5 Incident Response Mistakes That Cost Teams Hours
Incident response is one of those things that seems simple on paper but becomes chaotic in practice. When systems go down at 2am, every minute matters. Yet many teams repeatedly make the same mistakes that extend outages and burn out their engineers.
After working with dozens of on-call teams, we have identified five common patterns that consistently cost teams precious hours during incidents.
Not Having Clear Escalation Paths
When an alert fires, the on-call engineer should know exactly who to contact if they need help. Without clear escalation paths, engineers waste time hunting through Slack channels, paging random teammates, or worse, trying to fix problems alone that require specialized knowledge.
The fix is straightforward: document escalation paths for each service. Who owns it? Who is the backup? What is the path from first responder to domain expert? This documentation should live somewhere instantly accessible during an incident, not buried in a wiki nobody reads.
Ignoring Alert Fatigue
If your on-call engineers receive dozens of alerts per shift and most of them are noise, you have a serious problem. Alert fatigue leads to missed critical alerts because engineers start ignoring or auto-dismissing notifications.
The solution requires discipline: every alert should be actionable. If an alert fires and the correct response is "do nothing," that alert should not exist. Regularly review your alert history and aggressively prune anything that does not require immediate human intervention.
Manual Runbooks Instead of Automation
When an engineer gets paged for the same issue repeatedly and follows the same manual steps each time, that is a sign of technical debt. Manual runbooks are better than no runbooks, but they are a stopgap, not a solution.
For recurring incidents, invest in automation. If the fix is "restart the service," automate that. If the fix is "scale up the database connection pool," automate that too. Your engineers should spend their 3am hours on novel problems, not executing the same script by hand for the hundredth time.
No Post-Incident Reviews
Many teams treat incident resolution as the finish line. The alert is cleared, the service is back up, everyone goes back to sleep. But without post-incident reviews, you are guaranteed to repeat the same mistakes.
Effective post-mortems focus on systemic improvements, not blame. What gaps in monitoring allowed this issue to grow undetected? What automation could have resolved it faster? What knowledge was missing that delayed resolution? These questions lead to lasting improvements.
Siloed Communication
During an incident, information is power. When communication stays siloed, whether in private DMs, team-specific channels, or undocumented phone calls, the incident takes longer to resolve.
Establish a clear incident communication protocol. Use a dedicated incident channel. Post updates at regular intervals. Keep a running timeline of actions taken and hypotheses tested. This transparency helps additional responders get up to speed quickly and creates documentation for the post-mortem.
Building Better Incident Response
These mistakes are common, but they are also fixable. The teams with the best incident response are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones that have built good habits around escalation, alerting hygiene, automation, learning, and communication.
At NearIRM, we built our platform around these principles. Clear escalation policies. Reliable alert delivery that respects your attention. Simple configuration that encourages good practices. Because the best incident response is one that helps you resolve issues quickly and get back to building.
If you are looking to improve your on-call experience, check out our features or start your free trial. We are here to help your team respond faster and stress less.