# Incident Management & Response Incident Management is the process of detecting, responding to, and resolving unplanned service disruptions. When done well, Incident Management minimizes downtime, reduces customer impact, and builds organizational trust.
Cortex helps with Incident Management use cases.
### How Cortex helps with Incident Management & Response Use Cortex to help you **reduce incident response time** by: * [Triggering incidents](/solutions/incident-mgmt/in-action.md#trigger-an-incident) directly from an entity page in Cortex, enabling engineers to quickly declare incidents and link them to third-party incident management tools * Notifying users when an incident is triggered for PagerDuty via the [On-Call Assistant](/solutions/incident-mgmt/in-action.md#incident-response-with-cortex-on-call-assisstant), providing immediate access to entity health, recent deployments, runbooks, and dependencies to accelerate response and resolution * Using [Cortex MCP](/solutions/incident-mgmt/in-action.md#incident-response-with-cortex-mcp) to quickly gain visibility into impacted services and understand next steps Configure Cortex to help you **prepare for incidents** by: * [Connecting your data in Cortex](/solutions/incident-mgmt/configure.md#step-1-ingest-data-and-solve-ownership): Ensuring accurate owners and runbooks are listed for your entities and integrating with the tools you use to handle incidents, giving you a centralized view of your ecosystem and a fully-prepared workspace before incidents happen * Tracking incident-related metrics in [Scorecards](/solutions/incident-mgmt/configure.md#step-2-configure-a-scorecard-for-incident-preparedness) to drive alignment and continuous improvement in incident response practices * Configuring [Workflows](/solutions/incident-mgmt/configure.md#step-4-configure-workflows-for-incident-related-tasks) that streamline common practices during an incident, such as rolling back deployments ## Prepare for and handle incidents in Cortex Learn how to use Cortex features for incident management: [**Prepare for and prevent incidents**](/solutions/incident-mgmt/configure.md) Learn how to handle active incidents with Cortex: [**Incident Response in action**](/solutions/incident-mgmt/in-action.md) {% hint style="success" %} Looking for additional resources on enforcing Incident Management best practices in Cortex? Check out the [Cortex Academy "Incident Management & Response" course](https://academy.cortex.io/courses/incident-response), available to all Cortex customers and POVs. {% endhint %} --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.cortex.io/solutions/incident-mgmt.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.