# The things we find hardest in incident response

DevFeed: [The things we find hardest in incident response](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-things-we-find-hardest-in-incident-response-12039.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/the-things-we-find-hardest-in-incident-response>)

Author: Chris Evans

Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [Incident response](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident-response.md>), [Tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tooling.md>), [Complex Systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/complex-systems.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [complex-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/complex-systems.md>), [complexity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/complexity.md>), [customers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customers.md>), [debug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/debug.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [logs](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/logs.md>), [organizational](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/organizational.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [process](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/process.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tooling.md>)

## AI overview

The article discusses the aspects of incident response that remain difficult even with strong tooling, experience, and preparation. It focuses on staying in an incident leadership role instead of personally debugging or fixing systems, choosing the most valuable role to play, and quickly gaining situational awareness during complex incidents.

## Source excerpt

No matter how good your tooling is, how experienced you are, or how much you've prepared, incidents can still be hard. Despite the five of us at incident.io racking up some serious incident hours, we didn't struggle to come up with a lengthy list of things we still find difficult in incidents.