If you are in business, disruptions and incidents can be a headache. With that said, they should be resolved promptly so you can get back on track as soon as possible.
Tracking and solving these issues is part of management and can best be done using incident management software.
The aim of these tools is to restore the normal working of the business, reduce any adverse effect and ensure the production of goods and services don’t stop.
Once an incident is reported through user phone calls, web forms, monitoring and technical staff, the incident management software will follow the process, investigate and look for the best solution.
The best incident management software should, therefore, be more comprehensive than the event tracking software. It should also support the improvement of the IT system so as to prevent the re-occurrence of such incidents.
Here is a detailed review of the best incident management software in the market today.
1. SolarWinds Service Desk
SolarWinds Service Desk is one of the best cloud-based incident management software. It has not only won an award but also got the highest rating in the market list of incident management software reviews.
Designed with ITIL in mind, it has a variety of levels to satisfy different requirements. These include Teams for smaller teams, Business for growing teams and Professional for mature organizations.
If you choose the highest level, you’ll enjoy complete support for asset management, incident management and problem management and change management.
It also features a service level management that helps you improve customer satisfaction and ensure that you are aligned with your SLAs
Its dashboard will show you real-time information about what’s happening with your service desk. To ensure that you have all that your need for your team, the dashboards are customizable.
Apart from this, it provides machine learning and automation to help streamline all your IT operations. With this software, you can comfortably investigate reported issues and ITIL process and then propose project management tasks and solutions to help you address issues.
Since it’s supported on both Android and iOS, you can access it through a mobile app. This means you can access important information wherever you are. To review your work better through issue resolution, it supports historical data review.
Although it’s a cloud-based solution, it comes with software that you can use on-premise. If you are not ready to commit you can start with a 30-day free trial to see how it works. This way, you’ll know whether to commit to it or not.
SolarWinds Service Desk Pricing
- Team starts at $19
- Business starts at $39
- Professional starts at $69
- Enterprise starts at $89
Pros
- Remote login and remote management
- Provides asset reporting and asset management
- Tracks tickets by department and user
Cons
- Should have better reporting templates
- The initial set up should have better instructions
2. Freshservice
Freshservice is cloud-based incident management system with different levels of functionality to support a range of business.
These levels include garden, blossom, estate, sand forest. It allows you to enter tickets through a variety of channels including chat, email, and support portal.
As compared to others, it works by suggesting knowledge-based articles to help you address the issues you may be faced with.
If you have more complex problems, you just need to direct them to the correct team to help you out. Once the issue is resolved the information is added to the knowledge base for future reference.
Apart from tracking and managing your SLAs, you can create your own rules to monitor the tickets and follow up as required.
Just like Freshdesk, it provides a ticket-based solution where all the requests are handled by the agents. These tickets are generated by calls, emails and form-based solutions. These solutions also share team collaboration tools, basic reporting and knowledge base.
Besides these features, Freshservice offers change and problem management, incident management handling, and project management.
This means it features everything you need to handle software and hardware deployments. These tools can be used as an internal requirement for a company.
When it comes to the interface it uses a popular dashboard model where you manage all your tickets. Once the tickets have been developed, they are merged with the escalation and tracking system.
Overall, Freshservice has some of the best features to support IT. It also comes with a 21-day free trial that you can use to check how it works.
Freshservice Pricing
- Blossom plan is $29 per month per agent
- Garden plan is $59 per month per agent
- Estate plan is $99 per month per agent
- Forest plan is $99 per month per agent
Pros
- It’s simple and easy to use
- It’s fast to deploy
- Features several integration options
- It allows for heavy customization
Cons
- Does not have social media integration
- It’s too expensive for small companies
3. PagerDuty
PagerDuty is an operations incident management solution mostly used by IT departments and development operations teams to improve their business performance so they can perform better.
Unlike others, it’s not only powerful but straightforward as well. This way it will ensure that every team member is staying on top when it comes to IT matters.
The best part is that it works with most monitoring services. Once you configure it will deliver alerts by email, phone, iOS and Android apps. You can monitor all the incident alert status through the dashboard.
With its alert escalation and sophisticated scheduling, you can keep the whole team on top and ensure that everything runs smoothly.
Since it strikes a balance between power and ease of use, it’s one of the best tools out there. To sign up, you only require your email address and password and you’ll be done within a short time.
It has a seamless automation feature to allow you to work smarter in everything that you do. It also gives you access to its powerful capabilities such as alert monitoring, on-call scheduling and escalation policies.
