Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2024

Navigating the Evolving Landscape: A Deep Dive into REST API Versioning Strategies

In the ever-evolving landscape of APIs, ensuring seamless interactions and managing changes becomes crucial. While innovation and adaptability are essential, maintaining backward compatibility is equally important to avoid disruption for existing users. This is where REST API versioning comes into play. Versioning allows you to introduce new features or changes to your API in a controlled manner, while simultaneously keeping older versions running smoothly.

Negotiating Priorities Around Incident Investigations

There are countless challenges around incident investigations and reports. Aside from sensitive situations revolving around blame and corrections, tricky problems come up when having discussions with multiple stakeholders. The problems I’ll explore in this blog—from the SRE perspective—are about time pressures (when to ship the investigation) and the type of report people expect.

Combating IT Alert Fatigue

With the growing complexity of IT systems, managing alerts and notifications without succumbing to the crippling effects of alert fatigue has never been more challenging. Alert Fatigue occurs when the volume of notifications makes it impossible to discern signal from noise, desensitizing the recipient to warnings, some of which end up representing critical issues.

Welcome to StatusCast Demo Video!

Welcome to the StatusCast Demo Video – Your Ultimate Guide to Seamless Status Communication! 🚀 About StatusCast: StatusCast is a cutting-edge platform designed to revolutionize the way you communicate service status and incidents to your users. Whether you're a tech company, SaaS provider, or any organization relying on online services, StatusCast ensures that you keep your users informed, engaged, and satisfied.

Finally: alerting and on-call scheduling for how you actually work

TL;DR You deserve a better alerting and on-call tool. So we built Signals. In our early days, we often used the tagline, “You just got paged. Now what?” It encapsulated how FireHydrant solved for all of the messy bits that come after your alert is fired, from incident declaration all the way through to retrospective. At the time, we saw alerting and on-call scheduling as a solved problem.

Integrating Prometheus AlertManager with PagerDuty in Calico

In the fast-paced world of Kubernetes, guaranteeing optimal performance and reliability of underlying infrastructure is crucial, such as container and Kubernetes networking. One key aspect of achieving this is by effectively managing alerts and notifications. This blog post emphasizes the significance of configuring alerts in a Kubernetes environment, particularly for Calico Enterprise and Cloud, which provides Kubernetes workload networking, security, and observability.

Start Monitoring Third-Party Outages in Opsgenie

In today's digital world, we rely a lot on third-party services. These services are great because they help us grow, be more flexible, and work more efficiently. However, they also make things more complicated and risky. If a service we depend on stops working, it can cause big problems. To deal with this, we're excited to introduce a new feature that connects Opsgenie with IsDown.

Balancing Innovation and Reliability: A Guide for SRE Teams

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, striking a balance between innovation and reliability is a constant challenge for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. On one hand, businesses and customers crave the constant stream of new features and functionalities that fuel progress. On the other hand, ensuring system stability, minimal downtime, and optimal performance remains paramount for user experience and business continuity.

Elevate Your IT Outage Experience : Avoid The "Are You Down Chaos".

In today's digital age, IT outages can throw your operations into chaos, leaving you and your team scrambling to determine if you're down. Don't let the "Are You Down Chaos" disrupt your workflow! 🔗 In this video, we explore effective strategies to elevate your IT outage experience and steer clear of the confusion. Learn from real-world experiences as we share stories of how others successfully navigated through the turbulence of IT downtime.

Joe's Triumph with an Alert Fatigue Solution

In the fast-paced world of operations management, every alert bears weight, and Joe’s team found themselves caught in a relentless stream of notifications. The challenge they faced was alert fatigue – a persistent obstacle that blurred the lines between critical incidents and routine matters. As the head of operations, Joe navigated through this influx of alerts, ranging from urgent server issues demanding immediate attention to routine notifications like a failed login.

