There are a handful of providers that large parts of the internet rely on: Google, AWS, Fastly, Cloudflare. While these providers can boast five or even six nines of availability, they’re not perfect and - like everyone - they occasionally go down.

Ask most SREs how many incidents they’d have to respond to in a perfect world, and their answer would probably be “zero.” After all, making software and infrastructure so reliable that incidents never occur is the dream that SREs are theoretically chasing. Reducing actual incidents by as much as possible is a noble goal. However, it’s important to recognize that incidents aren’t an SRE’s number one enemy.

The past few years have led to fundamental business and cultural shifts for both companies and employees. Covid-19 has brought opportunities for companies who invested early in digital operations, while others struggled to maintain the status quo. The latter gave rise to record employee burnout, and what is now commonly referred to as the Great Resignation.

The first few minutes of an incident are often the hardest. Tension and adrenaline levels are high, and if you don’t have a well-documented incident management plan in place, mistakes are inevitable. It was actually the years I spent managing incidents without the right tools in those high-tension moments that inspired me to build FireHydrant. I built the tool I wished I’d had when I was trying to move fast at the start of incidents.

Having a reliable power source is something many of us take for granted. It is particularly important for healthcare facilities to have a consistent, reliable power source to ensure that vulnerable patients – specifically those who rely on electricity to sustain their lives – are not disrupted. In rural Sub-Saharan Africa, however, it’s estimated that only about 28% of hospitals have reliable electricity.

Leadership is essential in an organization. Establishing a leadership hierarchy helps teams avoid getting confused about who to turn to with questions and concerns, allowing them to focus their efforts where needed. High-quality leadership is vital to success but becomes even more important when the pressure to resolve an issue with minimal downtime is turned up.

There is a long list of requirements a hiring manager looks at before hiring an Engineering Manager, there needs to be a balance between technical and leadership skills to perform well in the position. Engineering Manager roles differ from company to company. It is hard to list what a day in an engineering manager’s life looks like.

For the vast majority of organisations, some form of round-the-clock cover is critical to successful business operations. On-call is an essential part of an effective incident response process, yet there is no commonly accepted playbook on how to most effectively structure and compensate on-callers. We ran a survey to uncover the mysteries of how on-call works in organisations of different shapes and sizes around the world.

If there’s one essential thing we’ve learned from being in the business of digital operations for more than 13 years, it’s that every business has a unique approach to building resilience with its bespoke tech stacks and processes. Many PagerDuty customers around the world are starting to provide direct access to their on-call teams with Live Call Routing (LCR).

Customer retention is critical. Studies show that acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. On top of this, a marginal increase in customer retention can yield increases in revenue up to 95%. Customers spend a lot of time interacting with businesses online and their user experience can have a major impact on how they view a company. One bad user experience can send a customer into the arms of a company's competitor.

Digital business is an imperative for 21st-century companies. Increasingly, organizations are directing investments toward technologies that deliver outcomes fast and enable more resilient digital business models. In this landscape, incidents such as software bugs, power outages, or downed networks have major consequences that affect both revenue and customer loyalty.

It’s been a busy month at FireHydrant. We’ve had our heads down shipping loads of improvements across the platform, and I want to take you on a quick tour of the changes. At the core of all these updates is a common theme: things are now a heck of a lot more intuitive. There’s a lot to digest here; read the full roundup of June releases below or follow us on Twitter for a bite-size demo each day this week.

‍ This post highlights some of the features and improvements that we have released in the last 3 months. If you want to submit your own ideas or vote on existing feature requests, you can now use our new public roadmap at roadmap.ilert.com.

Imagine having the ability to instantly know when a Kubernetes compliance or security violation occurs. Now you can with Shipa Insights. Coupling Shipa Insights with the robust notification and alerting capabilities of PagerDuty makes this very possible. Shipa has the capability of sending fine-grained events externally e.g to PagerDuty. Now with the power of Shipa Insights, you have the capabilities to alert on policy violations. Let’s take a look at gettings started.

I recently published a couple of blog posts about what happens when you invest in a thoughtful incident management strategy and three first steps to take to do so. What I’m getting at in these posts is that we need a shift toward proactivity in the software operators community. I’d wager most of the world is responding to incidents as they happen, and nothing more.

With cybersecurity boundaries going beyond the traditional walls of an office and attack surfaces constantly expanding, data breaches are inevitable. Managing risks from data breaches requires organizations to develop a comprehensive incident response plan – an established guideline that facilitates incident detection, response and containment, and empowers cybersecurity analysts to secure a company’s digital asset.

