We explain how a DevOps team is structured, the roles and responsibilities within the team, and the balance between an individual contributor and the needs of the team.

May 31, 2022 – Columbia, MD – StatusCast today announced the release of its IT Incident Management service, expanding its flagship offering from best-of-breed Status Page services to include the full incident management life-cycle. The new offering goes beyond standard status updates, allowing IT teams to respond faster and with more effectiveness when systems fail or go offline.

Summit’s right around the corner (have you registered yet?) but the shipping doesn’t stop! 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, Incident Response, Process Automation, and Integrations, to PagerDuty Community & Advocacy Events. New capabilities enable users and customers to resolve incidents faster, do the following, and more.

Logging and auditing have been an essential part of troubleshooting application and infrastructure performance. You can instantly spot areas of risk to ensure quick correction and prevention of issues. In this blog, we will explore the AWS CloudTrail service and discuss how integrating it with Squadcast can help you route alerts to the right users for quick and efficient incident response. Let's get started.

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have a considerable set of tasks to juggle no matter where they work or how long their company has had an SRE practice. But if you’re the very first SRE to join an organization – as many SREs are these days, given that the SRE trend is trickling down into smaller and smaller companies – you face a special group of challenges. You may find it difficult to get buy-in for SRE from other technical teams.

We believe incident.io should be used across an organisation, from SRE teams to Customer Success and People Ops. Until now, the way you set up your incident response flows has relied on having one set of roles and fields for every incident, meaning you have to choose between having lots of irrelevant fields to cover every use-case, or not getting the full incident.io experience on some incidents. That’s changing today with incident types, conditional fields and roles!

Looking into DevOps automation? We explain how automation can improve your process, how to prioritize which tasks to automate, best practices, and how to avoid common mistakes. ‍

Dexcom is more than a business. For its customers, the organization’s innovative continuous glucose monitoring platform provides them with a way to take control of their health and better manage their diabetes. Given the critical services Dexcom provides to its customers, their IT Operations teams have highly specific needs when it comes to the many tools and platforms, they rely on to keep their organization’s services up and running.

At a going away party from a job I was leaving a few years back, my VP of engineering told a story I didn’t even remember but that I know subconsciously shaped how I viewed my role on that team: Toward the end of my very first day at the company, there was some internal system issue, and with pretty much zero context, I pulled out my laptop, figured out what was going on, and helped fix the issue.

From a single on-call engineer hopping online to resolve a problem, to a massive cross-team effort that brings in even the most senior technical leadership (CTO, CISO, or CIO), incident response teams are lucky when they’re able to resolve issues before a customer is aware. But in the cases where there is customer impact, other stakeholders like sales and customer service need to be informed and updated as well.

A few weeks ago we released episode two of our ongoing webinar series, SRE: From Theory to Practice. In this series, we break down a challenge facing SREs through an open and honest discussion. Our topic this episode was “what’s difficult about incident command?” When things go wrong, who is in charge? And what does it feel like to do that role?

We are super excited to announce a major milestone in our company history. 10 years ago, iLert started with a simple mission: help companies to increase their uptime and deliver a seamless digital experience. Every feature in iLert is built to help you to respond to critical alerts faster and increase your uptime.

Incident management is the process followed by the area of IT service management to respond to a service disruption, in order to restore it to normal as quickly as possible, minimizing the negative impact on the business. An incident is a single unplanned event that generates a service disruption, whereas a problem is a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents, as defined by ITIL incident management guidelines.

We are excited to announce that xMatters, an Everbridge company, outperformed PagerDuty in a recent GigaOm benchmark report! The report took a deep dive into the features and functionality of the xMatters and PagerDuty platforms in a comprehensive head-to-head study based on tests conducted on both platforms.

If you have an on-call rotation, you want it to be a healthy one. But this is sort of hard to measure because it has very abstract qualities to it. For example, are you feeling burnt out? Does it feel like you’re supported properly? Is there a sense of impending doom? Do you think everything is under control? Is it clashing with your own private life? Do you feel adequately equipped to deal with the challenges you may be asked to meet? Is there enough room given to recover after incidents?

As failures are a common part of any system’s lifecycle - what would be the Root Cause Analysis for this type of problem? If you build and deploy a system, there are high chances that you'll have to deal with a failure in the near future. However, what matters is how you handle such failures. As an organization, you need to have pre-formulated strategies to handle failures as and when they occur.

Our second May update brings fragment search for category keywords (wildcards), content enrichments for Signls via categories, and an improved zoom level toggle in the duty scheduler. All the details are in this blog article.

