Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Ron Williams
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Tracking and managing incidents allows organizations to quickly address problems in an IT environment and correct them with the appropriate response. Incident and task management platforms enable this capability. They notify subject matter experts or stakeholders of incidents affecting an environment. Before these platforms became prevalent, notification systems usually involved physical pagers, emails, and phone calls. Schedules would be created on paper and shared across organizations.
Every application relies on a complex ecosystem of tools, processes, and teams. An incident and task management solution not only helps to identify what might have gone wrong, but also recommends how the incident can be resolved. It provides clear lines of communication and responsibilities.
Incident and task management solutions may consume events and metrics to create comprehensive pictures of incidents and manage them. Event-based incident management tracks data generated in chronological order by system changes. In contrast, metric-based incident management ingests performance data for forecasting performance and determining the current state of systems.
An incident and task management solution can alert responsible persons through phone, text, email, or a mobile app. An on-call schedule is needed to ensure that resources or support groups–that is, people–are available to respond to incidents so they are not lost or ignored.
Incident and task management solutions are critical to both technical and business operations and contribute to the operational awareness of the entire organization.
No product is 100% free from bugs or service interruptions. Still, with a proper incident and task management solution, incidents are addressed by the correct personnel, and any adjustments or corrective actions needed proceed promptly.
The GigaOm Key Criteria and Radar reports provide an overview of incident and task management platforms, identify capabilities and evaluation factors for selecting a solution, and detail vendors and products that excel. These reports give prospective buyers an overview of the top incident and task management solutions in the market and will help decision makers evaluate platforms and decide where to invest.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.