Opsgenie: Your Go to Tool to Streamline Incident Management

Opsgenie provides an excellent way to streamline incident management in your organization with a single centralized place and an impressive set of features.

This is the era of information technology that involves a multitude of systems to provide convenience, speed, and accuracy so that business and individuals can attain their goals. 

Many of these systems work together to enable the execution of some tasks. So, if any part or system breaks down, everything related to it crumbles. 

Moreover, IT development environments and infrastructure are at a high complexity level with different devices, technologies, tools, and techniques. 

To run programs smoothly, ITSM needs the systems to work together in cohesion. Any incident that occurs unnoticeably can create small or big issues, which further gives a lot of tension.

So, what’s the best way to solve these issues and correctly put everything in place?

Here, using an incident management tool like Opsgenie can help. 

It not only manages incidents and alerts but also monitors the performance, reliability, stability, and security of your systems. In addition, it can offer collaboration and communication features for your team to stay focused on the alerts. 

Let’s dive deeper into Opsgenie, and its features and understand how useful it can be for your business.

What Is Opsgenie?

Opsgenie is an incident management tool that centralizes all the notifications received from different sources in one place and sends information to the operations (Ops) team to resolve issues faster. 

Using this tool, you can take immediate action on receiving alerts and never miss any incidents. It receives instant alerts from your custom applications and monitoring systems and further categorizes every alert based on timing and importance. 

By centralizing incidents and alerts in a single place, Opsgenie notifies your operations team at the right time, and connects to other tools to synchronize and call for quick help instantly. It filters the noise and notifies you about the incident using multi-channel notifications, such as SMS, push messages, email, voice calls, and more.

In order to deliver end-to-end incident management functionality, Opsgenie includes various cloud plans from Jira Service Management. In addition, it works with Atlassian Open DevOps, which allows teams to streamline incident response and management. 

Opsgenie empowers your dedicated Dev and Ops teams to plan and stay in control during any incidents and service disruptions. With its flexible rules engine, it centralizes all the alerts and enables your team to collaborate, make data-driven decisions, and take rapid action. 

Features of Opsgenie

Let’s explore the features of Opsgenie in detail.

#1. Actionable and Reliable Alerting

Opsgenie makes sure you will never miss any alerts. It integrates with ticketing, monitoring, and chat tools to group alerts based on importance and time, filter noise, and notify you immediately about the incident. To provide necessary information quickly, it uses multiple channels so that your team can get instant notification and begin solving the issues right away. 

#2. Multiple Alerting Channels

Most of the monitoring tools send alerts via email. When alerts are important and time-sensitive and require immediate action, email is not the right option. Opsgenie uses multiple channels for communication, including SMS, voice calls, mobile push, email, and more to ensure you get notified in time. 

#3. Alert Enrichment

Opsgenie alerts will never limit your messages to a few characters. Moreover, it adds optional fields to the alerts and attaches logs, runbooks, charts, and more to enrich the message and provide the exact context. This enables your team to determine the better course of action and handle issues smartly. 

#4. Alert Customization and Classification

You can reformat the alert messages with Opsgenie to make them understandable regardless of their source. The alerts can be tagged using additional information so that they can be easily filtered and organized. 

• Custom alert actions: You can initiate necessary actions and respond to the alerts directly from the application. In the default alert actions, you will find “Add Note and “Close” where you can respond to the alerts by implementing corrective and investigative actions. For example, you can restart or ping a server with a click of a single button. 
• Automated actions: Opsgenie triggers your response by integrating with AWS Systems Manager and other third-party platforms. The system will take action without involving on-call engineers, minimizing alert fatigue and reducing MTTR. 
• Alert lifecycle tracking: Opsgenie offers detailed tracking for every alert. The activity log of alerts presents all activities related to incoming alerts, such as when it was created, who gets notified, when the alerts were sent, and whether actions are taken or not, etc. 
• Alert and notification policies: To tackle alert fatigue, you can get notified differently based on the source of the alert, time, or priority. Opsgenie gives the flexibility to delay, expedite, or suppress alerts based on the timing and content. 

#5. On-Call Management and Escalations

Opsgenie makes your on-call management easy. You can build schedules, define escalation rules, and do more within that single interface. Allow your team to know who is on-call and stay alert during incidents. This will help them gain confidence so they can manage critical alerts on time. 

On-Call Schedule Management

You can create on-call schedules easily with weekly, daily, and custom rotations. Also, you can leverage several scheduling rules to use various rotations at various times. Opsgenie allows you to define scheduling scenarios, including weekends and weekday coverage, after-hours coverage, and geographically distributed team coverage. 

Routing Rules and Escalations

Opsgenie makes sure that all the critical alerts are answered properly and on time. Its flexible routing rules allow you to get notified based on timing, priority, and issue origins. Escalations tell if the alerts get the required attention. 

For example, if an on-call person doesn’t respond to the priority alert within some minutes, another person will get notified immediately and automatically. 

On-Call Overrides

When a user faces scheduling conflicts or issues, another user can take the shift easily and transfer responsibility without involving administration. 

On-Call Reminder Notifications

Opsgenie enables your team to be aware of their responsibilities. It notifies users automatically when the shifts begin and end. 

#6. Advanced Reporting and Analytics

Easily gain insights into necessary areas and opportunities and strive for improvement with Opsgenie. The tool helps you keep track of everything related to incidents and alerts. You can use robust analytics and reporting to know the source of most alerts. 

In addition, it allows you to track your team’s performance in attending and resolving incidents and how workloads are distributed. 

