Major incident management (MIM) and incident response are critical processes for IT teams, demanding rapid and accurate execution to recover from outages. In today's complex, heterogeneous IT landscape, traditional approaches to incident management most often fall short, leading to prolonged downtime, increased operational risk, and loss of revenue.
Why traditional approaches to major incident management fail
The reason traditional major incident methods and processes fall short is that major incident managers and site reliability engineers (SREs) often struggle due to:
- Scattered information across too many tools
- Having to spend too much time on administration and communicating updates
- Starting from zero for each incident with little ability to pattern match and invoke previous responses
- Difficulty accessing automation for repeatable activities
- Work being obscured in chat threads and drowned out by wider noise
- Difficulty accurately piecing together the sequence of events for post-incident review and learning
What makes Cutover Respond different
Cutover’s ‘Respond’ product takes a different approach. It offers a very easy way to take the tasks out of chat to lay down the sequence of events and provide the hard-won training tokens for the system to recursively get better and better. It provides an action space for Cutover’s and other agents to be deployed with guardrails and the transparency to see what data was provided to the agent and what suggested actions it came up with. You can set out human approvals to take place to allow suggested actions to be executed.
Cutover Respond offers a transformative solution for enterprises, enhancing efficiency, transparency, and trust in the incident management and recovery process. Most importantly, it dramatically helps to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
The power of AI agent runbooks in major incident management
In complex processes such as MIM where speed and accuracy are essential, the need for human interaction and trust with AI agents is undeniable, especially in regulated industries. As highlighted in a recent article by PWC CTIO Matt Woods Matt Woods, ‘The Trust Deadlock’, human oversight and collaboration are essential for building confidence in AI-driven decisions. Cutover Respond, with automated runbooks and human-in-the-loop collaboration, allows continuous monitoring and intervention, fostering a "trust but verify" approach. The Cutover AI agent framework emphasizes transparency and control, and aligns with the following principles:
- Explainability: Being able to see the data shared with the agent, the agent’s process, and what it suggested. This is fundamental to Cutover runbooks that document the data used by the Cutover AI agent, its reasoning, and the actions it recommended, providing a clear audit trail.
- Training tokens: Cutover provides an immutable audit log of data that is representative of the incident with the sequence of activities and timings. This is critical to understand and track the incident response process, including the Cutover AI agent’s suggested actions, which team member approved them, and how the AI agent amended the directed graph of tasks in the action space. This is also critical to enable learning and improve the agents’ response in future incidents.
- Safety: All AI agents’ actions and rights need to be expected and controlled. The Cutover AI agent can only act with the rights and authority to do certain things based on approvals from people. In Cutover runbooks, team members can add their authority to AI agent tasks so it will not act in an uncontrolled way that might cause problems elsewhere, for example, in the infrastructure domain.
By aligning with the principles above, Cutover Respond becomes the collaborative action space where multiple AI agents can interact under human oversight for major incident management. With Cutover’s AI agents, you can automatically identify patterns and predict and suggest alternative paths to potential issues in order to meet or beat service level objectives (SLOs) with explainability, transparency and safety controls.
You can also engage agents from wider applications and have their actions and information influence the directed graph of your response to the incident.
This structured approach is far superior to unstructured chat streams, which can be difficult to follow and audit. Cutover Respond with AI agents enables a collaborative and intelligent approach for this orchestration, with human oversight at every critical step. This ensures a structured, efficient, and auditable incident resolution process.
Why Cutover Respond is the ideal AI agent-human collaboration space
Cutover AI agents coupled with Cutover Respond represent a significant advancement in major incident management and incident response. Cutover AI Agents are not just about automating tasks; they're about building a trusted, transparent, and explainable incident management ecosystem. By combining the power of AI agents with a robust orchestration and collaboration platform, Cutover enables DevOps teams to recover systems faster, more efficiently, and with greater confidence. AI agents can automatically identify patterns, predict potential issues, and recommend corrective actions in a controlled manner, significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
See Cutover Respond in action
Learn more about how Cutover Respond and Cutover AI is revolutionizing the way teams recover from major incidents, minimize downtime and safeguard business continuity or book a demo with us.