In March alone, Microsoft, X, and Meta all suffered major outages. Be it is a bug, a misconfiguration, a network glitch, or a slip-up in change management (or a messy combination of all of them), incidents are inevitable. It does not matter if you are running a B2B platform for enterprises or a consumer app with millions of users: sooner or later, something will break.
When it does, your incident management practices will be the difference between a quick recovery and a slow-motion disaster. In this article, I’ll cover the must-implement incident management practices that will come in handy when turbulence hits.
1. Plan, Simulate, Test, Adapt, Repeat
Start by creating an incident response plan. It could be just a one-pager that outlines the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in identifying, documenting, and responding to the outage. In an early-stage startup, one person often juggles all the responsibilities, but that is no excuse to delay. A clear plan today will save you from chaos tomorrow.
Most incidents are not unique. A runbook with step-by-step checklists for common failure scenarios is invaluable. When an incident occurs, you want to minimize the mental load and not waste your brainpower figuring out basic steps under pressure. After all, AI is yet to take over incident management, and we’re not the best at making critical decisions in stressful situations.
Once you have a plan, do not just frame and forget it. Introduce chaos engineering: deliberately inject faults into your applications and systems to see how they respond and where your plan falls short. Rinse and repeat at least quarterly and adapt your strategy as your systems evolve.
2. Observability
Almost every application logs something. But useful logs? That is a different story.
During development and testing, you usually have tons of context. You know where things are likely to break. However, in production, especially during an incident, you must assume the person reading the logs has zero background. Make your logs as clear and helpful as possible but watch out for security-sensitive data and log spam. Focus on clarity and relevance. You will thank yourself later.
A good coding habit I like is "failing fast." For example, if a method parameter might be null, check for it immediately and throw a clear, specific error, naming the parameter directly. This is world better than a vague ArgumentNullException, or worse, a NullReferenceException that leaves everyone guessing.
Event correlation is also very important in multi-tier/multi-service applications. I recommend generating a unique ID at the entry point of a user request and tracing it across every service. It is much easier to reconstruct the sequence of events when you chase one ID across systems rather than piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of partial logs.
Invest time in a good observability platform with structured logging, metrics and tracing. It is a foundation that pays off across development, operations, and incident response.
3. Monitoring and Alerting
Hearing about the outage from users is worse than the incident itself. Make sure your monitoring and alerting system is good enough that you are the first to know something has gone wrong and can act before the support tickets start pouring in.
Set up alerts for common failure modes but do it wisely. False positives are dangerous: if engineers are bombarded with noisy, low-quality alerts, they will start ignoring all of them. Good logging practices, log hygiene, and actionable alerts are among the best ways to effectively handle an incident and reduce the time to resolution.
4. Teamwork
More often than we’d like, things actually get worse while we are trying to fix them. Before diving in and making changes that you consider a path to resolution, make sure the whole team knows what you are planning to do before you do it.
Set up a clear channel and communicate with all the stakeholders about what went wrong and how you (as a team) plan to fix it. Even the most seasoned engineers can miss clues and take the wrong steps to address an issue. Incident resolution is a team effort, and trying to be the hero often makes things worse, including converting an outage to a security incident.
5. Learn Without Blame
Once the incident is under control, don’t just move on. Take the time to hold a review meeting: talk through what caused the incident, how it was handled, and what you can do to prevent it from happening again. Then document the lessons learned and turn them into clear action plans and tasks for the next sprint.
Here you’ve got to focus on systems, not people. No one is to blame but the series of failed or missing barriers. Most incidents are not caused by a single mistake – they are the result of multiple small gaps lining up at the wrong time.
This is where James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model comes in, which states that every step in a process, or every layer of a system, has weaknesses that can lead to failure: even if each layer has only tiny holes, failure slips through when those holes line up. The job after an incident is to spot these holes and close them before it happens again.
