Unveiling Past Incidents: Accelerating Incident Resolution with Historical Context

September 28, 2023

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Unveiling Past Incidents: Accelerating Incident Resolution with Historical Context

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Having the context of how similar issues were handled in the past can be invaluable. It can help incident responders grasp the nature of recurring problems, their causes, and effective solutions that have worked in the past.

Introducing Squadcast’s Past Incidents feature that assists incident responders by presenting them with a list of similar past incidents related to the same service they are currently investigating. It employs a system algorithm to match and display similar historical incidents, offering valuable insights such as historical context, past incident activities & involvement, timing patterns, and previously successful solutions aiding faster Incident Resolution for organizations

This feature is available to everyone who takes Squadcast on a spin via our 14 day free trial!

Benefits: Why Past Incidents Matter

Here are some reasons that make Past incidents a valuable feature:

Historical Context and Knowledge Transfer: Past incidents offer context and a record of how similar issues were handled in the past helping incident responders understand the nature of recurring problems, their causes, and the previously used resolutions. The historical context also allows users to transfer knowledge and insights gained from previous incidents to those who may not have been present during the initial incidents.

Performance Evaluation: Users can use past incidents as a benchmark to evaluate their performance in resolving similar issues over time. This helps in identifying trends, areas for improvement, and whether response times and resolutions are improving or deteriorating.

Documentation: Past incidents can help teams document the entire Incident Management process, from detection to resolution, making it highly valuable for auditing, compliance, and reporting purposes.

Incident Analysis: Analyzing past incidents can help in identifying patterns and trends that may indicate potential future issues. This enables proactive measures to prevent incidents or minimize their impact.

Decision-Making: When a new incident occurs, having access to past incident data can aid decision-making. Teams can quickly assess if the current incident is similar to past incidents and use previous incident data to make informed decisions about how to respond.

Communication: When communicating with stakeholders, having a history of past incidents can help provide context and explanations for recurring issues, which can be particularly useful in managing stakeholder expectations.

View Past Incidents

Here is how users can view Past Incidents for a parent incident,

Step1: Go to the Incidents List page and select the incident you're interested in from the list.

Step2: In the Incident Details page, locate the Details section.

Step3: Look for the Past Incidents subsection. And the following information will be displayed

Past Incidents on the Incident Details page in Squadcast for Incident Management — *Past Incidents on the Incident Details page*

Past Incident Details

Here are the details shown for the relevant incidents. By default the top 5 incidents that match and have been the most recent in the last 6 months will be displayed. Responders can now view and access which related incidents had high levels of activity along with the remediation steps taken by responders on these incidents.

Past Incidents in Squadcast for Incident Management — *Top 5 Relevant Incidents*

Field	Description
Incident Message	Shows the incident title of the past incident.
Alert Source	Shows the alert source from where the incident came in.
Assignee	Shows the latest responder of the past incident.
Created At	Displays the date and time of the incident creation.
Resolution	Coveys the resolution type for the past incident: Automatic or Manual.
TTR	Shows the time taken to resolve the past incident.
Incident Activity	Present the past incidents in descending order of activity. This is a system generated measure based on the response and resolution activities taken during this incident. Incident activity is determined by the incident activity score, which takes into account actions taken on the incident, such as attaching a Runbook, adding a Task, and other relevant activities. Here is the exact list of activities that we measure: Incident Reassign Tags Manually Added Incident Actions Taken Marked as SLO Affecting Communication Link Added Notes Added Notes Starred Postmortem Created/Edited Runbook Attached Task Added

Incident Statistics

Past Incidents Stats in Squadcast for Incident Management

Component	Description
# of occurrences in the last 6 months	Shows the frequency of occurrence of similar incidents over the last 6 months. It also displays the median TTR of all these past incidents in this period.
# of occurrences in the last 3 months	Shows the frequency of occurrence of similar incidents over the last 3 months. It also displays the median TTR of all these past incidents in this period.
# of occurrences in the last week	Shows the frequency of occurrence of similar incidents over the last 7 days. It also displays the median TTR of all these past incidents in this period.
Heatmap	The Past Incidents heatmap provides a six-month overview of comparable incidents related to the service you're currently assessing. In this visualization, the intensity of the square's color reflects the frequency of incidents on each respective day. Darker squares correspond to days with a higher incident count, while lighter ones indicate fewer occurrences. Please Note: For a more detailed examination of a specific day, simply hover your cursor over a square to reveal the number of incidents from that particular date. If you click on a square, all the past incidents from that day will be displayed in the Past Incidents list below. To gain further context, you can easily access these incidents by clicking on their linked titles.

Conclusion

In summary, past incidents serve as a valuable source of information, knowledge, and context for Squadcast users. They play a pivotal role in incident resolution, performance enhancement, and proactive Incident Management, ultimately resulting in more streamlined and efficient incident response procedures.

At Squadcast, a core tenet of our mission is to ensure that our platform and services offer the utmost user-friendliness, providing you with a seamless experience. We trust that our Past Incidents feature will bring us one step closer to achieving this objective. We encourage you to give this new feature a try and share your thoughts or feedback in the comments or with our support team. Cheers!

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‍Squadcast is a Reliability Workflow platform that integrates On-Call alerting and Incident Management along with SRE workflows in one offering. Designed for a zero-friction setup, ease of use and clean UI, it helps developers, SREs and On-Call teams proactively respond to outages and create a culture of learning and continuous improvement.