SIGNL4 is a cloud-based mobile alerting and incident response service. Third-party systems like monitoring tools, control systems or IoT sensors detect abnormalities and transmit events to SIGNL4 over the Internet. What if your systems cannot transmit critical events anymore? That might happen when the Internet is down or when the tool itself has a problem. In this case, SIGNL4 would miss critical events and could not turn them into alert notifications to your IT admins, technicians and experts.

Being affected by SRE toil? We define what SRE toil is, discuss how it can adversely affect your productivity, and tell you the best techniques to reduce it.

Interlink Software’s AIOps Platform is now listed on VMware Marketplace – residing in the Management and Monitoring category. VMware Marketplace offers ITOps, DevOps and SREs a comprehensive catalog of solutions across fifteen distinct solution categories.

We’re excited to announce a new set of updates and enhancements to PagerDuty’s Digital Operations Platform. Recent updates from the product team include On-Call Management and Incident Response, Process Automation, to PagerDuty Community & Advocacy Events. New capabilities enable users and customers to resolve incidents faster, do the following, and more.

Business continuity is a crucial part of any scalable operations plan, but many businesses fail to realize how important it is until their first critical emergency. Only then does business continuity management come to the forefront of planning exercises, and stakeholders are forced to reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and determine if they can avoid it happening again, or be better prepared if it does. The true business continuity management lifecycle begins long before an incident.

Atri Mandal, HEAL’s AI/ML expert, has written a second blog about the 4P strategy, this time primarily focusing on solution recommendation which gives useful suggestions to the SREs on how to fix problems pro-actively.

Sometimes heritage is better than new. Some people favor Coca-Cola Classic over New Coke, and heirloom tomatoes over regular tomatoes. Some Luddites might say the same thing about cloud computing. “I won’t put my (app/data) in the cloud! It will be more (secure | reliable | cheaper) if I run it myself in my own data center.”

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams and Platform Engineering teams share similar goals -- like maximizing automation and reducing toil -- and similar methodologies. But they have different priorities, and use somewhat different tools to achieve them. What are SREs, what are platform engineers and how is each role similar and different? This article explains.

When building an incident response process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving parts. Less is more: focus first on building solid foundations that you can develop over time. Here are three things we think form a key part of a strong process. I’d recommend taking these one at a time, introducing incident response throughout your organisation. Just being honest: we’re a startup selling incident management software.

Rundeck is an automation tool that helps to make existing automation, scripts, and commands more secure, auditable, and easier to run. It is a software Job scheduler and Run Book Automation system that automates routine processes across development and production environments. It brings together tasks scheduling, multi-node command execution, workflow orchestration. It also logs everything that happens in the system. Squadcast is an end-to-end incident response tool.

We constantly update the platform to provide the best-in-class experience to our users. These updates are not something that we feel is right for the client; these updates are based on the user data, behavior, and requests that our users provide. We are always excited to bring new updates and share them with people but this one is special! We bring to you Zenduty iOS and Android v3.0!

Most folks familiar with BigPanda know that automation is a foundational block of our technology. Our platform automates the entire events pipeline with functions including standardizing and deduplicating alerts, cutting down on the volume of incidents, and automated enrichment that provides better context and alert payloads. But these are all part of an inbound flow of events through integrations.

As an early stage company, one of our biggest priorities is hiring. In fact, we have two company goals this year and one of them is.

SolarWinds Orion is a scalable infrastructure monitoring and management platform. It is designed to simplify IT administration for on-premises, hybrid, and software as a service (SaaS) environments, in a single pane of glass. SolarWinds Orion ensures you do not have to struggle with numerous incompatible point monitoring products, as it consolidates the full suite of monitoring capabilities into one platform with cross-stack integrated functionality. Squadcast is an end-to-end incident response tool.

Remember when Slack went down in early January? The three-hour outage, set off by AWS capacity issues, cost the company an untold amount of money. And the effects rippled across the enterprise. The outage devalued the company’s stock and seemed to send all 142,000 of its customers to Twitter to gripe. This high-profile outage is just the most recent of many outages highlighting the critical nature of continuous availability. And there’s only one answer to the problem.

