The number of respondents reporting they are acting proactively to address IT incidents has increased from 35% in 2020 to 68% this year, according to Atlassian’s recently released 2024 State of Incident Management report.

Atlassian defines proactive organizations as those that use monitoring, alerting and communication tools; does formal incident response training; and uses AI to track incident trends and provide visibility into recent changes, according to the report.

In the report’s findings, it’s clear that incident management still is mostly handled by IT operations, with 95% of respondents stating that’s how it is in their organizations. Development teams are second with 60%. An interesting aspect of this is that the C-suite and even legal departments are getting increasingly involved in incident management, with big jumps in the reporting from 2023 to this year. This reflects the understanding that IT is no longer just a support system but a business driver.

And, when incidents do occur, IT service desks are on-call among 90% of respondents, but big jumps were seen among developers (from 49% in 2023 to 57% this year) and product managers (37% to 51%).

Another area in which there was a large jump in usage is implementing AI. According to the report, “When it comes to AI, nearly all organizations surveyed are currently using it (63%) or plan to use it in the future (34%) to enhance their incident response. This is a 21% increase in AI usage for incident response in just one year. Those who say it’s easy to get stakeholders involved in incident management (69%) are more likely to report the usage of AI tooling.”

While AI and machine learning have been in use for some time, Shihab Hamid, head of product at Atlassian, told SD Times, “The current wave of AI is super exciting because with the new foundation models, it’s not just generative language, but there’s also generative reasoning. So the ability to deal with new scenarios, the ability to learn from past scenarios and then apply them to the current scenarios is huge.”

He went on to say that the major capability areas in which Atlassian is seeing AI gaining traction are around AI-driven incident detection. “It’s things like classification, grouping together similar incidents, identifying underlying problems, automated incident routing and assignment, subject matter expert identification,” Hamid said. “So really, just figuring out when an incident is occurring. What is it about and who can help? And then we’re also seeing a trend starting out in terms of predictive maintenance for IT infrastructure. So we’re really excited to see it go from reactive to proactive.”

Two key factors that are driving AI adoption, according to Hamid, are efficiency and customer satisfaction. “They’re probably the two big indicators that people are looking for,” he said. So when they’re evaluating AI tools, what benefit is it bringing my team?”

Other key findings in the report include:

  • Chat established itself as the most used medium across the board for internal and external communication this year, followed by email and video conferencing. Ticketing and help desk followed for external communication.
  • While chat tools are the source of truth for 39% of respondents, 61% still prefer to leverage their ticketing or ITSM system instead.
  • Monitoring tools (85%), proactive discovery (74%), and reactive discovery (67%) led the way among channels used for incident discovery. Incidents reported by customers lagged, with only 62% of respondents saying they relied most on that. 
  • 96% of respondents completely agree or somewhat agree that their Dev and Ops teams have full visibility into what they need to do their job effectively while minimizing disruption.