Atlassian HipChat, PagerDuty Incident Management Integration Arrives -

Enterprise software company Atlassian and incident management platform provider PagerDuty are working together to help IT teams and partners improve incident response.

The companies today announced a partnership to provide strategic integrations that would allow IT teams to administer incident management workflows "to respond, organize and remediate when an outage or incident occurs," Atlassian noted in a prepared statement.

Atlassian Integrates HipChat with PagerDuty

With those goals in mind, Atlassian has integrated its HipChat group chat technology with the PagerDuty incident management platform.

The HipChat-PagerDuty integration features:

Slash commands: Users can leverage slash commands in HipChat to resolve incidents faster than ever before.

Instant alerts: Users can set up alerts and map out multiple services to individual HipChat rooms to ensure the right users can respond to various incident notifications.

Security and analytics capabilities: Users must sign in to PagerDuty via HipChat, and the integration ensures user logs are tracked at all times.

Ultimately, the integration addresses a lack of communication that plagues many incident response teams, according to Atlassian. It drives "enhanced communication and centralized operations," Atlassian pointed out, and helps developers take ChatOps to new heights.

The integration also may prove to be the first of many between Atlassian and PagerDuty.

"We'll continue to work with PagerDuty on a number of exciting incident management capabilities and look forward to building on our partnership," Atlassian wrote in a blog post.

Incident Response Stats and Tips

Many problems limit effective incident response, which is reflected in recent research from International Data Corp (IDC).

The IDC "Sluggish Incident Response: Next-Generation Security Problems and Solutions" report indicated the following issues often cause incident response teams to miss critical incidents:

Poor visibility and context: Incident response teams frequently lack automation tools to help identify and resolve incidents quickly.

Limited human resources: Incident response teams sometimes lack the expertise and training needed to manage critical incidents.

Inadequate follow-up: Incident response teams must maintain short- and long-term strategies to prevent critical incidents from escalating.

IDC also offered the following recommendations to help incident response teams:

Establish incident response procedures. Creating incident response procedures and updating them regularly may help incident response teams collect incident response data and gain insights into critical incidents.

Employ managed security services providers (MSSPs). MSSPs can provide incident response retainer services, triage assistance and phone support.

Conduct an incident investigation. A detailed report should be created after an incident to identify the root cause of the problem and explore ways to prevent it from happening again.

Moreover, expect many MSSPs to provide advanced incident response services in the foreseeable future, IDC stated.

"Managed security services providers added incident response services, with some MSSPs adding dedicated incident response personnel in their security operation centers to provide complete incident response or triage services. IDC expects service offerings to expand over time and is seeing services extending into risk assessments, penetration testing and other support capabilities," IDC wrote in its report.