How to Maximize Your ROI with Incident Management Tools

That's the case for the the majority of the participants in a 2023 IDC Study. A big pile of money. To put it in perspective: If you paid $4.99 / month for All Quiet - a tool that helps to significantly reduce downtime - you could instead (hypothetically) subscribe until 6191 A.D. I bet you will love All Quiet, but it's okay if you decide to leave us a bit earlier.

Even if these numbers are much lower for your company and / or you don’t trust a guy who makes his living by selling incident management software, you can quickly get to the conclusion that incident management is key for your company’s profit and loss account.

Downtime and bugs are not just technical headaches - they're major financial liabilities. Apart from the instant damage (not delivering SLAs, buying SEA traffic that cannot convert,…) they will at least cost you working hours to fix. Even more importantly, they reduce customer satisfaction and hurt your reputation, leading to churn and lower revenue in the future.

That’s why it’s your duty to take a hard look at your team’s incident management processes.

How can I measure my incident management effectiveness?

To truly understand the effectiveness of your incident management processes, you need to track the right metrics. By monitoring improvements in key areas, organizations can measure how well they are minimizing downtime, reducing costs, and improving overall efficiency. Here are some key metrics to start with:

1. Tracking Incident Volume

The number of incidents your team responds to are the most basic indicator of your system's health. Reducing the total number of incidents leads to fewer disruptions and more productive time for your team.

Key Metric - Total Incidents Responded to

Start by assessing how many incidents your team typically handles in a given period.

2. Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)

MTTA measures how quickly your team acknowledges an incident once it's detected. The longer this time, the more damage can accumulate before the issue is addressed.

Key Metric - MTTA

Measure how long it takes, on average, for your team to acknowledge an incident.

3. Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

While acknowledging an issue is critical, quickly resolving it is the ultimate goal. MTTR measures how long it takes from the time an incident is detected until it’s fully resolved. The shorter this time, the less downtime your systems experience, directly impacting your bottom line.

Key Metric - MTTR

Monitor how long it typically takes to resolve incidents.

Make sure to set up a proper reporting to check your KPIs regularly. As a part of every plan, All Quiet features an Engagement & Uptime Report that provides you with an overview of your MTTA, MTTR, number of incidents and other KPIs for a given period of time.

But how do I improve my incident management processes?

Let’s look at each of the metrics and see how we can improve.

1. Reduce Volume of Incidents

I know, that’s not surprising at all. There are myriads of ways to improve this KPI, and you could write a whole book about. In fact, there are many. Therefore, I will only drop two thoughts, here.

Incidents will always be there. You cannot completely prevent them from happening. And even if you tried - at what cost? Doing more code reviews and more QA will reduce the number of incidents, but it will also slow down your feature development. You have to find a sweet sport where you reduce the risk of incidents but don’t compromise too much on velocity.

What you will definitely want to prevent, though, is the same incident happening twice. To guard against this, it can be valuable to write incident post-mortems or conduct retrospectives. Our integrations to tools like Confluence and Notion allow you to prepare everything in a matter of seconds, so your team can focus on error analysis and prevention.

2. Reduce MTTA

To reduce your MTTA, you need to make sure that the right person is informed at the right time - which, of course, is as soon as the incident happens.

But who is the right person? Usually, it’s the person who is responsible for and has the best knowledge of the broken service.

Here’s how we can help: Most modern tech teams operate in teams. And Each team owns parts of the whole organizations tech stack. Therefore, All Quiet is structured in teams, too.
Our on-call scheduling and alerting features adapt to your team’s needs. Set up On-call Rotations that follow your rhythm. Make sure that the person who is on-call can handle potential incidents. And set up escalations to automatically inform more team members if the on-call user needs help.
To ensure that you are always informed if something bad happens, you can select from various different Alerting Channels. You can decide to receive voice calls, SMS, emails or push notifications to our native apps with do-not-disturb overrides for critical bugs. Or you can combine all of them. We make sure to alert the right people at the right time.

3. Reduce MTTR

Reducing MTTA already reduces MTTR, as Mean Time To Resolution includes Mean Time To Acknowledge. That said, we can focus on the period of time between acknowledging and resolving.

Well, what does you save time?

Make sure the incident details include all the information the people in charge need to understand the issue asap. This includes properly setting up your monitoring and observability tools, ensuring the alerts include all attributes you need. With All Quiet, you can easily map these attributes to All Quiet incidents and streamline information from different tools in one place.

Next, you want to set up processes, so that everyone knows who’s in charge of fixing the issue and who’s in charge of communication to stakeholders or customers. As these tasks re-occur for each incident, you will want to automize them to save as much time as possible. All Quiet enables you to forward all incidents to your favorite collaboration tools, like Slack, Jira or Linear. Simply send incidents to your team’s communication channels or create issues pre-filled with all incident details in a matter of a seconds. Automize as many steps of the communication as possible to save time for resolving the issues. As we learned earlier, every minute counts.

We’ve discussed several ways platforms like All Quiet can improve your incident management processes. But let’s talk money. Is it really worth it?

What's my ROI of implementing incident management software?

To calculate ROI, we need to compare the total cost of incidents before applying incident management software with the total cost after implementation. Don’t forget to include the cost of using and implementing the software.

ROI _{Incident Management Software}= Cost of Incidents _{without software} - (Cost of Incidents _{with software} + Price of Software + Cost of Implementation)

Comparing the implicit and explicit cost of an incident with the cost of an incident management solution like All Quiet, I am pretty sure that ROI > 0 will be the case for you.

I am aware that this is simplified. Every company is different, every incident brings different cost.

And I am not asking you to sign a subscription until 6191 A.D. (we only have monthly plans, anyways 😉). But I want you to rethink the term "Cost of Incident Management". Probably, it should rather be “Cost of no Incident Management.”
After all, incident management software like All Quiet has a positive impact on your company's profit.

To sum it up:

Tracking key metrics like incident volume, MTTA, and MTTR offer a clear path to calculate the cost savings tied directly to your incident management strategies. Your improvements don’t only help you to reduce downtime but also free up your teams to focus on growth and innovation. There are even metrics like “Revenue Growth from Retention” or “Innovation Growth”, that can suggest revenue growth from improving your organization’s incident management practices.

Rather than simply reacting to issues as they occur, businesses that track these metrics are in a better position to anticipate, prevent, and resolve incidents - leading to stronger performance and better bottom-line results.

All Quiet’s on-call alerting, scheduling and incident response workflows help software team’s to significantly improve their incident management ROI.

Start your free 30-day trial and maximize your ROI from incident management. can benefit your business.

Peer
CPO & Co-Founder of All Quiet