Incident Management in 2024: Proactivity Surges Amid Visibility Challenges

In an era where digital infrastructure underpins nearly every aspect of business operations, effective incident management has become paramount. The ability to swiftly detect, respond to, and resolve IT issues can mean the difference between minor hiccups and major disruptions. Against this backdrop, the recently released 2024 State of Incident Management Report from Atlassian offers a comprehensive look at how organizations are evolving their incident response strategies to meet these challenges.

Now in its fourth year, the report surveyed more than 500 software developers, IT professionals, and IT decision-makers across the United States. It reveals a landscape marked by increased proactivity, widespread adoption of new technologies, and persistent challenges in infrastructure visibility.

Key findings from the report include:

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The report also found that organizations are using more tools for incident management, which came as somewhat of a surprise to Kate Clavet, senior technical product marketing manager at Atlassian.

"I was surprised by this because with the economic climate that we've been in the last year or two, and then heading into a U.S. election, I was surprised that we're seeing people double down on their investment in tools and investment in incident management.," Clavet told ITPro Today.

"Obviously, incident management is important no matter the economic climate — some might say even more so because you don't want to lose the customers that you do have due to a terrible incident."

Visibility Remains a Top Pain Point

The report also revealed that despite increased tool usage and automation, lack of full visibility across IT infrastructure remains the top pain point.

One potential reason is related to a specific type of tool known as CMDB (Configuration Management Database) that isn't as widely deployed as it should be. Clavet noted that only 50% or respondents reported that their organization is using a CMDB or asset repository.

"I'm just surprised that it's not more of a standardized practice, especially considering that the top pain point was having full visibility across the IT infrastructure," she said.

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Simply having a CMDB, however, is not the entire solution for improving visibility. Clavet said that many companies don't deploy and use CMDBs correctly or they don't ensure that the data is complete, current, and accurate.

The Proactivity Paradigm

The most notable trend in Atlassian's 2024 State of Incident Management Report is the substantial increase in proactive incident management. The percentage of organizations considered "proactive" in incident management has risen to 68%, marking a 12% increase from 2023 and the largest jump since the 2021 report. 

Atlassian defines a "proactive" organization as one that utilizes monitoring, alerting, and communication tools; facilitates formal incident response training; and employs AI for incident trending and integrated visibility into recent changes.

This shift toward proactivity is further evidenced by the widespread adoption of incident management procedures, with 97% of organizations now having processes or runbooks in place.

Why Wargames and Incident Management Training Are Needed

The report found that while 97% of organizations have incident management procedures in place, only 78% use wargames or incident management training.

As to why more organizations don't do training, Clavet suspects that in many cases it is seen as being a costly exercise. However, that doesn't have to be the case, she argued. Instead of doing a full-day exercise, she suggests that shorter training sessions also provide value.

"You could do a simulation that only lasts an hour," Clavet said. "Whatever you can do to familiarize people with the process and then how they act in the process."

The Continuing Challenges of Incident Management and the Road Ahead

The core challenges for IT incident management are all too familiar to many IT professionals.

The report cited lack of full visibility across the IT infrastructure, lack of root cause analysis, and lack of coordination across departments as core challenges.

"None of these are surprising because I would consider them to be kind of the evergreen challenges," Clavet said. "But what I'm excited for is to see how AI helps in the future. We had 74% of respondents say today that they're using AI for incident trending."