Of growing concern to both patients and the professionals who facilitate their care is the growing trend of healthcare organizations being preyed upon by cybercriminals. In the United States, recent political dialogue has brought special attention to patients’ privacy rights under HIPAA and the ongoing security of their records.

We’re excited to announce a new set of updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Recent development and app updates from the product team include Incident Response, PagerDuty® Process Automation, as well as Community & Advocacy Events updates. We continue to help customers automate everywhere to optimize cloud operations and reduce the amount of issues escalated to other teams.

We’ve just launched our inaugural State of Availability Report and the results are sobering. We discovered that: We’d hoped that at this point in the global digital transformation, organizations had gotten further ahead with mastering availability but there’s still a long way to go.

We’ve been celebrating a few big milestones 🎉 at incident.io in the last few months. We were recently discussing product metrics (as you do for fun on a Friday afternoon 🤓) , and Lawrence was very surprised with a particular stat around the number of workflows that have been run using incident.io.

Andon Cord catapulted Toyota into 40 years of unprecedented quality and domination. What is Andon Cord and how did they do it? In the early 1900s, Taiichi Ohno architected and introduced Andon cord in Toyota's manufacturing plants. The problem: This costs a lot of money. Production costs have always been high. In 1984, it cost NUMMI $15,000 per minute. That's $42,758 in today's value.

BigPanda supports inbound integrations for alert ingestion out of the box; however, many IT organizations have older, rarer or custom-built tools that require a little more work upfront. Fortunately, BigPanda’s recently announced Open Integration Manager and Email Parser aim to streamline integrating these kinds of monitoring tools with the BigPanda platform.

It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and as a Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion Organization, xMatters is proud to be actively participating. Since the National Cybersecurity Alliance started this initiative in 2004, the number of devices connected to the internet and the amount of time we spend interacting online has increased exponentially. The impact on our lives is so massive that it’s become hard to imagine what life would be like without our devices.

Customers expect that online services are available all the time. The truth is that outages happen to almost everyone because providing 100% service availability is challenging and costly. Creating reliable and profitable service is, amongst other things, finding the balance between application availability, costs and time to market. Faster feature delivery means less availability as constant changes to production may cause issues and introduce bugs.

In order to respond in real-time to urgent, critical digital incidents, on-call responders must be able to take action from anywhere. But when on-call responders become overwhelmed with alerts, they often just “ignore them” because they cannot tell the difference between a real alert and a false one.

Good communication is at the core of any incident management process, empowering stakeholders with the information they need to avoid lost productivity. Delivering the right message through the right channel to the right people across the enterprise is key – if you’re simply firefighting and communicating reactively, stakeholders will likely get frustrated.

StatusGator has a wide a variety of use cases: from education to help desk to IT and managed services and DevOps, too. All corners of an organization depend on cloud services and StatusGator gives you visibility into the status of all of your vendors. We’ve heard over and over from our DevOps users that alerts and notifications for their teams are already centralized into a single incident management platform such as OpsGenie, PagerDuty, or FireHydrant.

Resolving the incident is only half the battle when it comes to responding to incidents. For many teams, incident communication is an afterthought, leaving stakeholders inside and outside the organization guessing what happened. But ensuring that important information about the incident is disseminated clearly and quickly is essential.

Over the last few quarters a couple of interesting patterns have emerged amongst our larger customers who are looking to catalyze cross-team collaboration during a major incident spanning members from multiple teams.

“Well, that’s the job.” Have you ever heard that from your colleagues or bosses when it came to being on-call? Imagine you started a new job 3 months ago and were looking forward to it from the start. You are on-call one weekend a month and thought there wouldn’t be many incidents from Friday evening to Monday morning. But by now you’ve noticed how much being on-call duty actually stresses you out. You get restless as soon as your shift starts.

Companies moving their applications and services to the cloud is nothing new, but doing business there requires a solid cloud migration strategy. The list of things to consider is longer than you might think. Fortunately, xMatters has done it successfully and has helped its own customers move to the cloud too. In this article, Product Marketing Manager Erin Jones gives a checklist you can use to get your cloud migration right.

Companies go to extreme lengths to provide their customers the best possible experience—and every company’s concept of what makes a good experience is different. In our RESOLVE ’22 panel Customer experience in action we sat down with Translation.com Director of Strategic Initiatives Sridevi Matukumalli and Akamai Senior Director Harish Menon to talk about this notion.

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. ‍

In our first session from RESOLVE ‘22, we were honored to have Darren Boyd and Satbir Sran from the Incubator podcast and ink8r think tank talk observability and AIOps with BigPanda’s Aaron Johnson. Both panelists are part of communities adopting open standards, and they regularly consult with organizations about how they can improve IT Operations and overall performance.

Over the last couple of years, Spike.sh has largely been a Simple Incident Management Platform helping engineering teams across the world. Our focus on simplicity has been well received by all of you and we couldn't be more happy about it. After speaking with users earlier this year, we quickly realised there is a lot we can do to help our responders and help them better than we currently are.

The why and what we learned from surveying 1,900 engineering teams around their best practices to build, scale, and maintain high availability.

Incident management is easily one of the most annoying things anyone has to ever deal with. There will always be only a handful of people who would ever want to walk into the building on fire to mitigate. That’s the same with most engineering teams. Only a handful are willing to get in, find the root cause, and mitigate the incident.