Service ownership is a DevOps best practice where team members take responsibility for supporting the software they deliver at every stage of the development lifecycle. This level of ownership brings development teams much closer to their customers, the business, and the value being delivered. Service owners are the subject matter experts (SMEs) for their services – and in a service ownership model, they are also responsible for responding to any production issues.

As an IT Ops exec, imagine your jubilation upon learning that after a year of hard work across your NOC, DevOps and SRE teams, you are able to automate incident response by 25%. You’re elated as you enter your CTO’s office to share this information, and their response is.

There are a number of lessons I learned guiding weeks-long backcountry leadership courses for teens that I carried with me into my roles in incident management. In this blog post, I’ll share three that stand out.

Hospitals that adopt electronic health records (EHR) to optimize clinical workflows face the decision of how to integrate EHR alerts into their workflows. The rationale is to surface actionable data from EHR systems and present healthcare providers with this information to supplement their day-to-day clinical decisions.

This day started a bit abruptly, with several services experiencing outages due to a Cloudflare outage. It started approximately at 06:34 AM UTC. Check the official announcement. What came next was a domino effect through many popular services over the internet. Major services like Gitlab, Notion, Hubspot, Digital Ocean, Monday, Recurly, and a lot more. We registered incidents from 230 services between the outage was published until it was marked as resolved.

Is your IT team ready to respond to an increasing volume of data security incidents? According to the 2021 Annual Data Breach report from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 2021 saw a record number of data breaches, representing a 68% increase from the year prior. The most recent Cost of a Data Breach report from IBM shares the Ponemon Institute’s finding that the average data breach is a $4.24 million expense, up 9.8% from the previous year.

Almost 70 percent of leaders have dealt with a corporate crisis in the last five years, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found in its 2019 Global Crisis Survey. And, according to management consultancy McKinsey, between 2010 and 2017, the name of a Forbes-recognized top 100 company appeared in headlines together with the word “crisis” 80 percent more often than in the previous decade — and those are just the organizations that made the news.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it sent ripples through many markets. Ukrainian car factories which supplied Europe were interrupted, oil and gas supply from Russia was throttled, and the supplies of steel, sunflowers, corn, and wheat were affected. Prices of sugar and petroleum surged, a threat of long-lasting high inflation emerged, and social unrest began to foment, with cyber-attacks coming both out of and going into Russia.

Honeybadger's new incident management feature lets you report incidents in real time, schedule alerts for upcoming maintenance, or retroactively insert an update for past incidents.

GrafanaCONline 2022 is off to a great start with exciting news from around the Grafana-verse and a jam-packed day filled with dashboards showcasing how Grafana is used in space, in industrial IoT, at live events, and even in an effort to prevent food waste.

For teams that follow a structured build and release cycle, having a reliable, shared workflow makes the difference between chaos and consistency. With every new feature in development the team needs to know what the specs are, how it fits in the roadmap, what the customer feedback was, where to find the repository, who is responsible for each step, and so much more.

For years, Netcool has been omnipresent in many IT Operations organizations. That, combined with the sheer utility it once brought to the table, sometimes gave it a special sort of nostalgic reverence in IT Operations circles. But with all due respect to Netcool, there’s also little doubt the platform’s real-world utility has waned in the era of cloud and hybrid ops.

Last November, we announced the launch of Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use on-call management tool that helps reduce toil through simpler workflows and interfaces tailored for developers. Born out of Grafana Labs' acquisition of Amixr Inc., Grafana OnCall began as a cloud-only solution that became generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, on both paid and free plans, in February.

If you talk to any Service Desk agent, they will agree there has been an explosion in IT tickets since the transition to remote and hybrid work. Even now, there are growing challenges preventing them from being able to reduce IT incidents. In the last year, average ticket volume has risen by 16% since the pandemic, stressing already overtaxed help desk agents. This increase in tickets has led to wasted resources, poor IT service delivery and frustrated employees.

Get info, insights, and more from our RESOLVE 2022 keynote speech. “I kind of view AIOps as more of a practice.

Delivering dependable and high-performing IT services in 2022 requires coordination and collaboration across different workflows, areas of expertise, and even time zones. Whether serving in-house colleagues or external clients, there is immense pressure on IT management to create seamless experiences 24/7/365. Seconds matter when critical systems break down, and slow incident resolution can have costly ramifications on customer experience and employee productivity.