Best Practices For Building A Resilient On-Call Framework

Whether a business is small scale, medium-sized, or a large enterprise, downtime issues can affect any organization as no business is exempt from experiencing downtime. However, the swifter the acknowledgment of an issue, the quicker the response, resulting in a reduced impact on business. An effective On-Call framework not only aids in prompt issue resolution but also plays a vital role in minimizing the overall downtime impact on business operations.
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The 6 Best Incident Management Software in 2024

When the siren blares and your IT infrastructure is under siege, panic can be your worst enemy. In the heat of these digital battles, robust incident management software becomes your indispensable weapon. Forget fumbling through spreadsheets and frantic Slack threads - you need a clear-headed commander-in-chief, a champion of incident response who orchestrates your team to victory.

The Unplanned Show, Episode 27: GovTech and platforms with Bryon Kroger

How do highly regulated and bureaucratic organizations become more innovative to meet the needs of customers, citizens, and warfighters? We'll hear a perspective from Bryon Kroger on leading transformational change and the power of platforms in some of the most security-sensitive government agencies. Here are some of the resources mentioned in the interview.

Streamlining Incident Management With Squadcast and ServiceNow Bidirectional Integration

Revisit our insightful webinar to explore how Squadcast’s latest bidirectional integration with ServiceNow can make the best of your ServiceNow implementation. Discover this powerful bidirectional integration's key features and benefits, designed to streamline incident resolution and enhance collaboration within your DevOps and IT teams. Learn, share, and grow with us as we journey towards a more reliable and efficient digital world..

Incident Commander Training Strategies: What The Books Don't Tell You

It has been lightly revised and reposted with his permission from the original article on Medium. So, you’re training incident commanders (IC), and you have your group read Google’s SRE books. Everyone knows what they are supposed to do and you are ready for any incident, right? Not quite. Half of your team complains that the descriptions are too vague or don’t apply to their situations, and the other half just starts to improvise. The result?

Performing Seamless Root Cause Analysis With Squadcast

Critical incidents can pose significant challenges in organizational operations that demand prompt and effective resolution. A vital aspect of this resolution process involves Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reports, which dissect incidents to uncover their underlying causes and pave the way for preventive measures.

Breaking Down the 2024 VOID Report: "Exploring the Unintended Consequences of Automation in Software"

In an era where automation and artificial intelligence are increasingly integral to software development and operations, the 2024 VOID Report sheds critical light on the nuanced impacts of these technologies. Here, we delve deeper into the report's key findings and explore predictions for the near future, weaving a comprehensive narrative highlighting challenges and opportunities.

Manage Different Teams Within An Organization With Role Based Access Control In Squadcast

In a dynamic business landscape, organizations specifically Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often find themselves juggling the needs of multiple customers. It's crucial for them to maintain strict data segregation to prevent the mixing of customer information. Likewise, large organizations with distinct departments like the customer service or the technical department face similar challenges.

How Do You Handle Third-Party Dependencies in Your Reliability Planning?

External dependencies and third-party services play a crucial role in powering modern applications. These components bring a wealth of benefits, ranging from access to specialized tools and resources to the ability to offload non-core tasks, allowing development teams to focus on delivering value-added features.

How StatusIQ enhances the digital user experience for ManageEngine users

Picture this scenario: Your user is accessing a critical service online, and suddenly, they view an unresponsive webpage. The anxious user contacts the support desk multiple times via phone, email, and chat and gets frustrated when they do not receive clear communication. In such dire situations, organizations often fail to communicate with users about what is happening.

Jumpstart your self-healing IT with BigPanda and Ansible

Imagine a world where IT systems hum along, proactively detecting and resolving issues before they turn into full-blown outages. No frantic fire drills, no late-night heroics, just seamless self-healing powered by automation. It’s the siren song of self-healing IT systems, beckoning every enterprise ITOps team. Despite the allure of streamlined incident response workflows, many attempts at IT automation sink before they can swim.

