problems.
We looked at a few automated incident response tools. Each has its own strengths and is built for a different kind of team.
If Spike’s simple yet powerful approach to automation caught your interest, you can test it right away.
FAQs
- What’s the difference between Alert Rules and Playbooks?
Alert Rules are simple if-then conditions. For example, if an alert’s title contains “database issue,” then set the severity to sev1.
Playbooks are a series of connected steps. They guide an entire workflow. A playbook can create a Slack channel, invite the on-call engineer, and run a diagnostic script, all in one go.
2. How do you measure the success of incident automation
You can track metrics like Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). As you automate more, these numbers should go down. You can also measure the number of incidents that are resolved automatically without any human input.
3. Can small teams use automated incident response?
Yes, small teams can benefit greatly from automation. It helps them do more with fewer people. By handling routine tasks, automation frees up limited engineering time for more important work.