10 Best Incident Management Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 23 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
Security incidents such as data breaches and service outages can disrupt your business operations. Incident management tools help IT teams respond quickly to incidents and facilitate root cause analysis to prevent future incidents.
Here are my top picks for incident management tools, with screenshots and explanations. I’ve also provided pricing information and the criteria I used to narrow down my choices.
What Is Incident Management Software?
Incident management software is a software solution for managing incidents and service requests. It can help organizations streamline and centralize their IT service management and incident handling processes with incident logging and tracking, categorization and prioritization, investigation and diagnosis, and incident resolution and recovery.
Best Incident Management Software Summary
Tools | Price | |
---|---|---|
ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer | Pricing available upon request | Website |
Preparis | Pricing upon request | Website |
ServiceNow | Pricing upon request | Website |
AlertOps | From $5/user/month | Website |
Opsgenie | From $9/user/month | Website |
BigPanda | From $9/user/month (billed annually via AWS) | Website |
Mantis Bug Tracker | From $27.50/month for MantisHub (includes more features) | Website |
xMatters | From $9/user/month | Website |
ClickUp | From $7/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
FireHydrant | From $19/user/month | Website |
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Compare SoftwareBest Incident Management Software Reviews
Here’s an overview of each of the top incident management tools I picked. I’ll cover their general features, pricing plans, strengths, and weaknesses.
ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer is a comprehensive log management and IT compliance solution designed to help organizations monitor, manage, and analyze event logs from various sources.
Why I picked ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer: As an incident management software, the EventLog Analyzer stands out with its real-time log monitoring and centralized log management capabilities. This allows organizations to collect, analyze, and correlate log data from various sources, including network devices, servers, and applications. The real-time monitoring ensures that any anomalies or security threats are detected promptly, enabling swift incident response.
ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I want to highlight include the built-in incident management module, which automates the incident response process. This module allows for the creation of workflows that can automatically perform actions such as disabling USB ports, shutting down systems, and changing firewall rules. It also offers comprehensive compliance reporting and forensic analysis tools to help organizations meet regulatory requirements and conduct thorough investigations into security incidents.
Integrations include Log360, ADAudit Plus, Firewall Analyzer, SharePoint Manager Plus, M365 Security Plus, Cloud Security Plus, DataSecurity Plus, FileAnalysis, OpManager Plus, and NetFlow Analyzer.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Extensive log management capabilities
- In-depth auditing capabilities
- Detailed and customizable reporting options
Cons:
- Potential performance delays when handling large volumes of log data
- Some users find the initial setup to be complex
Preparis is a business continuity and emergency management software that assists organizations in preparing for and responding to various disruptions. The platform offers functionalities such as risk assessment, incident management, and emergency communication tools to ensure effective crisis management.
Why I picked Preparis: Preparis offers customizable templates for building your incident response plans, making it easier to align the software with your organization’s specific needs. You can update and maintain your plans directly within the platform, ensuring they stay relevant as your infrastructure evolves. Automated workflows help streamline communication during incidents, so your team knows exactly what to do when an issue arises. Additionally, real-time reporting keeps you informed, providing critical insights that guide your response efforts from start to finish.
Preparis Standout Features and Integrations:
Features include an incident manager that allows you to track, assign, and resolve IT incidents efficiently, ensuring that each issue is properly handled from start to finish. The platform’s alert system helps your team send notifications across multiple channels, keeping everyone updated during IT disruptions or emergencies. Additionally, Preparis provides document management tools to store and access your IT response plans and related documents.
Integrations include ADP and Okta.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- The tool is scalable
- Centralized platform for business continuity and incident management
- Effective emergency notification system
Cons:
- Could offer a ticket management feature
- Limited customization options available
ServiceNow is software that lets you automate the complete incident management process and helps you reduce the effects of incidents on everyday business operations.
Why I picked ServiceNow: During my evaluation, I really liked ServiceNow’s AI platform called “Now Intelligence.” It analyzes patterns in large data sets with performance analytics, provides intelligent insights, and automates routine tasks. Its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities enable users to interact with the system using conversational language, improving the user experience.
ServiceNow Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I want to highlight here are its ability to perform predictive analytics, which can detect anomalies and potential issues before they become major problems. It also comes with auto-escalation and routing capabilities, has a mobile app to provide service on the go, and offers multi-language support.
Integrations are available natively for Adobe Workfront, Asana, G Suite, Looker, Jira, monday.com, Slack, Trello, Salesforce CRM, and PagerDuty. Custom APIs are also available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Set impact and urgency of incidents for faster resolution
- Omnichannel support via phone, email, or chatbot
- Can design pre-built conversations for virtual agents
Cons:
- May require a dedicated administrative team to manage the platform
- Overwhelming amount of features can be difficult to navigate
AlertOps is a comprehensive incident management platform that helps you to set up escalation policies and consolidate alerts from various sources into a single dashboard.