This way, you can resolve any issues with your servers and websites. It also provides support for up to 300 third party applications thus giving you other benefits such as operations tools, end to end visibility and advanced reporting.
Furthermore, its incident management tool is meant to ensure your operations are as efficient as possible. Plus it changes events into actionable alerts and combines them together.
In case of any issues, you can contact their support through email and phone.
PagerDuty Pricing
- It has a free trial
- Lite Plan is $10 per user per month
- The basic plan is $34 per user per month
- The standard plan is $59 per user per month
- The enterprise plan is $99 per user per month
Pros
- Excellent in-depth help available
- A variety of supported monitoring platforms
- Worked flawlessly during testing
- Straightforward alerting and incidence
Cons
To get good features you need to upgrade
4. Zendesk Suite
Zendesk is a Help Desk system with excellent and analysis and reporting modules for all your business needs. As a very widely used system, it connects several avenues to allow you to solve issues before asking any IT workers for assistance.
Its features revolve around knowledge management base and chat window to speed up incident responses.
One of its features includes Guide Answer Bot to help you filter out all help desk calls. It also has an AI-driven virtual assistant that you can present in the chatbox.
By using guided questions, it will provide you with the right solutions without involving any technicians.
With its ticket management system, agents can be assigned to the next assistant. Apart from that, chat tickets can be raised through emails or calls. Once this is done, you can split, track and even forward them.
Since it’s a cloud-based, you don’t need to maintain any software on-site. Plus, it has reporting and monitoring functions to allow you to assess your expected turnover and agent performance.
Available in two levels you can either choose Professional or Enterprise level. If you are using it for commerce, you’ll enjoy up to 600 possible integrations with software platforms and 3rd party applications.
By consolidating different customer interactions into one user interface, you can sort out everything and get the information you are looking for.
Due to its flexible pricing, it’s suitable for businesses of any size or shape. Whether you have a small or medium-sized business, you can access all its support tools.
Zendesk Suite Pricing
- Essential Tier is $5 per agent per month
- Team Tier is $19 per agent per month
- Professional Tier is $49 per agent per month
- Enterprise Tier is $99 per agent per month
- Elite Tier is $199 per agent per month
Pros
- Provides different support channels including, web, live chat and email
- Extensive analytics and reporting
- Flexible pricing system
- Huge knowledge base and community forum
Cons
- If you are not tech-savvy it can be a bit hard to learn
- Automation locked behind high pricing tiers
5. VictorOps
Designed with DevOps in mind, VictorOps is one of the best incident management software in the market today. Apart from its three standard plans, you can use it to create a customized solution to fit all your needs.
Its starter plan can accommodate up to 10 users and its Growth plan can accommodate an unlimited number of users. However, if you are looking for additional reporting, additional notifications and additional integration, you should choose the Enterprise plan.
As compared to others, its alerts come with more flexibility. These alerts can be updated to include links to other important information including support, noise reduction, and server logs.
It accomplishes this by grouping different alerts and classifying them based on their importance. This means the IT teams will not be disturbed unless there is an emergency.
This software features one of the best conferencing tools to help you improve response time and collaboration. You can also use mobile and chat to stay in touch with other team members and resolve any issue that you may have quickly.
To enable it to create a timeline it collects information from all integrated tools. In addition, its report and dashboard provide further visibility to allow you to see the response time.
Whether you are looking for good documentation, context-rich notifications and automated escalations, this is the right tool.
The best part is that it has a 14 day trial that you can always use to try it out. You can therefore choose a plan depending on the number of users and selected levels.
VictorOps Pricing
- The starter plan is $5
- The growth plan is $23
- The enterprise plan is $25
Pros
- Provides all the functionalities that you need to manage a team
- Good call alerting and text
- Allows setting up on-call schedules for several months
- As compared to others, it has some of the best tools
Cons
The UI is a little bit clunky
6. Jira Service Desk
Developed to help business service Desk and IT, Jira Service Desk is among the most popular incident management software in the market today. As part of the Atlassian group of products, it’s quite flexible.
Available as a cloud service, it’s fitted with different levels based on the number of agents. You can also manage it well at the customer site.
Apart from providing end to end service, it works better with Jira software. It provides incident management services including routing alerts and out of the box automation rules.
Unlike other tools, it focuses on the end-users. With its self-service portal, you can comfortably search for answers to your problems, track deadlines, provide feedback and check whether the customers are satisfied or not.
From identifying key incident metrics to creating more customized reports, it comes with everything you need. It also has analytics tools which you can use to develop customized reports.
Furthermore, it enhances other tools including change management, problem management, configurable workflows and asset management.
