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Why Incident Triage is a Key Element in Your MTTR

Yoram Pollack
BigPanda

One of the key performance indicators for IT Ops is MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Resolution). MTTR essentially measures the length of your incident management lifecycle: from detection; through assignment, triage and investigation; to remediation and resolution. IT Ops teams strive to shorten their incident management lifecycle and lower their MTTR, to meet their SLAs and maintain healthy infrastructures and services. But that's often easier said than done, with incident triage being a key factor in that challenge.


Why Incident Triage is Critical for Lowering MTTR

One of the main side effects of today's increasingly complex, hybrid and constantly changing IT environments is the proliferation of disparate ops teams, tools, apps and environments. This in turn leads to high volumes of IT incidents that lack full business context.

As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for first incident responders to triage incoming incidents: Without the ability to understand the incidents' severity based on their business priorities and their impact on services or customers, their routing information, and more — IT Ops teams often waste valuable time determining what to do next, and in doing so, lengthen the incident management lifecycle.

In essence, incident triage has grown to play a key role in determining MTTR in modern, hybrid environments.

Manual Incident Triage Can Be Painful

Because different applications and services have different impacts on customers, availability and revenue, when several incidents occur at the same time it is imperative for incident responders in IT Ops and NOC teams to identify the priority in which these incidents need to be dealt with, and how best to deal with each of them. For teams to be able to rapidly perform this triage, they need access to critical business context and business metrics:

■ The business severity of each incident

■ The services each of them impact

■ Whom to route them to

■ In which priority to do so

■ And other context based on the organization's relevant processes and services.

Without easy access to this information, the teams waste precious time tracking down relevant spreadsheets, runbooks, and other sources of tribal knowledge, as well as manually calculating the business metrics needed to help them understand the incidents' implications.

The more time that is spent on these manual steps, the longer the incident triage lasts.

And the longer that takes, the higher the probability that SLAs are violated, MTTR is kept high, and costs associated with high MTTR rapidly increase.

The solution? Automating incident triage.

Automating Incident Triage

Incident triage can be automated by following several key guidelines:

■ The first step is to allow relevant business context information to reside on the incident level, rather than on the alert level. This can be done by creating custom tags for incidents that can hold this information and be acted upon (filtering, sorting etc).

■ The next step is to create simple yet robust formulas that allow operators to automatically calculate the values and metrics held by these tags. For example — calculate the SLA values in an SLA tag, based on the customer and the service to which the incident is referring. By automatically calculating the values and attaching them to the incident by using tags, the need to search for this information manually within tribal knowledge sources is eliminated, as is the need to calculate the values manually when the incident happens.

■ Now — provide filtering and sorting capabilities based on these tag values, and facilitate effective visualization of these tags alongside the incidents, so teams can easily make decisions and act on the incidents based on what they are seeing.

■ Finally — allow routing automation based on the tag values, so large volumes of incidents can be dealt with by relevant teams or automated resolution processes.


The Short and Long Term Advantages of Automating Incident Triage

The first advantage of incident triage automation is self-evident in all that was just discussed, mainly a shorter incident lifecycle — leading to improved performance and availability for apps and services. It's simple — lower MTTR equals better service.

But let's not forget two additional, substantial gains.

First — improved NOC productivity. By providing the above-mentioned capabilities, a substantial part of the incident lifecycle becomes simpler, and teams can collaborate better — lowering stress and effort across the board. Over time, the collected information can also be used for ongoing improvements in tools and processes.

And second — reclaimed FTE hours, an often “hidden” cost-reducer and revenue-generator. By reclaiming thousands of operational “fire-fighting” man-hours and utilizing them to improve and develop new services, enterprises not only reduce costs but also accelerate their business.

Yoram Pollack is Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda

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Why Incident Triage is a Key Element in Your MTTR

Yoram Pollack
BigPanda

One of the key performance indicators for IT Ops is MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Resolution). MTTR essentially measures the length of your incident management lifecycle: from detection; through assignment, triage and investigation; to remediation and resolution. IT Ops teams strive to shorten their incident management lifecycle and lower their MTTR, to meet their SLAs and maintain healthy infrastructures and services. But that's often easier said than done, with incident triage being a key factor in that challenge.


Why Incident Triage is Critical for Lowering MTTR

One of the main side effects of today's increasingly complex, hybrid and constantly changing IT environments is the proliferation of disparate ops teams, tools, apps and environments. This in turn leads to high volumes of IT incidents that lack full business context.

As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for first incident responders to triage incoming incidents: Without the ability to understand the incidents' severity based on their business priorities and their impact on services or customers, their routing information, and more — IT Ops teams often waste valuable time determining what to do next, and in doing so, lengthen the incident management lifecycle.

In essence, incident triage has grown to play a key role in determining MTTR in modern, hybrid environments.

Manual Incident Triage Can Be Painful

Because different applications and services have different impacts on customers, availability and revenue, when several incidents occur at the same time it is imperative for incident responders in IT Ops and NOC teams to identify the priority in which these incidents need to be dealt with, and how best to deal with each of them. For teams to be able to rapidly perform this triage, they need access to critical business context and business metrics:

■ The business severity of each incident

■ The services each of them impact

■ Whom to route them to

■ In which priority to do so

■ And other context based on the organization's relevant processes and services.

Without easy access to this information, the teams waste precious time tracking down relevant spreadsheets, runbooks, and other sources of tribal knowledge, as well as manually calculating the business metrics needed to help them understand the incidents' implications.

The more time that is spent on these manual steps, the longer the incident triage lasts.

And the longer that takes, the higher the probability that SLAs are violated, MTTR is kept high, and costs associated with high MTTR rapidly increase.

The solution? Automating incident triage.

Automating Incident Triage

Incident triage can be automated by following several key guidelines:

■ The first step is to allow relevant business context information to reside on the incident level, rather than on the alert level. This can be done by creating custom tags for incidents that can hold this information and be acted upon (filtering, sorting etc).

■ The next step is to create simple yet robust formulas that allow operators to automatically calculate the values and metrics held by these tags. For example — calculate the SLA values in an SLA tag, based on the customer and the service to which the incident is referring. By automatically calculating the values and attaching them to the incident by using tags, the need to search for this information manually within tribal knowledge sources is eliminated, as is the need to calculate the values manually when the incident happens.

■ Now — provide filtering and sorting capabilities based on these tag values, and facilitate effective visualization of these tags alongside the incidents, so teams can easily make decisions and act on the incidents based on what they are seeing.

■ Finally — allow routing automation based on the tag values, so large volumes of incidents can be dealt with by relevant teams or automated resolution processes.


The Short and Long Term Advantages of Automating Incident Triage

The first advantage of incident triage automation is self-evident in all that was just discussed, mainly a shorter incident lifecycle — leading to improved performance and availability for apps and services. It's simple — lower MTTR equals better service.

But let's not forget two additional, substantial gains.

First — improved NOC productivity. By providing the above-mentioned capabilities, a substantial part of the incident lifecycle becomes simpler, and teams can collaborate better — lowering stress and effort across the board. Over time, the collected information can also be used for ongoing improvements in tools and processes.

And second — reclaimed FTE hours, an often “hidden” cost-reducer and revenue-generator. By reclaiming thousands of operational “fire-fighting” man-hours and utilizing them to improve and develop new services, enterprises not only reduce costs but also accelerate their business.

Yoram Pollack is Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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