Opsgenie – Meaning and Benefits

Atlassian’s Opsgenie is an incident response platform designed to promote effective resource allocation and management during times of crisis. With Opsgenie, there’s no more running around worrying about who is on call or wasting time trying to verify functionalities when things go wrong in your system.

Opsgenie offers always-on services that provide insights and guidance when it matters most.

What is Opsgenie?

When outages happen, the last thing you want is unanswered questions. A tool like Opsgenie will help your company get up and running again as fast as possible, thanks to tools and information that supports better incident investigations.

Plus, the alert management system notifies the exact DevOps team members who need to know about the issue and none who don’t, helping to reduce alert fatigue.

Opsgenie helps you support your ops team in proactive incident management with features like:

• Intelligent alerts are sent through phone calls, email, SMS, and push notifications.
• Notification rules to avoid overwhelming your team with alerts.
• Automated escalation to ensure important incidents are addressed quickly.
• Dedicated Incident Command Center (ICC) to centralize incident insights.
• Tools for post-incident analysis to help prevent future problems.

One of the best features of Opsgenie is its ability to assign priority to events, target notifications to the right people, and escalate the notification as necessary to ensure events are resolved in a timely manner without keeping your whole team on their toes.

Of course, the routing rules are just a small part of what makes Opsgenie so effective.

As a modern incident management platform, Opsgenie is one of the most advanced and user-friendly systems of its kind.

Opsgenie is now included in all plans of Jira Service Management, alongside other tools designed to empower your dev and IT ops teams.

Especially when combined with other tools in the Jira Service Management suite, Opsgenie has the potential to simplify your company’s ITSM while reducing the number of deployments necessary for overseeing your production environments. 

Benefits of using Opsgenie

Using a system that constantly sends alerts to everyone when events happen will rapidly exhaust your team and lead to notifications being ignored. By tying your custom apps and monitoring systems into Opsgenie, it will automatically categorize alerts based on priority. 

Opsgenie also uses your on-call schedules to make sure the right people get alerts at the right moment. If an important notification goes unacknowledged, Opsgenie will escalate it automatically, making sure the incident gets the attention it deserves.

Thoughtful features like these add up to key benefits like:  

• Centralize the management of production environments for your support and operations teams.
• Eliminate the need to set up and manage notifications and status pages manually.
• Improve the average response time for incidents while streamlining your alerts system. 
• Meet users where they are with the ability to send notifications across multiple channels, including push notifications via the mobile app. 
• Utilize integrations with tools like Slack to build Opsgenie into your ideal workflow.

With these benefits front and center, Opsgenie is highly regarded as one of the most powerful and flexible incident management platforms on the market. So, what type of team is the tool best suited for? 

Who should try Opsgenie? 

Handling incidents in a timely manner is a critical goal for every ops team, but one of the downfalls of most incident response platforms is that they can burden your whole team when incidents happen.

Opsgenie’s thoughtful design makes it highly functional for teams of all sizes while ensuring all members are able to focus on the tasks most important to them without interruptions.

While larger companies tend to deal with a higher volume of incidents due to the sheer complexity of their environments, proper incident management is just as essential for smaller companies.

For these reasons, Opsgenie is a good fit for any company with a dedicated ops team.

Tips for making the most of Opsgenie  

If your company is thinking about implementing a tool like Opsgenie, the first thing you should do is take the time to review the implementation process and understand how the tool works.

Meanwhile, setting the right metrics to gauge the tool's success is important. In the case of Opsgenie, you should look to improve metrics like mean time to resolution (MTTR), as that’s the primary business outcome Opsgenie is built around.

You can make the most of Opsgenie by focusing on these six key areas:

1. Identify your mission-critical systems

These are the systems whose incidents should always be given the highest priority, resulting in the most alerts across your team.

Likewise, identify your lowest-priority system where excessive alerts will cause more harm than good. Make sure you're acting objectively when implementing your weighted scale. 

2. Design your scheduling model

There’s no point in sending alerts to team members who don’t have the time or expertise to address them properly.

The scheduling model you give to Opsgenie will determine who gets alerts and when, along with who they are escalated to.

However, you must make sure the schedule stays updated or it defeats its purpose of it. 

3. Adapt your routing and filter settings

Automating your notification system will help you send alerts more quickly while reducing user error (i.e., duplicate alerts).

Opsgenie allows you to set routing and filter preferences to minimize the manual input required to communicate status alerts with your teams. 

4. Choose the appropriate channels

Different team members will prefer different channels, and so will other key stakeholders, like upper management and end users.

Opsgenie allows you to choose from a variety of channels, including automated phone calls, to make sure each party receives communication in the most direct and consumable manner.

5. Invest in performance monitoring

Opsgenie will help you know when system status changes, but determining what’s considered “normal” for your systems requires ongoing monitoring with performance and health benchmarks.

This means investing in other tools and processes to ensure the highest uptime and reliability across your environments.

6. Utilize post-incident tools

Opsgenie shines in the heat of the moment, ensuring all the right people are on the ground and working to tackle an incident in real-time.

However, it also offers post-incident tools to help your team conduct a full investigation to discover gaps and weaknesses that need to be addressed. Using them will help your ops team become more proactive.

All in all, Opsgenie is a powerful platform for incident response, but that’s just a small part of the bigger picture.

Whether you’re running on the cloud, on-premises, or both, finding solutions capable of keeping up with what’s new on the market and supporting your company’s overarching goals is critical to your success.

Support your DevOps team

Opsgenie is far from the only incident response platform on the market, but it is one of the most advanced.

If your company is looking to improve incident response and support your ops team in deploying preventative solutions, Opsgenie can help you solve one piece of the puzzle.

Of course, building resilient digital experiences takes an entire suite of tools, along with a team that knows how to use them.

If you’re looking for help solving performance issues and optimizing your production environments, Adservio can help you build out a robust monitoring platform that minimizes incidents and maximizes uptime.