If you choose the cloud version you’ll enjoy up to 7-day free trial. Afterwards, you are required to pay monthly depending on the number of agents you need. On the contrary, the on-premise version comes with a 30-day free trial.
Jira Service Desk Pricing
- For pricing details contact the vendor
Pros
- Powerful with good implementation
- All information regarding defects can be found in the portal
- Automated main triggering
Cons
It’s a bit hard to understand it at the beginning
7. Mantis BT
Mantis BT is a renowned open-source incident management software designed to meet all your requirements. As a web-based tool, it’s not only simple but also easy to set up.
It’s a flexible software that provides customization features and makes updates through notifications. Unlike others, it’s free software.
By providing a balance between strength and simplicity, you can easily get started and collaborate with all your teammates.
With a huge collection of plugins, you can customize all the features that you need. Whether you want to manage defects or track bugs it’s the right software for you.
Plus you can use it to manage defects, track bugs and do several other things. Once you install it on Linux, Windows, Solaris or Mac you are good to go.
Additionally, you can use it to sort issues, communicate with team members, record feedback, and comment with email notifications.
Since it gives you the option to customize notifications, issue fields and workflow it’s one of the best software tools out there.
Apart from good project management features, many language support and wiki integration, this tool provides notifications, plugins, system integration and full-text search.
With its custom field elements, you’ll be able to track the progress of your work and make work a lot easier. It’s also available on all mobile devices. So, whether you have Android or iOS you can always use it.
Mantis BT Pricing
For pricing details, contact the company.
Pros
- Free and open-source software tool
- It’s simple and light
- Capable of tracking several projects and users
- It comes with simple features
Cons
- It requires a well-skilled person to work with
- It should be improved
8. Spiceworks Help Desk
As compared to other incident management software tools, Spiceworks Help Desk is totally free. Once you start using it you don’t have to upgrade to a paid version later.
To generate revenue, it’s supported by several ads. If you can tolerate the ads it’s one of the best tools out there.
With its user-friendly interface, you can perform your entire inventory and monitor the network. To stay current, it provides updates and alerts. You can also view the information in the dashboard.
If you are looking for a basic functionality while waiting for advanced features it’s the right software for you. However, since its free software, you need to know its limitations.
More so, its self-hosted version only works on Microsoft Server Window. This means you’ll not get any multi-channel communication option or document storage capabilities.
One feature that sets it aside is its unlimited amount of service tickets. This allows you to create as many tickets as the situation requires. Plus, you don’t have to delete the tickets hence you can always refer to them when needed.
Since it’s available on Android and iOS you can comfortably use it on mobile. With this feature, you can manage support tickets anywhere at any time.
You can also use a quick view to view the tickets, organize and assign them to your team members.
Backed by a group of specialists, IT professionals and tech vendors it’s among the best software out there. If you have any query, you’ll be able to get a good response.
Spiceworks Help Desk Pricing
All its plans are free. This means you don’t have to upgrade to enjoy additional features
Pros
- As compared to others it’s completely free
- It’s easy for users and administrators to learn how to use it
- It’s quite easy to use
- It has a great user portal
Cons
- Its aesthetic is a little bit basic
- The addition of ads makes it a bit clunky
9. OpsGenie
If you are looking for the best incident management software for always-on-services, OpsGenie will not disappoint you. It comes with different levels that you can choose based on the needs of your business.
With all its levels, you can monitor and respond to all incidents affecting your business. Given that it has both Android and iOS, you can use it wherever you are.
One amazing thing about it is its alert functionality. With this feature, you can have access to multiple channels thus ensuring you don’t miss any notification.
It also provides alert enrichment that enables you to add more information to your alerts. Its main work is to provide your IT with enough content so they don’t have to look anywhere.
By allowing you to review all the information you’ll know if there are areas that need improvement. It also allows you to plan ahead. You can, therefore, identify the template to use and customize it the way you want.
Coming with a 14-day free trial, you can check it out to see whether it’s the right software for you. You can then move to the paid version once you are sure it’s the right tool for you.
It will also allow you to monitor the issues and alert the right people who will take action and take care of the incident as soon as it occurs.
Although it’s a straightforward tool, it comes with highly customizable and sophisticated features designed to fit different workflows.
Unlike other monitoring software, it has the capability to predict potential issues based on the signals that come along. Through mapping and action, you’ll know the right people to work on the issue.
With its ability to monitor, assess and handle critical issues, it’s the right tool to use if you have an always-on-service kind of business. This means all errors will be detected and addressed as soon as possible.