Managing your on-call rotations just got a little less stressful. With Grafana 8.0, we introduced unified alerting, which centralizes alerting information into a single, searchable view. With the introduction of Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use on-call management tool available in Grafana Cloud, you can now extend the alerting workflow in Grafana to ensure that the right notifications reach the right people at the right time using the right method.

IT Operations is experiencing lightning-fast change right now. From the emergence of cloud computing to the explosion of data—not to mention ever-present cyber threats—every day is a new day for IT Ops. At BigPanda, we’re laser-focused on making life easier for IT Ops teams, which means we’re staying on top of all this change to help IT Ops keep up.

Spring is blooming here at PagerDuty, and so is our automation product line. We’re thrilled to share some exciting product announcements. First, we’ve officially rebranded our automation product line, Rundeck®, as PagerDuty® Process Automation. Fundamentally, everyone who buys Rundeck becomes a PagerDuty customer, so we decided to make it less confusing.

For the vast majority of organisations, it’s necessary to have some form of round the clock cover to support the business. Whilst it’s most commonly a concern for engineering, it’s increasingly common to have folks from various disciplines available out-of-hours. Irrespective of role, compensating people fairly is an important factor of running a healthy and effective on-call system.

The HIMSS 2022 conference, hosted in Orlando, was an enjoyable, insightful experience with sessions that covered many healthcare topics, such as business operations, data and information, care delivery, policy and technology. Education sessions were led by renowned thought leaders who examined challenges and trends in modern healthcare. Here are five takeaways from our HIMSS 2022 experience.

Enterprise Alert offers the ability to get in touch with your users multiple ways to help you fit your business needs. We at Derdack pride ourselves in being customer first when it comes to not only product enhancements and features but also support and building that customer/vendor relationship that lasts for years. We want to ensure that you and your users have the abilities needed to handle any situation that may arise.

Honeycomb is an application monitoring tool that helps DevOps and SRE teams to operate more efficiently by offering rich observability solutions and intuitive team collaboration. It helps understand complex relationships within your distributed systems and troubleshoot issues accordingly. Squadcast is an end-to-end incident response tool. Built with an SRE mindset, it streamlines all the incident response activities.

Salesforce Cloud is one of the leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. It provides a shared view of your customers and their relationship with the business. With Salesforce Cloud, users can automate service processes and streamline workflows. Squadcast is an end-to-end incident response tool. Built with an SRE mindset, it streamlines all the incident response activities. Squadcast aligns your teams towards a common organizational goal of better reliability.

I joined incident.io recently to lead Sales, after having set up my own company. In both startups, one of the first questions I’ve landed on was: “What sales tools should we use as we scale?”. In this post, I’ll walk through our sales stack, and by extension, what I think most B2B SaaS startups can get away using when they have less than ~100 employees.

Automation in the enterprise is nothing new. Engineers have been working with automation tools and frameworks for decades. From configuration management tools, to continuous integration and delivery pipelines to cloud formation, you name it—automation is part of the fabric of nearly any technology use case in the business landscape. If the previous statement is true, then why does automation still seem to pair with so much manual work?

You just hired a bunch of superstars who are in tune with the latest industry trends. They roll up their sleeves and get to work. In a few days, they point out some systematic issues in your codebase that is making it difficult to expand current capabilities, and chalk out a plan for significant refactoring. But there’s a caveat - the refactor work will be a blocking issue for your near future roadmap.

Your new release tested fine on staging, but it’s not playing nicely with applications and services in the wild. Your monitoring application notices something going wrong and raises the alarm. But often raising the alarm isn’t enough – to solve complex issues, you might need to roll back to the last good deployment while you figure out the root cause and get multiple people working together on the solution.

Add multiple responders to one or more incidents. Helps in gaining empathy, transparency, and future context for an incident that helps reduce MTTR.

Engineering teams can now manage incidents in Microsoft Teams. You’ll have the consistent process and automation of FireHydrant right in the messaging tool you use every day. Effectively run through the entire incident response lifecycle: declare and manage incidents, collaborate with stakeholders, and resolve incidents faster when you integrate FireHydrant with Microsoft Teams.

Our interim update from March 15 adds important security features to call forwarding to on-callers. Three new settings have been added for call routing numbers.

