Incident management where your telemetry already lives
Declare, route, coordinate and review incidents in the same platform that detected them, with on-call schedules, escalation, a live timeline and post-mortems built in.Why teams use Incident Management in Obseria
Faster time to resolve
Responders start with the problem, the affected services and the probable root cause already attached, instead of rebuilding context from scratch.
The right person, first time
Ownership from the service catalog and on-call schedules route each incident to the team that runs the affected service.
Learning that sticks
Timelines are recorded automatically, so post-mortems are based on facts and action items are tracked to completion.
Incident Management in three steps
- Step 1
Detect and declare
Problems from Obseria Intelligence, alerts or a manual trigger open an incident with severity, affected services and evidence attached.
- Step 2
Route and escalate
On-call schedules and escalation policies page the owning team by push, SMS, phone, chat or email until someone acknowledges.
- Step 3
Resolve and review
Responders work from a shared timeline, run automation workflows and finish with a post-mortem generated from the recorded facts.
Capabilities
- On-call schedules. Rotations, overrides, follow-the-sun handovers and time zones per team, with calendar export.
- Escalation policies. Multi-level escalation with timeouts, so an unacknowledged page always reaches a backup or a manager.
- Live incident timeline. Alerts, deployments, chat messages, status changes and actions are recorded in one chronological timeline.
- Roles and severities. Assign incident commander, communications lead and responders, and use severity levels that drive routing and updates.
- Automated runbooks. Trigger Obseria Automation workflows from an incident, for example to roll back, scale out or collect diagnostics.
- Post-mortems. Generate a blameless post-mortem draft from the timeline and evidence, and track follow-up actions to closure.
Incident Management: what you need to know
What is incident management?
Incident management is the process of detecting, responding to, resolving and learning from unplanned interruptions or degradations of a service. In practice it spans several activities: alerting the right people, coordinating the response, communicating with stakeholders, restoring service and, afterwards, understanding why it happened and preventing it from happening again.
For many teams these activities are spread across separate tools: monitoring detects the problem, a paging tool wakes someone up, a chat channel holds the discussion, a status page informs customers and a wiki stores the post-mortem. Every hand-off between those tools costs minutes and loses context. Responders copy links, paste graphs into chat and later try to reconstruct a timeline from memory.
Why integrated incident management matters
The fastest incident response starts with context. When the incident already contains the affected services, the dependency graph, the recent deployments and a probable root cause, the first fifteen minutes are spent fixing instead of searching. That is the main lever for reducing mean time to resolve.
Integration also improves accuracy. On-call routing based on service ownership means the payments team gets paged for payments, not a central operations rota that has to forward the call. A timeline that is recorded automatically means the post-mortem reflects what actually happened, including the alerts that fired, the actions taken and when the service recovered.
Incident metrics worth tracking
Incident management should be measured, not only executed. Useful metrics include:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Mean time to detect (MTTD) | How quickly problems are noticed after they start. |
| Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) | How fast on-call responds to a page. |
| Mean time to resolve (MTTR) | How long customers are affected on average. |
| Incidents per service | Where reliability work will have the most impact. |
| Action item completion | Whether post-mortems actually lead to change. |
Obseria calculates these metrics from the incident data and shows them per team and service, so reliability reviews are based on numbers rather than impressions.
Track these numbers as trends over quarters rather than as targets for individual incidents. A single long outage can distort an average, while a steady improvement in acknowledgement time or action item completion shows that the process itself is getting better.
How Obseria handles incidents
An incident in Obseria can be opened from a problem detected by Obseria Intelligence, from any alert rule or manually. It inherits the evidence: affected entities from TopoGraph, related anomalies, recent deployments and, if an investigation ran, the root cause with its chain of evidence. Severity determines who is paged and how often updates are expected.
On-call schedules and escalation policies live next to the service catalog. Each service has an owning team; each team has a rotation and an escalation path. Pages go out by mobile push, SMS, phone call, chat or email. If nobody acknowledges within the configured timeout, the next level is notified.
During the incident, the timeline records everything automatically: alerts, state changes, deployments, workflow runs and messages from the linked chat channel. Responders can trigger Obseria Automation workflows, such as a rollback or a diagnostic snapshot, directly from the incident. Updates can be published to the status page from the same view. After resolution, Obseria drafts a blameless post-mortem from the timeline, which the team edits, reviews and completes with tracked action items.
Incident management best practices
- Define severities clearly. Agree what SEV1 to SEV4 mean in terms of customer impact, and what each requires.
- Page on symptoms, not causes. Alert on user-facing impact and SLO burn, and use causes as context in the incident.
- Assign an incident commander. One person coordinates; responders focus on technical work.
- Keep ownership current. Routing is only as good as the service catalog behind it.
- Write blameless post-mortems. Focus on systems and decisions, not individuals, and follow through on action items.
Frequently asked questions
It can. Obseria includes on-call schedules, escalation policies and notifications by push, SMS, phone, chat and email. You can also forward incidents to an existing paging tool via webhook if you prefer to keep it.
Incidents can be opened automatically from problems detected by Obseria Intelligence or from alert rules, or manually from any dashboard, service page or the CLI.
Alerts, problem updates, deployments, status changes, automation workflow runs, role changes and messages from the linked chat channel, all with timestamps.
Yes. Obseria drafts a blameless post-mortem from the timeline and evidence. Your team edits and approves it and tracks the follow-up actions.
No. Incident management, on-call and post-mortems are included. Obseria has unlimited users and no seat-based pricing; Intelligence investigations use agent credits.
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