OpsGenie Pricing
- Free trial
- Free plan up to 5 users
- Essentials plan is $11 per user per month
- The standard plan is $23 per user per month
- The enterprise plan is $35 per user per month
Pros
- It allows for merging
- It helps in tracking ownership of alerts
- You can configure notifications based on your requirements
- Simple and easy to use UI
Cons
- Administration users’ privileges should be improved
- The user management feature is a bit hard to use
10. BigPanda
Whether you are looking for the best software for machine learning or autonomous operations, BigPanda has everything you need.
As one of the best platforms, it can help you track changes, alerts and all the data that you receive. It deploys machine learning to help you detect issues and know their causes. This will ensure you suffer very few outages and get faster resolutions.
One amazing thing about it is that it groups all alerts from separate monitoring systems into one database. It also features a robust capability that filters several entries around the same incident.
You can easily integrate it with software such as Amazon Cloud Trail, Catchpoint, Slack, Splunk, VMWare, Zabbix and much more.
With its open box machine learning your team will enjoy unprecedented transparency, control and testability.
Apart from enriching it also correlates alerts from your legacy and modern monitoring tools. As the only way to keep up with the IT demands, it’s a tool that you can rely on.
It allows IT operations, system administrations, developers, NOCs to change alerts into workable insights.
Given that it automatically centralizes IT notifications from different platforms, it will significantly reduce the time needed to spot issues.
Its success can be attributed to features such as smart ticketing, algorithm alert notifications, custom views and centralized visibility.
BigPanda Pricing
For pricing details contact the vendor
Pros
- It will help save up to 50% of your time
- It allows you to establish a correlation of alerts
- It has an Ops-Aware inbox that allows you to organize and update all alerts
- Provides a customized view for any application
Cons
Its annual cost is a bit high as compared to other
11. Incident Tracker
Incident Tracker is incident management software designed to help security firms, educational institutions, healthcare agencies and other businesses track any incident at their workplace and generate reports.
By marking inputs and adding labels, you can easily create and customize electronic forms. Its key features include role-based access, alerts and notifications, heat maps, data exports and imports and document management.
You can, therefore, use it to configure your workflow and organize reports depending on categories, locations and groups.
It also features bulletin board modules that allow you to post and share important notes with your team members and colleagues.
As a cloud-based and on-premise solution, you can use to generate all your reports. In addition, you can monitor the status of your report and receive any information need for follow-up.
If you are using it for the first time you can rest assured that you’ll enjoy a very positive experience.
Unlike other software, it’s very easy to use and navigate. Regardless of the industry, it will provide you with all documenting and analytics tools that you need.
Further, it allows you to upload documents and pictures directly to your reports. This makes it one of the most user-friendly software tools.
In case of anything, you can always contact them through email, phone and chat.
Incident Tracker Pricing
- It comes with a free trial
- Its starting price is $1600 per year
Pros
- It provides automated email alerts
- You can use it to set custom statuses for easy tracking
- Provides different rights for each user
- They continuously improve the software and add features
- Its cost-effective incident management software
Cons
It’s hard to archive old reports
12. Form.com
Form.com is incident management software designed to provide you with tools you need to optimize the workflow.
Based on the responses, it automatically creates follow-up tasks and schedules any additional appointments.
By automating workflow, it prevents any miscommunications so as to create an effective and smooth way to track and facilitate field services.
Whether you have a small or medium-sized business, this is the right software for you. It’s also recommended for several industries including service providers, maintenance, distribution, communications and manufacturers.
Featuring a flexible core technology, it can help your business with advanced logic to streamline all the processes driven by data.
Another unique thing about is that it does not cater to a specific industry. Instead, you can configure it to provide solutions audits, inspections and field operations.
With its comprehensive reporting capabilities, you can compare information from different sources of data. It also provides charts with visual elements and all the features that you need.
Plus, it has a variety of modular plugins including barcode scanning, Geolocation, calculations, file upload, calendars and sliders and much more.
By regularly developing, it will allow you to customize your system the way you want.
Form.com Pricing
- It comes with a free trial
- For a quote based plan you need to contact the vendor
Pros
- It’s less complex but highly configurable
- You can access it on any platform
- It’s constantly being improved
- It’s simple and easy to navigate
Cons
It cannot be used without a tutorial
13. OnPage
OnPage is leading incident management software that not only allows you to get the most out of your business but also gives you a reliable system to escalate your notifications.
When it comes to the evaluation section, it does so well. Once you have everything it’s easy to set up and start using. It also has a very responsive customer service that responds to all your needs.