It feels a bit surreal stepping into the Regional Vice President of Sales position here at BigPanda just a few months after the company achieved Unicorn status. In more than 15 years of managing enterprise software sales, this is the first time I knew I was going to play a critical role in facilitating a company’s ascension to the top of their sector. Even in college, I knew this is what I wanted.

These days, more and more IT teams spend much of their workday in Slack. It’s essentially a second virtual home. For those employees who find Slack their main source of communication, it stands to reason that you need to access tools, bots, apps, and more – directly within the Slack environment. You shouldn’t have to leave your home to get your work done, and you shouldn’t have to leave Slack to communicate with and update your team and your clients.

Wondering about severity vs. priority? We explain severity and priority and discuss their differences and their impact on the incident management process.

We are excited to announce that PagerDuty® Runbook Automation and PagerDuty® Process Automation On Prem are now available on the AWS Marketplace, the leading global cloud provider. With more than 200 different cloud services, AWS makes it simple and attractive to build and grow your cloud-native business and/or migrate your existing infrastructure to the cloud, so you can begin to take advantage of the unlimited scale, agility, and flexibility the cloud offers.

Inflation is running rampant, the world stage is unpredictable, and what’s happening in the U.S. markets has been dubbed the “tech wreck.” A common theme I’m hearing come up in conversations across industries right now is value — we’re all looking to maximize every dollar spent, every hire made, every hour logged. For a lot of companies, this means looking at processes and tools with a critical eye for not only cost savings but also cost avoidance.

Incident management is a practice that seeks to resolve business-impacting events in the most efficient manner possible. But not every problem that arises requires an incident response, and it’s crucial that teams know the difference between a problem and an incident. Responding to problems may be part of daily routines, or small ad hoc projects that don’t require more than one resource or a significant time commitment.

At first glance, people tend to think that incidents are cut-and-dried, relatively objective occurrences. But if you look closely, incidents are highly varied, often require unique handling, and often defy clear answers to something as seemingly simple as knowing when they even start.

Welcome to a special Monthly Moo - Product Edition. We have so much to share that we needed to create a special edition of the Monthly Moo to cover all the latest features that are now available. And to see these in action, sign up for our webinar that's coming on Tuesday. More details below. With many new features recently rolled out we need to group them in logical order to cover each of the following categories.

Since 2015, Lex Neva has been publishing SRE Weekly. If you’re interested enough in reading about SRE to have found this post, you’re probably familiar with it. If not, there’s a lot of great articles to catch up on! Lex selects around 10 entries from across the internet for each issue, focusing on everything from SRE best practices to the socio- side of systems to major outages in the news. ‍ I had always figured Lex must be among the most well-read people in SRE, and likely #1.

Previously, FireHydrant supported video collaboration tool integrations for Zoom and Google Meet. In response to customer asks, today we are pleased to introduce our new Cisco Webex Meetings integration for all paid plans. With the new integration, teams can automate Webex bridge creation as part of incident response.

Chicago, IL – May 17, 2022 AlertOps, a major incident response management platform, announced today a new technology integration partnership with Cisco AppDynamics, the leading Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and full-stack, business-centric observability solution. This new relationship empowers AlertOps and AppDynamics, joint users, with intelligent alerting, escalation policies, workflows, and scheduling to rapidly remediate major incidents.

With the Cloud Bridge introduction, I started reaching out to our customer base to make sure people are aware of what this feature can do, Usually, I try to keep our customers up to date through blogs or the occasional webinar but with the Cloud Bridge, I went for a more personal approach. Reaching out to our customers individually, presented a unique opportunity to educate them on our Cloud Bridge and by extension what SIGNL4 can bring to the table.

Responding to and managing incidents feels fairly straightforward when you’re in a small team. As your team grows, it becomes harder to figure out the ownership of your services, especially during critical times. In those moments, you need everyone to know exactly what their role is in order to recover fast. Moving to incident.io as the 7th engineer, from a scaleup of around 70 engineers, has given me a new perspective on what it means to own your code.

Not all status updates are published because of an incident or scheduled maintenance event. Sometimes, IT teams simply want to cast an informational status update without affecting the overall status.

What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive Site Reliability Engineering turn out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question that teams at about 400 businesses have presumably had to ask themselves this month in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud.

Whiskey and Wisdom is a monthly executive-only forum where IT Operations leaders can network independently and discuss high-level AI operations and IT Ops strategies with their industry peers. In our most recent session, the discussion was around justifying AIOps—proving the value the technology brings to the table.