Wondering about severity levels? We explain what incident severity levels are, how to classify them, and how they will affect your incident management process. What are severity levels? Incident severity levels are the measure of the impact an incident will have on a system. In general, a lower number severity level, such as SEV-1, denotes a higher impact on the system.

Downtime—especially in customer-facing services—can cost businesses thousands of dollars an hour and incalculable customer trust. No company can afford to pay this price. To reduce downtime, software engineering teams must act quickly and decisively. But that’s easier said than done. With Lightstep® Incident Response, generally available from ServiceNow today, we're unlocking speed, agility, and productivity for your engineers and your software-powered business.

We envision a world where all software is reliable, and today we’re making that vision more of a reality for small teams. Available today, our new Free Tier helps smaller teams wrangle their reliability challenges with our enterprise-grade Incident Management, Service Catalog, and communications products. Our new package also has every feature that makes FireHydrant great with generous limitations.

Every IT Ops team uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to track metrics that keep them accountable, improving, and contributing to long-term success. But it’s easy for teams to lose sight of what KPIs to use, how many they should use, and how to derive meaning from them. To shed light on what constitutes a meaningful KPI, Sterling Nostedt, BigPanda’s Value and Adoption advisor, hosted a community conversation which spanned across multiple industries.

Whiskey and Wisdom is a monthly executive-only forum where ITOps leaders can network independently and discuss high-level AIOps and ITOps strategies with their industry peers. In our most recent session, the discussion was geared specifically towards AIOps—its hype and its reality. Here are some quick value takeaways from the conversation.

We’ve been pretty lucky at incident.io to be able to avoid dealing with more complex authentication issues for quite a while, because we piggy-back on Slack to know who you are and which organisation you work in. Whole companies have been built around doing authentication and user profiles really well, so it was pretty neat to be able to avoid doing most of that work for so long!

What comes to mind when you hear the term 'incident commander'? You are not alone if you think about fancy, tri-cornered hats, well-polished shoes, and a uniform weighed down by medals. The roles of incident commander, incident manager, or technical escalation manager have been typical in large organizations but are gaining popularity in smaller companies. For the purposes of this article, we will use the term 'incident commander,' but any of the above titles could work.

If you’re an SRE, you might view AIOps with great excitement. By automating complex workflows and troubleshooting processes, AIOps could make your life as an SRE much easier. Alternatively, SREs may choose to view AIOps with disdain. They might think of AIOps as just a fancy buzzword that doesn’t live up to its promises, and that can become a distraction from the SRE tools that really matter. Which perspective is right?

Handoff communication occurs when a patient is transitioned from one care setting to another. Communication is central to handoffs, and clinical staff are expected to share comprehensive details about the patient’s health to the next care provider in charge. During handoff, sensitive information is passed in real time to another care provider during changes in shift or care setting.

Wondering about five nines availability? We explain what five nines availability is, why it’s important, how to measure it, and whether it’s an achievable goal.

Many IT professionals are familiar with the popular metrics and measures of IT operational success. Such metrics as Customer Satisfaction, Average Handle Time and First Contact Resolution are typically memorized by service desk managers and stored for quick reference during planning and other types of meetings. But how do we measure the effectiveness of the processes that support those teams?

You likely deal with major incidents regularly, but do you know who first coined the term? You also probably use the best tools on the market to help you fix those incidents, but do you know what some of the first tools were? When incident management is part of your day-to-day, it’s easy to think you know it all. But we have a hunch that there are some interesting facts that haven’t crossed your mind yet!

Reliability, scalability, and innovation are three terms at the forefront of any discussion about how businesses can achieve long-term success. When you put those three together, you create a business that’s capable of producing the best possible product with the least amount of waste, known simply as a lean enterprise. Being a lean enterprise is the ideal state for most organizations but becoming one can be an ambitious all-hands-on-deck undertaking. The best way to do this?

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is an intelligent, next-generation security information and event management (SIEM) solution designed to detect threat anomalies. Azure Sentinel is also categorized as a security orchestration automated response (SOAR) service that expedites the incident detection and event response process for cybersecurity teams. Azure Sentinel provides an extra layer of security to protect critical resources across an organization.