With distributed IT Operations becoming the norm, most enterprise teams struggle with communication and collaboration within and across the organization. Without the proper tools, staying on top of incidents can be challenging, quickly resulting in outages taking longer to resolve. The overall effect: increase in downtime-related costs and decrease in performance and availability of services making mean time to resolve (MTTR) worse.

Customer support tickets are a key indicator of which customers are being actively impacted by an incident. Incident-related support tickets are an important component of impact assessment, incident prioritization, and effective stakeholder communications. FireHydrant's new Zendesk integration allows Enterprise tier users to: With our Zendesk integration you can streamline customer impact assessments and incident communications, resulting in reduced support response times and incident durations.

This is the second in a two part series on how we built our workflow engine, and continues from Building workflows (part 1). Having covered core workflow concepts and a deep-dive into the Workflow Builder in part one, this post describes the workflow executor, and concludes the series with an evaluation of the project against our goals.

The perfect incident management checklist doesn’t need to be a fantasy. In fact, it shouldn’t be! The perfect incident management checklist should cover several topics, be broken down into bite-size sections, and help team members quickly identify tasks that fall under their responsibility. We asked our experts what should be included in the perfect incident management checklist. Here are their answers.

At incident.io, we’re building tools to help people respond to incidents, often by automating their organisations’ process. Much of this is powered by our Workflows product, which customers can use to achieve things like: Workflows as a product feature are incredibly powerful, and we’re proud of the value they provide to our customers. Behind-the-scenes, though, building something like workflows can be difficult.

We are thrilled to announce that Grafana Incident is now generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, including our generous free tier. (You can sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account now.)

If you’re familiar with PagerDuty, you probably associate it with alerts about technical services behaving in ways they shouldn’t. Maybe you yourself have been notified at some point that a service wasn’t available, was responding slowly, or was returning incorrect information. That’s the common use of a service in the PagerDuty platform.

Over the last couple of months and service releases, we made continuous efforts to enhance Derdacks capabilities to collect, aggregate and alert shopfloor incidents for our Industry customers that primarily use OPC for alerting. In the accompanying projects, we made big improvements to our OPC Integration even added additional features. The OPC integration received a complete overhaul of the configuration and data management systems and can now handle OPC UA Alerts&Conditions.

Not many companies will tell you why you shouldn’t use their product, but any product that tries to be everything to everyone is doomed to failure. When you build without a specific user in mind, your target becomes the intersection of many viewpoints, and what you build is the lowest common denominator. What usually follows is software that can technically do everything, but feels unfocused, complex, and unpleasant to use. Something everyone is equally unhappy with.

Integrating all of your monitoring alert sources is quite a task. Large enterprises often struggle to aggregate millions of data records from dozens of monitoring, change, and topology tools in real-time. Filtering out the noise and prioritizing the most important alerts are crucial to a team’s success. BigPanda makes it simple to integrate with any monitoring alert sources with Open Integration Hub. Currently, we have more than 50 easy-to-use integrations to choose from.

In July, the research firm Research In Action (RIA), published the 2022 edition of their annual Vendor Selection Matrix™. Despite AIOps being a well established technology (Moogsoft has customers who have been reaping the benefits of AIOps for many years) selecting a vendor can still be quite difficult, given the plethora of vendors who quickly re-branded their solutions as AIOps. So a vendor selection guide is a valuable resource.

Today, we’re announcing major new updates to Honeycomb’s PagerDuty integration. These updates put more of the information you need into PagerDuty notifications and allow for greater configurability. These enhancements are available to all users who leverage Honeycomb Triggers and Burn Alerts to send notifications via PagerDuty.

What’s just as important as resolving an impacted service? Providing detailed yet digestible updates to your communities and stakeholders. A recent update to StatusCast, involves the addition of three new status types that can be assigned to your components. Detailed communications is an essential component of incident response and management, and additional status types provide your users with a more granular view of incident activity.

How are you tracking the long-term operation and health indicators for your micro and macro services? Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are prized (but sometimes “aspirational”) metrics for DevOps teams and ITOps analysts. Today we’ll see how we can leverage SignalFlow to put some SLOs Error Budget tracking together (or easily spin up same with Terraform)!

World-class incident responders are a strategic asset in today’s world where the frequency and sophistication of cyber security attacks continue to increase every year, as do the associated financial damages: As such, more and more organizations are looking to grow their cyber incident response expertise, both with inhouse staff as well as by engaging with third-party experts.

We've all done it: "that'll be simple, I'll just write a quick script and..." In the case of calculating on-call pay, we really have done it before: our team have built the on-call pay scripts for several companies, and each attempt was a painful, error prone process. While we believe everyone on-call should be paid for their inconvenience, relying on someones side-project or back-of-napkin maths to calculate pay leads to mistakes, frustration, and wasted time.

We get it – incidents happen. What differentiates resilient teams from others is how they learn from them: using them as an opportunity to find the biggest improvements in how they work. Incident timelines are one of the most simple and effective tools available to you when it comes to learning from an incident. It’s vital that you ensure they’re accurate and useful, in order to make the biggest improvements after an incident.

Companies can take big strides toward “preventing preventable” incidents by minding what they measure. What’s in a name? In Measuring what matters, one of the panels at our RESOLVE ‘22 event, the three words in the title reflect a plan successful IT Ops teams have embraced to reduce the complexity of their reporting systems—resulting in a faster path for companies to make more effective use of all the IT resources at their disposal.