According to research from Atlassian, most companies are now practicing proactive incident management, meaning that they are using monitoring, alerting, and communication tools; have formal incident response training in place; and are using AI for incident trending and visibility into recent changes.

When Atlassian conducted the same survey four years ago, only 35% of companies were doing proactive incident management, but now 68.4% are. This year had the biggest year-to-year jump since 2021’s report, jumping by 12% since last year.  

This is all according to Atlassian’s State of Incident Management 2024 report, which surveyed 500 full time software developers, IT professionals, and IT decision makers at a manager level or above, in the US. 

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Atlassian also found that chat is now the most used medium for both internal and external communication. “The immediacy of chat, along with the lower pressure is hard to pass up: after all, you don’t need to get video-call ready to answer a chat ping,” Atlassian wrote in the report. 

However, video conferencing did see a big spike as a method for communicating externally. Last year 31% used it to communicate externally, and this year, 44% were using it. 

“In 2023, we saw a marked drop in the use of video conferencing for collaboration and internal communication during an incident,” Atlassian explained. “Interestingly enough: this was also coupled with an increase in frustration around communication during incidents. That may be why video conferencing is back on the upswing this year, increasing 2% over last year as a team communication method.”

Over the last four years of conducting this survey, Atlassian has studied which teams in an organization get involved in incident management. Other teams — like marketing, legal, or the C-suite — are increasingly getting involved, but IT operations are still involved in 95% of incidents and developers in 60% of them. In 2024, engineering was involved in 53% of incidents, C-suite executives in 43%, SRE in 37%, legal in 22%, and marketing in 20%.

IT is also still the role that is on-call the most, but there’s been an 8% increase in developers being on-call since last year and a 14% increase in product managers being on-call. 

In addition, the most popular tools and processes for preventing incidents were monitoring tools (in use at 85% of companies), proactive internal discovery (74%), reactive internal discovery (67%), help desk (65%), and customer reporting (62%). 

Atlassian also found that the biggest pain points during an incident are lack of visibility across the IT infrastructure (22%), lack of coordination across departments (17%), and lack of context during an incident (13%).

At the same time, the company found that 63% of organizations are using AI to enhance incident response and 34% plan to use it in the future. Since last year, there has been a 21% increase in AI usage in this area.

“As AI continues to mature and the “hype-cycle” dies down, it will be exciting to see where it gets woven throughout the incident management practice,” Atlassian wrote. “This year’s results saw a spike in the number and type of tools that organizations were using as part of their response. We will have to see if this trend continues in 2025 as AI becomes more prominent across ITSM.”

Finally, when it comes to post-incident practices, almost all companies are conducting postmortems, and the numbers have stayed fairly consistent since 2020.

Mean time to resolve (MTTR) is still the preferred metric for incident response, but usage of all metrics — including mean time to acknowledge and mean time to respond — is up since 2023. And in terms of accountability, 22% of companies are practicing blameless postmortems for incidents.