An introduction to Cross Incident Analysis
Cross incident analysis in Jeli
When an incident occurs, we often focus on understanding what happened, how it happened, and how to fix it. Then we move on. But every incident has the ability to change the environment of an organization. Not only can incidents alter the technical landscape through deploys and action items, but the people who work in the system now have a new mental model of the system and how to respond to it when things go wrong. Every incident that occurs after, with any technical or personnel overlap, is informed by the incident preceding it.
We can discover new insights about the human and technical aspects of our organizations by looking across related incidents and surfacing their similarities and differences. This is where Opportunity Tags come into play! We’re excited to offer another product in the suite of tools to support your efforts with cross incident analysis.
Great! What can Opportunity tags in Jeli do for us?
Opportunity tags are a way to look at opportunities in Jeli that relate to one another. Users have the ability to create new tags, and add existing tags to Jeli opportunities.
As you create Opportunity Tags based on the various services and technologies at use in your organization, Jeli will automatically search across all your opportunities and apply relevant tags to the incidents where those keywords were mentioned.
Here are some things to keep in mind as you use Opportunity tags to understand incidents that relate to each other:
1) Not all incidents impacting your frontend service are the same, but looking across them you may notice that each incident review involving frontend mentions:
Team members have difficultly understanding a specific alert
Your Support team struggling to find the right engineering team to page
An indication of technologies that could use more sharing of expertise (ie. knowledge silos that might exist in your organization)
Surfacing these common themes can help us find process gaps, prioritize work, and highlight organizational systems that work or need investment.
2) Seeing where the incidents differ can help us in our analysis as well:
Process changes made in reaction to previous incidents made subsequent response more difficult
Two incidents with the same impact to customers and underlying services had vastly different triggers, contributing factors, and takeaways, and shouldn’t be considered “repeat incidents” at all
Now, when you take a look at an opportunity, the Report Overview page will suggest Related Opportunities based on the services and technologies those incidents have in common.
How can Opportunity tags improve incident analysis?
Incident analysis often results in the creation of action items as an output, but that is only the beginning of the value incident analysis can provide! By using Jeli’s Related Opportunities feature, you can surface the relationships and impact incidents have on each other, and surface much larger themes across incidents. This helps us better anticipate problems and respond more effectively in an incident.
Cross incident analysis can help prove or disprove hypotheses, combat assumptions, and reveal a deeper understanding of your sociotechnical systems.
We’re excited to hear from you about what you uncover using Opportunity Tags and Related Opportunities!