Why I picked AlertOps: My primary reason for choosing AlertOps for this list is that it integrates with many tools and platforms, including monitoring and alerting tools, communication tools, and ITSM platforms across categories like DevOps, enterprise, MSP, and SecOps. Apart from this, you can have their solution architects create and optimize configurations for you.
AlertOps Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I feel is powerful beyond its integration capabilities is dynamic routing so that you can spot and escalate incidents with contextual data to the right team member. You also get playbooks and communication templates for incident types and a detailed timeline to see how the incident was resolved and learn from it.
Integrations are native and include AlertSite, Bugsnag, Catchpoint, Checkly, Confluence, Datadog, Dynatrace, Freshservice, FireHydrant, and HaloITSM. Open APIs are available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Reports and analytics with downloadable reports
- On-call scheduling
- iOS and Android mobile app
Cons:
- Advanced features are available on high-pricing tiers
- Setup process and integrations can be complicated
Opsgenie is Atlassian’s incident management tool that lets you handle incidents better with powerful alert management, on-call scheduling, and routing rules.
Why I picked Opsgenie: I chose Opsgenie because it lets you map your incident responses with different workflows. For example, you can pre-fill the incident priority, relevant response team, stakeholders, and communication channels for every incident to quickly collaborate and resolve the issues. Plus, its robust alert management process ensures that no problem gets lost in the cracks.
Opsgenie Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I want to spotlight for its workflows is that you can put up status updates so that you know how the incident resolution is progressing. Opsgenie also has a robust alerting feature. You can receive alerts via multiple channels like email and SMS to be notified about every incident.
Integrations are available natively, including Slack, Datadog, Jira, Zendesk, BMC Remedy, SignalFX, SolarWings, Cherwell, and Big Panda. Zapier integrations are available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Post-incident analysis to see what steps each team took to resolve an incident
- Incoming phone call routing
- Classify alerts to add additional information
Cons:
- Amount of features can be overwhelming
- Access management features available only on premium plans
BigPanda’s incident management software allows you to detect incidents in real-time and helps triage and investigate them with context-rich data.
Why I picked BigPanda: BigPanda caught my attention because it helps you set rules to create relationships between various incidents and identify patterns that run across them. For example, its alert clustering algorithm groups related alerts together, minimizing noise and improving situational awareness. By correlating related alerts and identifying the root cause of an incident, BigPanda reduces the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and helps you see the impact that incident has caused.
BigPanda Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I found useful are BigPanda’s dashboard, which provides a high-level view of the organization's IT infrastructure and incident status. Its topology awareness quickly identifies the scope of an incident and prioritizes resolution efforts with auto-routing. It also provides business context, such as severity and affected services, so that teams can work on the incidents sooner.
Integrations include 50+ native options like Solarwinds, AppDynamics, Dataloop, Dynatrace, Jenkins, Vmware, Jira, Asana, and Slack. Fee-based custom integrations are available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Timeline feature for historical incident data
- Single console for NOC, DevOps, SRE, and IT Ops teams
- Reports on health trends and IT Ops key performance indicators (KPIs)
Cons:
- Comprehensive list of features may take time to learn
- Can be pricey for those on a tight budget
Mantis Bug Tracker is a simple, yet powerful open-source issue tracker that allows teams to collaborate on issues and set deadlines for issue resolution.
Why I picked Mantis Bug Tracker: What impressed me about Mantis Bug Tracker, despite being open-source, is that it has all the essential features of a comprehensive incident management solution. You can get email notifications on issue updates, comments, and resolutions. You can set role-based access controls and customize your workflows.
Mantis Bug Tracker Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I think teams will love that it is built on PHP and supports all major operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is also compatible with Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and IE10+. It also provides full-text search, advanced filters, issue change history, built-in reporting, and support for 50 languages.
Integrations are available as plugins, including ViewVC, Google Calendar, Twitter, Scrum Board, Slack, Telegram, Kanban, and Lightbox.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Can perform group actions on multiple incidents
- Can track time
- Unlimited users and issues support
Cons:
- Need technical knowledge to set it up
- UI is outdated
xMatters is an incident management software with features like workflow management, collaboration, and analytics to help you improve your incident resolution times.
Why I picked xMatters: Though xMatters has most of the features a standard incident management software has, it stands out to me because of its reporting and analytical abilities. You get comprehensive insight into how your team is performing, and you can also track incident severity, validate the source of alerts, and group incidents by their MTTR. xMatters also has an incident timeline to see how an incident was solved and which strategies were successful (and which ones weren’t).
xMatters Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that makes me recommend this software is real-time event metrics. You can see how many alerts were responded to, how many are pending, and how many were delivered. You can share reports to support post-mortem analysis, automate workflows and even build your own workflows without any coding.