Effective communication in nursing is central to providing top-quality patient care. Nurses communicate with patients to understand their health issues, and they provide them with the care and compassion needed for recovery. Accomplishing effective communication with patients directly impacts patient health outcomes, and it has far-fetched implications when carried out ineffectively. As such, effective communication in nursing drives patient-centered care.

Too many of us are still playing whack-a-mole when it comes to incidents: an incident is declared, the on-call engineer is paged, the incident is resolved and then forgotten — until next time. It’s time to start thinking in terms of proactive incident management, not just reactive incident response.

One of the most critical aspects of monitoring your digital assets is getting a timely alert when something goes wrong. Even when you finish building a monitoring stack and expose metrics on a beautifully designed dashboard if you cannot notice abnormal behaviors and fail to take pre-emptive or follow-up actions swiftly, this means your monitoring system does not serve the purpose.

Every interaction with our customers, partners, and employees is special – but this year’s PagerDuty Summit went far beyond my wildest dreams. Together we committed to helping you learn and grow in how you manage business critical operations – in other words, getting you ready for anything in a world of Digital Everything.

In the first blog this demo series, we showed you how to use Restorepoint to remediate after a network breach. In our second blog of this three-part series, we walk you through a change management instance—showing how to speed problem resolution and how to mitigate the impact of poor change management to minimize MTTR.

In a world of digital everything, teams face increasing complexity. Ever-growing dependencies across systems and processes put customer and employee experience, not to mention revenue, at risk. There is simply too much data to sift through and correlate for humans to understand what is important and know when something is going wrong.

Customer-facing teams have their hands full doing whatever they can to address customer issues quickly. At PagerDuty, our goal is to ease the burden of these teams by giving them the tools and access they need to deliver excellent customer experiences. Over the last year, we have deepened our integration with Salesforce Service Cloud, allowing users to work directly within the platform, reducing the need to context switch.

We know our customers rely on PagerDuty as the backbone of critical real-time operations, so we want to make sure each and every enhancement helps streamline incident response. How can we help our customers spend less time firefighting and more time innovating? One of PagerDuty’s values is Champion the Customer – and we take this very seriously. When building and improving features, we aim to keep a pulse on what’s going on with our customers: what’s keeping them up at night?

Insight Partners is a leader in working with scale-up companies that have existing product/market fit and can use our help establishing best practices for their businesses. But my specific focus is in developer-driven companies. I look for the best technical teams that are building products that developers love and adore.

Kelverion Runbook Studio V5.0 makes it even easier for organizations to automate IT service desk requests and reduce IT burden. In its fifth iteration, The Runbook Studio has undergone a significant design overhaul. The Studio’s technical capabilities have always been exceptional and now it has a user interface to match. On top of that, this version takes Kelverion’s low code/no-code design environment to the next level.

My first incident.io-incident happened in my second week here, when I screwed up the process for requesting extra Slack permissions, which made it impossible to install our app for a few minutes. This was a bit embarrassing, but also simple to resolve for someone more familiar with the process, and declaring an incident meant we got there in just a few minutes. Declaring the first incident when you start a new job can be intimidating, but it really shouldn’t be.

A lot of people in technology talk about the cost of an incident solely from the perspective of downtime, or the number of customers and employees impacted. And from the surface, oftentimes that is a fair angle to take. It makes the headlines, and customer reputation and trust are critical to the success of any business—obviously.

The cost of IT downtimes is enormous as service breakdowns impact both the top-line and bottom-line growth. As the digital ecosystem continues to become complex and organizations continue to adopt additional tools and systems to scale their businesses, it’s imperative that they are equipped with incident response tools that can help drive accelerated incident response and mitigate expensive downtimes.

MTTR, or mean time to resolve, is an important key performance indicator for incident response teams to track, but it’s rarely useful for technological stakeholders or customers. To really make use of the data at their disposal, decision-makers must tailor the info they provide—and understand the scope and granularity of the data they have when they deploy an AIOps platform like ours. That’s the gist of our latest Real Talk webinar on analytics and reporting maturity.

Security is a major requirement while dealing with SAAS companies across the globe. As a service provider to leading companies globally YellowAnt is fully committed to provide the best in class security compliance, in lieu of that we on May 31, 2022 have become Soc2 Type II compliant. It is integral to maintain our customers’ trust by keeping their data safe and secure.

Regardless of your organization’s size, industry, or security measures, you will inevitably face IT incidents. But what do you do if an incident affects a critical system and your on-call responders can’t resolve it? Does your team have a set of clearly outlined next steps they should take to handle the issue? Answering these questions can be complicated, even more so for large organizations that rely on cloud-based services to fuel their IT environment.