Incident Tracking Software

What is incident management in ITIL?

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines define an incident as an unplanned interruption to an IT service resulting in a reduction in the quality of that service. The process of managing and remedying those ITIL incidents, from when you first log them to when they’re eventually resolved, is called ITIL incident management. 

An incident can be the result of any kind of service failure or interruption. In some cases, the cause of an incident is apparent right away and can be addressed very quickly, meaning no further action is needed. In many cases, though, the cause is unclear, meaning more time needs to be allotted to determining the cause of the incident and to resolving it. In cases like these, it’s particularly important to be able to assign priority levels for the incidents based on both urgency and on the impact of the interruption. 

The goal of incident management is to restore your IT service to normal as quickly as possible and attempt to minimize the impact the interruption has on your business operations. This helps you ensure the best possible level of service availability and quality is available to your customers, you’re not in breach of your service level agreement (SLA), and you provide the “normal service operation” level as defined in the SLA. 

What is an incident ticket?

An incident ticket is the means by which an unexpected incident is reported by either a customer or an employee. Incident tickets typically contain details relating to the specific nature of the issues end users are experiencing. Incident management revolves around resolving the issues reported through incident tickets. 

When an incident affects a shared resource or device, it’s likely to result in multiple incident tickets around the same issue. For example, if an office’s network goes down, multiple people will likely report it, which results in multiple incident tickets about the same problem. Since there are many tickets to manage at a time with multiple IT technicians handling them, it’s important to stay organized by linking related incidents within the ticketing system. 

Without an incident management solution, this kind of ticket grouping can be more complicated, error-prone, and lead to technicians individually working on separate tickets instead of working towards a resolution for the bigger issue. An incident management tool lets you easily link all related tickets to a single problem. When you resolve it, the software can automatically close out linked tickets and notify users of the resolution. 

What is an incident tracking tool?

Incident tracking tools are built to organize and automate the incident management process. This lets your IT technicians focus their efforts on solving widespread reported problems rather than trying to manually organize, log, prioritize, and identify trends between individual incident tickets. 

When an incident is reported, whether through email, social media, a phone call, or another method, the incident management software is designed to create an incident ticket containing all the information reported. The tool can then automatically move forward with the initial steps involved in the incident management process to help with ticket organization. These steps include incident communication and reporting, giving the incident a priority rating, and making sure tickets are paired with the correct problem. 

From there, the incident ticket can be directed to the proper technician. Thanks to the incident tracking software, the technician won’t waste time performing all the tasks in the early stages of incident management. Help desk technicians will also know whether incidents are high or low priority and can organize their own work accordingly.

How does incident tracking software work?

Incident tracking software works by automating and streamlining the incident management process from end to end. It makes the process more effective, systematic, and dynamic than it would otherwise be. 

With its larger service desk capabilities, an incident management tool can bring people, processes, and technology together. This lets you engage in systematic tracking and incident management. The tool makes sure all the tickets associated with a problem are logged together, so you can organize your work and so when you solve the root problem behind many tickets, all your incident tickets will be marked as completed. Not only does it quickly and automatically identify the root cause of the problem, it also ensures the root cause is quickly resolved. 

Since incident tracking software is typically part of a larger help desk tool, it comes with the added benefit of letting you engage in ticket monitoring and allowing you to set up alerts for when unaddressed tickets are at risk of breaching your SLAs.

By using an incident management tool for your IT needs, you can ensure your incidents are addressed in a systematic and effective fashion.

Why is incident tracking software important?

Incident tracking software is important because it helps make sure you address all the problems end users are experiencing in a timely manner. This not only means you can help reduce the risk of violating SLAs, but also helps ensure your resolutions lead to happy end users.

Incident management software goes even further by helping reduce costs, decreasing manual tasks, and improving visibility into help desk ticketing operations.

Some of the main benefits incident management software can provide include:

• Helping maintain service level agreements, so you can consistently deliver the levels of service promised in your SLAs
• Increases efficiency by improving resource utilization
• Helps eliminate human error, such as inaccurate logging of incidents
• Reduces overall service desk workloads by providing end users access to a shared knowledge base in support of self-service resolutions

Without incident tracking software, you may be more prone to mishandling incidents, which can cause the general quality of service provided to fall and can result in costly SLA breaches and unhappy customers. Incident management software is important for maintaining adequate service levels for your customers and reducing the risk of leaving incidents unresolved.

What does incident tracking software do?

Instead of handling each ticket on its own, incident tracking software is built to connect all related incident tickets to a single issue. By resolving the central ticket, the software is designed to simultaneously respond to and resolve all related tickets.

Incident tracking software can help automate the steps involved in incident management, helping make the process faster and more effective. These steps include: 

1. Identification and logging of the incident. This involves creating a complete record of the relevant information about an incident. 
2. Classification and prioritization. The tool can classify incidents based on their type, which helps with both reporting and analysis. Then, you can prioritize incident tickets based on the risk factor, severity, and impact. 
3. Investigation and analysis of the problem. This can help support quickly solving the problem and with preventing its occurrence in the future. 
4. Resolution and recovery. This is the stage in which the problem is fixed, and the ticketing system is brought back to the normal service level. 
5. Closure of the incident. Once the solution is tested, the problem and all related incident tickets can be closed. 

Thanks to incident management solutions automating the incident management process, technicians are free to focus their energy on the tasks requiring their expertise—like resolving tickets—instead of on tasks that can easily be automated. 

How does incident tracking software work in SolarWinds WHD?

Incident management solutions are typically part of a larger ticketing and service desk solution, such as SolarWinds Web Help Desk. Web Help Desk is designed to provide the tools you need to engage in effective incident management. SolarWinds WHD comes with a full suite of features built to elevate your operations and help you provide your customers with consistent results. 

With the WHD incident management system, you can:

• Simplify service request, incident, and problem management
• Automate IT asset discovery, management, and reporting
• Create parent-child relationship between incidents and problem tickets
• Alert and report on SLA timelines and ticket status
• Monitor technician performance and track ticket status with intuitive reporting dashboards
• Manage incident tickets from a single pane of glass with a centralized web-based interface

Web Help Desk automation capabilities can also go far beyond managing tickets, covering related areas such as:

• SLA management
• Asset discovery and management
• Parts and inventory management
• Purchase order management
• Billing management
• Help desk task automation

Offering easy installation and an intuitive dashboard, Web Help Desk enables technicians to centralize, optimize, and better manage the incident management process, so they can focus their time and effort on actually solving end-user problems.