Integrations include native integrations like Slack, Zendesk, Jira Cloud, New Relic, Cherwell, Datadog, Dynatrace, and Freshdesk. It also offers “Integration Builder” services to connect to other tools not on their list.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Multilingual messaging
- Flexible roles and permissions
- Mobile Android and iOS apps with on-call management
Cons:
- Conference calling feature can be complicated to use
- Needs a user-friendly interface
ClickUp is a project management tool, but teams can use it to manage and respond to incidents. Its flexible incident management features let you create tasks for every step of the incident response process and set priorities and due dates.
Why I picked ClickUp: I included ClickUp in this list because it gives a high-level overview of all incidents and their progress. You can create your own dashboards with various views, like a board view, where you can group incidents by status, assignee, and other attributes. There are also roadmaps that help you prioritize issues and set dependencies to solve those incidents.
ClickUp Standout Features and Integrations:
Features include Gantt charts so you can see your ticket status progress and resolution timelines. I also like that ClickUp lets you create simple statuses for yourself, like “Work in progress” or “In a meeting,” to collaborate better with team members. Email ClickApp lets you receive emails right within ClickUp, so you don’t have to toggle between platforms.
Integrations are built natively. You can connect to 1,000+ tools like Slack, GitHub, WebHooks, Harvest, Google Drive, Outlook, Google Calendar, and Figma. The platform also allows custom integrations with public API.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Docs functionality to record bugs and their resolution plans
- Checklists so that you don’t miss any tasks
- Incident report templates
Cons:
- Sometimes buggy
- Seems complicated at first glance due to the abundance of features
FireHydrant is an incident response platform designed to help businesses recover from and prevent incidents with automated incident response workflows and real-time status updates.
Why I picked FireHydrant: I like how FireHydrant’s service catalog provides a centralized view of the entire infrastructure, making it easier to understand dependencies and quickly identify the affected services during an incident. You can catalog every service that you run and the teams that are responsible for them.
FireHydrant Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I appreciate from FireHydrant’s service catalog is that it includes readiness checklists so that every service meets production qualifications. Apart from this, you can also automate workflows with the help of FireHydrant’s Runbooks to reduce manual tasks. In these Runbooks, you can add conditions so that teams are notified about the severity of an incident.
Integrations include native options like Slack, PagerDuty, Jira Cloud, Checkly, GitHub, Kubernetes, Okta, Statuspage, and Terraform. Users can request custom integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Active community to connect and learn
- Analytics dashboards to check what can be improved
- Incident retrospectives to check timelines
Cons:
- Pricing plans are not mentioned
- Learning the platform can take time
Other Incident Management Software Options
Here are some additional options that weren’t included in the best list but are worth mentioning because of their specific use cases:
- incident.io
For incident management on Slack
- Rippling IT
For device lockdown during security incidents
- Freshservice
For multi-channel support
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
For ticket life cycle automation
- New Relic
For enterprises
- Squadcast
For Runbooks to track progress for incident resolutions
- LogicGate
For managing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes related to incidents
- 4me
For creating custom fields
- Zero Incident Framework
For predictive analytics
- Splunk On-Call
For incident management on mobile
- OnPage
For alert management
- Moogsoft
For managing incidents on both on-prem and cloud environments
- BetterStack
For automatic incident reporting
Selection Criteria For Incident Management Software
Here’s a summary of the selection criteria I used to evaluate and choose my list of the best incident management software for this post:
Core Functionality
I examined the selected tools for the following core functionalities:
- Automation capabilities like auto-routing of incidents and alert notifications
- Central dashboard that gives real-time visibility of incidents and their statuses
- Customizable workflows to adapt the tool to your requirements
Key Features
Key features that I evaluated are:
- Integrations to popular collaboration, operations, and IT tools
- Analytics and post-mortem reports to improve on mistakes
- Prioritize incidents automatically and escalate when needed
Usability
I checked whether or not the software has a simple interface so that team members can adopt it easily without hurting productivity. For more complicated tools, I made sure they came with adequate documentation with explanations fit for non-technical users.
People Also Ask
Here are some FAQs if you’re still curious to know more about incident management tools:
What is incident management?
What is an example of a software incident?
Is incident management software customizable to the specific needs of my organization?
Conclusion
When choosing incident management software, consider factors such as the size of your organization, the complexity of your IT environment, and the specific needs of your IT team. Look for software that offers the features and integrations you need to effectively manage incidents in your organization.
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