When your processes for deploying changes and responding to incidents are siloed, you're constantly on the back foot. Speed and precision are non-negotiable. This operational gap leads to longer outages, frustrated engineers, and slower innovation. Here, at SolarWinds, we realized that to move faster and be more reliable, we had to get back to basics and apply core IT service management (ITSM) principles to our own operations.

Our Philosophy: Unifying Operations with ITSM

The core of ITSM teaches us that change management and incident management are not separate functions, but two sides of the same coin. One focuses on introducing change safely, and the other on managing its impact when things go wrong. Instead of fighting this reality, we embraced it. To meet the challenge, we decided to “eat our own cooking” and use our own platform, SolarWinds® Service Desk, to centralize and unify these two critical functions across our global infrastructure. Here’s how we did it.

Step 1: Building a Foundation of Deployment Governance

First, we tackled change management. Production deployments are critical junctures in the software lifecycle, often involving different teams and environments. Without a single source of truth, every deployment was a potential risk. Using Service Desk, we established a structured approach to gain oversight and accountability.

This framework allows our teams to:

  • Log and track every deployment across all environments, including US, EU, AU, QA, and Staging
  • Gain granular visibility by tagging changes by service, team, and environment
  • Maintain a complete audit trail, which is crucial for both compliance and effective root cause analysis

By using standardized templates and process integrations within our own product, we replaced fragmented tracking methods with consistent governance for our engineering and operations teams.

Step 2: Engineering a Rapid and Traceable Incident Response

With a clear picture of every change, we then integrated a robust incident response workflow into the very same platform. Now, when a high-severity incident occurs, the context of “what changed” is immediately available.

Our integrated workflow helps ensure our teams can:

  • Instantly trigger automated alerts through systems like SolarWinds Incident Response, and notify stakeholders via Slack and email
  • Track incident progress, ownership, and resolution timelines in a centralized place, eliminating confusion
  • Document post-incident reviews within the same system, ensuring we learn from every event and continuously improve

This tight integration between change and incident data is the key to reducing our own mean time to resolution (MTTR) and improving cross-functional coordination.

The Result: From Firefighting to True Resilience

By building our operational framework on ITSM principles and our own platform, we achieved the very outcomes we promise our customers:

  • End-to-end visibility into our operational health and risk posture
  • Streamlined communication during critical events
  • A centralized repository for historical data that fuels continuous improvement

This unified approach isn't just about closing tickets faster; it's about building a more resilient and reliable infrastructure from the ground up. It was born from a core philosophy: that change management and incident response are two sides of the same coin, one introducing change safely, the other managing its impact. This integration is what ultimately supports our compliance needs, improves audit readiness, and strengthens stakeholder confidence.

Ready to Build Your Own Resilient Operation?

Our story isn't unique; it's a blueprint. To help you achieve the same results, we’ve put together a whitepaper that details how to set up these unified incident and change management processes.

Get the Whitepaper: A 'How-To' Guide for Unified Change and Incident Management