Its main integrations include Connect Wise, ServiceNow, Amion, Uptime Robot, Kaseya, Veeam, REST API, SolarWinds among others.
As a reliable and secure tool, it will provide you with a real-time alert system and ensure that your healthcare and IT teams do not miss important alerts.
With its persistent on-call escalations and mobile alerts, you can achieve maximum patient satisfaction.
The most amazing thing about it is its time-saving feature. If you intend to modify something you just need few clicks and everything and everything will be updated within no time.
This means you’ll make fewer mistakes, and improve the efficiency of your business. If you like you can change the data wherever you are.
Whether you are having 6 languages of more it has a dictionary of all the words and capability to extract everything in one excel file.
Thanks to its sync and mass publishing functions you can update and publish any information on your website in just a matter of minutes.
OnPage Pricing
- For pricing details, you need to contact the company
Pros
- No more inaccuracies in the product information
- It’s simple and easy to use
- It does not have fixed templates or any restrictions
Cons
There is a lot of information that makes it slow
How to Select the Best incident Management Software
1. Efficiency and Ease of Use
You need to look at how the software can ensure that your workflow is more efficient and smooth. Although there is no specific number it should reduce the number of clicks you need to eliminate incidences.
Instead of relying on the vendors’ word that the system is the best, ask them for a demo to see what it’s capable of doing. They should also show you how the tool will fit in the way you are already working.
If it does not fit well ask yourself whether there are any adjustments that need to be made.
2. Flexibility
You also need to know whether the software is flexible or not. Since every software or tool is dynamic, it should be flexible so you can configure it to your specific needs. You should also ask yourself whether it’s easy to change the field to match your business’s priorities.
If there are any unique changes, the vendor should be able to work with you solve any changes that you may face along the way.
3. Mobility
If you are in business, you understand data is very important. You, therefore, need incident management software that has the best in class mobility features.
With such software, you’ll ensure your incident team receives important alerts on their tablets and smartphones. This should even be possible in places where there is no internet connectivity.
4. Scalability
While your incident management team may be small for now, it will definitely grow as your business expands. You, therefore, need software that can grow with your business.
It’s advisable to choose a software provider that will enhance your company’s incident needs.
5. Application Security and Data Segregation
It’s important to ask yourself whether the incident management software can allow you to share your data. Can it ensure the security of your data while allowing you to share the same data with others?
As your business grows, you don’t have to be stuck to the number of people you can share your data with. The right software should adapt to your company and allow you to share data with Legal, HR and Brand protection departments with ease.
6. Integration with Third-Party Apps
Most IT teams use multiple applications. You should, therefore, choose software that can integrate with other applications for the smooth running of your company.
7. On-premise or Cloud Deployment
As a software buyer, you should know the type of deployment you are looking for. While most buyers prefer Could-based software because of ease of deployment and pricing flexibility, others may opt for an on-premise software tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
Incident management software means the framework in which a business restores the normal working condition after the occurrence of an incident.
The goal of the software is to work quickly so as to reduce any impact of the incident to the company. These tools are, therefore, meant to help with this process.
Although some incident management software have unique features, the main features include real-time monitoring, configurable forms, response dashboard, automatic escalations, and collaboration features.
The main benefits you’ll enjoy include real-time notifications, a collaboration between the teams, and streamlined operations.
A software inventory tool is a unique tool that provides details about the tool being used. It’s very important for incident management because it provides all the details about any disruptions and errors within the program.
A good software inventory tool will help you know the circumstances, time and details of all the issues that have occurred.
The strongest users of incident management software are your business IT team. Since the software is meant to alert you of any incident that affects the workflow it can be of great help to anyone in the IT team.
These teams can use this software together with other monitoring tools such as ServiceDesk tools among others.
While most software works quite well, not all of them will display a sign to show that something is wrong. In such situations, it can be quite difficult to know what’s wrong.
While an incident issue is an occurrence that prevents a user from getting the task done, problem management is the cause of many incidents.
So, incident management handles immediate problem while problem management takes care of all the underlying issues.
Automated incident management is a process that creates information sharing and workflows that removes any need for management intervention.
Typically there are up top 8 steps in the incident management process. These include incident definition, incident prioritization, incident allocation, task creation and tracking, SLA management and escalation, incident resolution and incident closure.
Conclusion
Incident management plays a key role in any business entity by reducing cost, improving efficiency and providing the best client experience.
Since there are several incident management software tools in the market, it’s important to look for the best. If you don’t know which way to go, start with the above tools. Try them out and see whether they are the best.
Most of them come with a free trial hence you can choose the right one for your business.