BigPanda gives the Incident Commander award to IT Ops superstars—people who go above and beyond in this high-pressure, critical line of work. In 2021, Ben Narramore, Director of Operations/Service Management at PlayStation was a recipient for his ability to handle high-impact global incidents with exemplary professionalism and skill. Let’s find out what he’s been up to…

For teams who deploy software to users around the world, every second counts when responding to outages and other incidents. It’s important that you have tools in your arsenal that are up to the challenge. Service monitoring, alerting, collaboration, and visibility are all essential components of a well-implemented incident response plan.

In the IT world, outages and service disruption are a fact of life. Stuff hits the fan… Stuff happens! And it can happen to any service provider – even the most well designed and managed SaaS applications and platforms. One of the reasons why stuff happens is failing to adhere to best practices. To minimize the potential for problems, here we run over some of the key points from the cloud platform management best practice playbook.

One of the biggest roadblocks to providing consistently excellent customer experience is a breakdown of communication between customer support and technical teams. Too often support teams are left out of the loop when it comes to detailed incident information. When customers experience an incident and call support, they expect status updates immediately. But without access to the right information, representatives are left guessing at best and providing incorrect answers at worst.

SIGNL4 offers powerful duty scheduling and time-based overrides for routing alerts to the right people at the right time. With time-based overrides for example, you can apply different alerting workflows during business hours, weekends, holidays, etc. Holidays in general can bring other requirements for signaling and must also be considered separately when planning shifts. You can add and edit holidays manually in SIGNL4 or you can import them from iCal files.

True reliability takes into account all of the services that exist in your software environment — which is why it can get so complicated. An ecommerce site, for example, might have services that update current inventory in near real time, process payments in the shopping cart, trigger email receipts to send, kick off fulfillment orders, etc. And if one of these services isn’t operating at its best, that can mean money — and in some cases, customers — lost for the company.

Looking into DevOps pipelines? We explain what a DevOps pipeline is, how to build one, and the best practices for building one for your team.

At Nobl9’s annual SLOconf—the first conference dedicated to helping SREs quantify the reliability of their applications through service level objectives (SLOs)—Sumo Logic shared our contribution of slogen to the OpenSLO community, as well as our commitment to OpenSLO as an emerging standard for expressing SLOs as Code. slogen is an open source, SLO-as-code CLI tool based on the OpenSLO specification.

Planning for potential security incidents has become a crucial element in every organization’s business strategy in today’s complex landscape of data theft, security breaches, and cybercrime. Surveys revealed 41% of business investors and analysts are becoming increasingly worried about cyber threats. One way for organizations to achieve cybersecurity readiness and instill confidence among stakeholders is to build a robust security incident management plan.

Consider what happens if digital apps or services go down. Companies lose revenue, decrease productivity, compromise customer loyalty and the list of repercussions goes on, depending on the business. Indeed, modern business continuity is contingent on a well-functioning suite of consumer and commercial apps and services.

Setting up Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is one of the foundational tasks of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, giving the SRE team a target against which to evaluate whether or not a service is running reliably enough. The inverse of your SLO is your error budget — how much unreliability you are willing to tolerate.

Reliability is more important than ever. As users depend on services more and more, and competition in every sector grows, a great digital experience becomes the baseline for expectations, not the ceiling. It’s crucial to invest in making your software reliable enough to keep customers happy. ‍ But what does investing in reliability look like?

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 Web v2.0!

During an incident, time is fungible. At points it seems to go way too fast, and at times it seems like an eternity for a command to complete. More importantly, however, is how it feels to be in an incident. It’s a heightened state of being, where any and every piece of information could be “the one” that helps crack open what is really going on. Likewise, there is an inherent distrust of incoming information.

Our May update brings Signl templates for manual alerting, improvements for duty scheduling and various enhancements in the web portal. Another new feature is the possibility to notify through calling landline numbers. All details can be found in this blog article.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology has become a fundamental part of identifying and guarding against cyber attacks. It is one of the essential technologies powering the modern security operations center (SOC). SIEM is an umbrella term that includes multiple technologies, including log management, security log aggregation, event management, event correlation, behavioral analytics, and security automation.

Today, Derdack SIGNL4 (www.signl4.com), provider of critical alerting and anywhere incident response for SecOps teams, announced it has joined the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), an ecosystem of independent software vendors and managed security service providers that have integrated their solutions to better defend against a world of increasing threats.