The End of War Rooms: Conversational Incident Management

By Prakash Palani

The Traditional War Room Model

Major incidents have long followed the same pattern:

Critical system failure triggers a cascade of phone calls, bridge links, and calendar invites.

Teams—DBAs, app owners, infra admins—scramble across systems to analyze logs and run commands.

Stress levels rise as decisions are made under pressure, often without consistent playbooks.

While this approach emerged in the 1990s and persisted into the cloud era, it struggles to keep pace with modern, distributed, 24x7 business environments.

Challenges of Traditional Incident Management

Slow to start: Time lost assembling the right people.

Manual effort: Logs, traces, and queries pulled by hand.

Context switching: Teams juggle multiple dashboards and tools.

Stressful decisions: No consistent guidance under pressure.

Limited auditability: Post-incident reports rely on scattered notes and memory.

Shifting to Conversational Incident Management

By centering incident management around conversations rather than war rooms, enterprises can streamline responses. Maestro integrates directly with chat platforms like Teams or Slack, enabling a structured, real-time incident workflow.

How Conversational Incident Management Works

1. Alert Engagement

Maestro posts the alert directly in chat.

2. Automated Context

Logs, metrics, and system insights are automatically enriched and presented:

OS memory trends

HANA used memory trends

Expensive statements, users, and ABAP code links

3. Suggested Actions

Actions appear as interactive options for human review:
✅ Cancel Conn ID 27481
✅ Flush Column Store Cache
❌ Restart Indexserver (downtime 5 mins)

4. Human-in-Loop Decision

Team selects the appropriate action directly in chat.

5. Automated Execution and Updates

Symphony executes the command, updates ServiceNow, and posts progress in the chat.

6. Closure and Audit

Incident ticket updated automatically

RCA report generated and attached

Full audit trail archived in chat

Traditional vs Conversational Model

Traditional:

Phone bridge → Manual war room → Logs dug → Fix debated → Execute → RCA later

Conversational:

Alert posted in chat → Logs auto-enriched → Actions suggested → Approval in chat → Fix executed → Ticket closed + RCA ready

Benefits of Conversational Incident Management

Faster response: Minutes instead of hours

Context-rich: All logs and metrics in a single thread

Calm collaboration: Reduces chaos under pressure

Standardization: Repeatable, not hero-driven actions

Audit-ready: Conversations automatically create a timeline

Looking Ahead

Conversational incident management isn’t just reactive. Future capabilities may include:

Proactive prevention of recurring issues

Simulation of fixes before execution

Incident summaries in clear narratives for leadership

The era of the war room is evolving into an agentic-first, conversation-driven model, where structured chat interactions replace chaos with clarity.