Operational Efficiency Analytics

Operational efficiency analytics lets you understand the alert volume your company handles over a period of time. To this, you can analyze the mean-time-to-acknowledge and -to-resolve. You will be able to visualize how the metrics you get are trending over time. With a single click, you can drill down into several areas of concern to know which alerts need more attention and time. 

Monthly Overview Analytics

You can use Opsgenie’s dashboard to get the data on monthly alert distribution trends. In addition, you can compare the analytics with the previous month’s analytics to drill into important areas. 

Opsgenie groups the related alerts automatically from various systems into one incident based on the points you specify. This will reduce noise and complexity and let responders focus on the context and respond to the problems quickly. 

#7. On-Call Analytics

This will help you analyze the on-call workloads that are distributed throughout the team. It ensures that your team is balanced and working efficiently.

• Conference attendance and efficiency analytics: Conference participation is the key to the fast resolution of various incidents. During an Incident Command Center (ICC) conference, Opsgenie allows you to analyze your team’s participation. It will help you understand conference attendance and analyze the efficiency of every ICC session. 
• Service and infrastructure health reporting: Get the top-level visuals quickly of all the services so that you can identify problems and weaknesses easily. Thus, you can realize the process and system flaws along with potential improvements. 
• Post-incident analysis reporting: Post-incident analysis report helps you understand the steps taken and time taken to resolve the major incident. You can identify how fast your team acknowledged the problems, when changes are communicated, and how teams resolve the issues at the right time.
• Postmortem reports: Postmortem reports summarize the incident information in an easy-to-read and consistent format. You can edit, take document lessons, and add notes while creating an incident report. 

#8. Incident Management and Response

Opsgenie knows how incidents impact your business services. So, it helps you proactively communicate with your stakeholders about the outages. You can make a plan for service disruptions and let Opsgenie send text messages to conference bridges instantly and create the status page. This helps in minimizing distractions, letting your team stay focused on their work. 

Team-Based Service Management

Opsgenie lets you map alerts to your business services and get a clear understanding of who needs continuous updates and which team needs to respond immediately. Teams will be notified accordingly and presented with advanced tools to collaborate while resolving issues. 

Planning and Scenarios

You can design incident responses and set up various workflows for different incidents using incident templates. For every incident, you can predefine the responses you need so that your teams and stakeholders can use the best collaboration channels to solve the issues instantly. 

Status Pages

You can minimize the noise during any incident, allowing your team to focus on resolving the issues quickly. Status pages show you the latest updates separately for every incident. In addition, you can view the Service status page to track the system’s health. 

Incident Timeline

The incident timeline lists key details like associated alerts, incident status, ICC activities, and more. The data is added automatically to the postmortem so that teams can view a record of all the events clearly. 

#9. Communication and Collaboration

For fast response times, you need effective communication and collaboration tools. With Opsgenie, you can integrate with the popular chat tools so that you can collaborate and take actions easily. In addition, you can create virtual chat rooms to manage responses between several teams and keep your stakeholders updated using Opsgenie’s notification capabilities. 

ChatOps

The ChatOps tool helps you take action on alerts and schedules inside your company. Once there is an incident, you can create a Slack channel easily for that incident. 

Within some seconds, all the other members can be gathered in a single room, saving you time and enabling the team to work on resolving the issues faster. Opsgenie integrates with leading tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack to achieve success in collaboration. 

Web Conference Bridge

Opsgenie allows you to communicate with individuals using any web conferencing provider like Twilio or Zoom. The details shared using the conference bridge are attached directly to the incident and automatically shared with the team. 

Stakeholder Communications

You can notify your stakeholders about the incidents according to your organizational specifications. This will allow stakeholders to stay informed about the progress of incident resolution and service health via automatic notifications, subscribing to the status page updates, or visiting the status page. 

Opsgenie Integrations

Connect with the business tools you use daily to streamline your workflow. You can integrate the Opsgenie account with more than 200 powerful applications and web services so that syncing data will never be a question. 

• Slack: Consolidate alerts from the monitoring tools you use and communicate them with the team.
• Datadog: You can sync Datadog alerts with the Opsgenie alerts and get benefits from its rich alert notification system, on-call rotations, and escalations.
• Jira: You can create, update, and manage issues easily from any monitoring tool. 
• Amazon CloudWatch: You can sync Amazon CloudWatch SNS alarms so that your team will get the right notification at the right time. 

Other integrations Opsgenie supports are Zendesk, Zapier, Cherwell, Big Panda, BMC Remedy, Dynatrace, SolarWinds, and SignalFX. 

Opsgenie Pricing

Opsgenie offers discounts to large teams. Small teams can use this application for free for up to five users. It has also paid options:

• Essentials: Manage alerts and incidents easily at $9/month/user, if billed annually. This plan is built for simplicity.
• Standard: Get unlimited incident and alerting management at $19/month/user if billed annually. This plan is built for flexibility.
• Enterprise: Get advanced incident and alerting management with business visibility and enterprise collaboration at $29/month/user if billed annually. 

With the plan you choose, Opsgenie offers a free 14-day trial so that you can understand which plan works better. 

Opsgenie vs. PagerDuty vs. xMatters

Conclusion

Opsgenie helps your company keep track of incidents and responses and make data-driven decisions using different metrics. Its alert management system immediately notifies your team about an incident so that they can take necessary action immediately. 

Opsgenie has the ability to prioritize events, target the required notifications, and escalate the messages to ensure the teams can resolve issues faster without inefficiencies. 

Thus, you can minimize time and resource wastage in your IT and development teams and quickly solve and manage all the incidents with Opsgenie. 

You may also explore some best security incident response tools.