We’re excited to announce our Jira integration is leveling up to make tracking Blameless incidents in Jira faster, smoother, and more powerful. Teams can now specify the way incidents get categorized into projects, and we’ve also enhanced the overall user experience. Let’s take a closer look.

Keeping track of what all that you need to do to mitigate an incident is crucial. And if you’re an Incident Commander, you also need to keep track of what everyone is doing. This is why we’re excited to share a new experience in Slack to create and manage all tasks in an incident.

Looking into runbook automation? We explain how runbook automation works, with examples and tips on how to use it to streamline your incident response process.

The importance of well-managed communications when handling IT and security incidents cannot be overstated. If updates are not communicated in a timely and accurate manner, misunderstandings, misalignment, and costly errors will occur. Not to mention, resolution will be prolonged. And if highly sensitive information is communicated to those who should not be privy to such, then the risk of legal ramifications is high, as would be the damage.

ServiceNow is a workflow automation platform used by organizations for their IT ticketing and project management needs. In contrast, Squadcast is an end-to-end incident management and SRE platform that is used by organizations for their reliability requirements.

When are you smarter than your playbooks, and when are your playbooks smarter than you? That’s a question that engineers rarely step back to consider. The rational, disciplined parts of our minds tell us that the playbooks we are supposed to follow were carefully designed and tested, and that we should stick to them at all costs.

Wondering about the incident response lifecycle? We explain what it is, and how each phase helps lead to effective incident resolution. What is the incident response lifecycle? The incident response lifecycle is an organization’s framework for responding to an incident that disrupts service. The incident response lifecycle contains the following phases.

What a start to 2022 has been for us all. We are incredibly proud of the continuous innovation, velocity and delivery of new features and functionality. We’ve heard success story after success story from our brilliant customers, each unique in their own way and continue to collaborate with them on our roadmap. So, this March update is for you and a massive thank you. We couldn’t do it without you, and it’s been our honor to be part of your success.

When automated software delivery runs smoothly, it can whisper, and quietly attend to itself. But when your delivery and distribution pipeline runs into a problem, it must shout. Boosting the volume of Artifactory and Distribution change events and issues through PagerDuty can help ensure they’re heard by everyone whose job it is to monitor your software delivery pipeline.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform that significantly simplifies an application's creation and management. Distributed systems like Kubernetes can be hard to manage, as they involve many moving parts and all of them must work for the system to function. Even if a small part breaks, it needs to be detected, routed and fixed. These actions also need to be automated. Kubernetes allows us to do that with the help of readiness and liveness probes.

I’m excited to announce that today, PagerDuty is taking our automation capabilities to new scale and scope as we enter into a definitive agreement to acquire Catalytic. With their technology and talented team we accelerate the delivery of enterprise-wide process automation that manages no-code workflows across the business, broadly applicable to any workflow, for any employee.

Something big happened at Blameless this month — our “Postmortem” feature was updated to its new name, “Retrospective”. To the naysayer, I suppose you’re thinking, This seems trivial. Different teams call it different names anyway, so why bother making the change? First let me say, thank you for reading our blog and I hope you finish this one through to the end. Now, allow me to explain our reasoning and why we’re excited about this update.

The most common way to do it, which is part of the offical solution is to create a Docker image server capable of responding to any request with 404 content, except /healthz and /metrics. This could be an Nginx instance. /healthz should return 200 /metrics is optional, but it should return data that is readable by Prometheus in case you are using it for k8s metrics. Note: Nginx can provide some basic data that Prometheus can read. /returns a 404 with your custom HTML content.

Wondering about alert fatigue? We describe what it is, how it affects software development teams, and how to avoid it. What is alert fatigue? Alert fatigue is the phenomenon of employees becoming desensitized to alert messages because of the overwhelming volume they receive, and the number of false positives they receive. The risk with alert fatigue is that important information will be overlooked or ignored.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we anticipated a slow-down in IT-related spending. In reality, the opposite occurred. Companies massively expanded their digital offerings using the same IT staff they’d had pre-pandemic, even as the teams lost access to many of their existing tools while working from home. This acceleration put immense pressure on IT teams everywhere, resulting in messy incident management, outages, and a huge shortage of talent.