Curt Micol (pictured here) gave a talk on incident management that really resonated with the AlertOps team, as this speaks to the heart of what we’re all about.

One key take-away: communication and collaboration need not be limited only to the support teams.

As Curt pointed out, too often incident management only focuses on the support side. What is often missed is that business partners need to be made aware of issue impacting their customers. If there is an issue impacting external customers then maybe the customer service team would like to be notified. If the incident impacts internal customers, then the appropriate internal team should also be notified.

This is what our customers have told us, and that is why we’ve added features to AlertOps to help meet these needs.

• AlertOps Workflows allow you to define communication actions to help create feedback loops and keep your partners informed. You can create a workflow to notify a business partner when an incident is created, another workflow to notify them of the progress, such as assignment, and another workflow to notify the partner when the incident has been closed.
• AlertOps Message Rules define how you deliver messages to people, so you can define Message Rules for critical incident communication support teams, and Message Rules for business teams.
• Topics are a neat feature that allow you to associate a team to one or more topics. When an incident is created with a defined topic, AlertOps can match the team to the incident. Topics can be set manually or through one of our inbound APIs.