Using Feature Flags During Incident Management

Incident resolution is crucial for minimizing the impact of unplanned service interruptions or reductions in quality. Automation plays a significant role in incident management, with many organizations lacking sufficient automation tools and processes. The pandemic has further complicated incident response due to remote work and increased demand for digital services. Feature flags can be used to improve incident management by providing valuable data points during troubleshooting, automating tasks, and reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR). Automation helps eliminate toil and cognitive load during incident resolution, allowing teams to focus on resolving the problem at hand. Regularly updating runbooks and incorporating chaos experiments or game days can help identify areas where operational flags are needed for proactive incident management.