Best IT Alerting and Incident Management Software

Events and incidents are occurrences that play an important part in the management of IT environments. Although it might initially appear that these two terms are synonymous, the truth is that they are subtly different.

• An event can best be defined as any type of observable occurrence in an IT environment. The term itself indicates nothing about what has occurred, as events can be anything from a positive occurrence to a serious breach of security.
• An incident is a very particular type of event. Incidents are events that negatively impact an organization's IT infrastructure. An incident is always harmful and negative. It can be defined as an event that interrupts or otherwise reduces the performance of an IT system.

According to the collection of IT practices known as the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL), IT event types can be broken down into three categories.

• Informational events - Events of this sort are any occurrence that indicates that the IT environment in question is functioning normally. Depending on the organization in question, these can either be important events or events to be ignored. An example of an informational event is a notification concerning a user application login.

• Warning events - Warning events are a type of event that takes place when the IT environment in question is experiencing an unusual or unexpected operation or set of operations. These often signal that something that could potentially impact an organization’s network has taken place. IT administrators will usually investigate this type of event. An example of this kind of event is a notification of unusual traffic in a particular portion of an organization’s network.
• Exception events - When an exception event is spotted, it will usually result in an organization taking some kind of immediate action. This is because the appearance of this type of event indicates that something abnormal has occurred in the IT environment. This type of event can include a notification that a user installed unauthorized software onto a work computer.

IT alerting and incident management tools are a type of software that empowers IT teams to take complete control of their digital environment if malware or another digital threat threatens their organization. Tools of this sort notify administrators of threats and give them options that they can leverage to remedy the problem before it can escalate.

There are many features that effective IT alerting and incident management tools share. These features include:

• The ability to access multiple alerting channels. Organizations always want to stay ahead of potential threats. Therefore, the software that is charged with alerting them of threats often offers them the ability to set the tool to notify them in several ways. This option ensures that urgent alerts are immediately noticed by those toward whom they are directed.
• The ability to enrich alerts. Many IT alerting and incident management tools enable users to create detailed system alerts. They are given the ability to attach data that provides administrators with the context that they need to effectively deal with the issue that confronts them.
• Automated system responses. These features enable administrators to set the software to automatically react to alerts that meet the criteria that they set.

Organizations that employ IT alerting and incident management tools can benefit from them in many different ways. These benefits include:

• Increased productivity. Organizations do not need to spend precious time trying to find out what is wrong when their system comes under attack. IT alerting and incident management tools enable employees to quickly find and address the problem.
• Reduce the impact of incidents. IT alerting and incident management tools make it so that incidents that occur do not have the time to severely harm an organization’s network. They allow organizations to resolve issues quickly. This can keep potential issues from escalating into problems that can have devastating impacts on the affected business.
• Promotes effective use of manpower. Instead of being forced to spread themselves thin, IT alerting and incident management tools make it so that some tasks won’t need to be handled by people at all. Any potential threats can now be identified without having to devote manpower to constant system monitoring. This frees organizations to devote manpower to the most critical of tasks.