NIST Incident Response Steps & Template | Blameless

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides the framework to help businesses mitigate cybersecurity risks. The framework also protects networks and data, outlining best practices to inform decisions that save time and money. Creating a cybersecurity strategy that identifies, protects, detects, responds, and helps you recover from cybersecurity incidents is critical in the evolving threat landscape.

How to Comply With the SEC's New Cybersecurity Rule

On July 26, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced new rules regarding cybersecurity risk management, strategy, governance, and incidents. Public companies subject to reporting requirements must comply with the changes to avoid rescission and other monetary penalties, not to mention the risk of legal action and reputation damage. Here, we look at the two new cybersecurity rules and how your company can comply. ‍

Making incidents less painful with Kerim Satirli of HashiCorp & Lawrence Jones of incident.io

For a lot of teams, incident management can be a bit of a headache. It's stressful. It's not optimized. The whole process can feel like it's being held together with tape. Worst of all? Responders are the ones feeling the brunt of it. But in reality, your customers are, too. Think about it: But honestly, the situation doesn't even have to be so dire. Things can be, generally speaking, totally fine. But you recognize that there are some things that you can do to make incident response really shine at your organization.

5 Hidden Costs of Over-Sensitive Monitoring Systems in Incident Management

Monitoring systems are invaluable for detecting incidents before they spiral into catastrophes. However, there's a hidden danger lurking within even the most robust monitoring setups: false alarms. When systems are overly sensitive, they raise alerts for incidents that don't actually exist. While this may seem harmless on the surface, hyper-sensitive monitoring can quietly drain time, money, and morale in ways that only become apparent over time.

The Human Element in Incident Management: Balancing Psychology, Communication, and Team Dynamics

Incident management isn't just about technology; it's about people too! Understanding the human factors—psychology, communication, and team dynamics—is just as crucial. Let's explore how these elements are essential in incident management.

6 Common Challenges in Incident Management

$1.81 trillion—that’s how much software operational failures cost US companies in 2022. But you can avoid such software mishaps. How? With robust incident management! However, running an incident management is no easy feat. It comes with its fair share of challenges. The following are some typical problems you might face when managing incidents: Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of what causes these problems, their consequences, and how to fix them.

MTBF MTTR MTTF MTTA - Your guide to incident response metrics

Even the most reliable and well-designed software systems experience failures. Tracking incident response metrics helps teams strengthen both organizational preparedness and system resilience by uncovering trends, gaps, and opportunities for improvement. In short, important metrics for incident management are: Understanding these metrics helps engineering leaders improve service uptime, meet SLAs, and align operational capacity.

What is alert fatigue?

Alert fatigue is a serious issue that affects numerous professions, e.g. in IT or healthcare. It can lead to neglecting critical events and delaying response times. Responders need to continuously monitor their systems and applications to avert possible downtime and keep operations running smoothly. However a high number of incoming alerts inundating these teams can make them less responsive. The ramifications of such disregard can severely affect the efficiency and dependability of response teams.

The Debrief: How we built a "game changing" AI assistant feature

Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Charlie, the project lead for Assistant, to get a peek behind this game-changing product. You'll hear him chat about.

Site reliability truth bombs by Piyush Verma (CTO & Co-founder at Last9.io) #shorts #podcast

Dive into an in depth conversation on how software has now become the backbone of things and get access to extraordinary reliability nuggets with Piyush. Zenduty is a revolutionary incident management platform that gives you greater control and automation over the incident management lifecycle.

New Features: AI Help for On-call Schedules, Event Explorer, and Revamped Status Page Designs

We're thrilled to announce the latest enhancements to ilert AI in our most recent update. For those eager to dive into AI functionalities firsthand, we invite you to reach out to us at support@ilert.com. We'd be more than happy to welcome you into our Beta program. Moreover, we always appreciate your input on the ilert roadmap and look forward to hearing your innovative feature suggestions. Now, let's delve into the exciting new updates!

The Debrief: Making incidents less painful with Kerim Satirli of HashiCorp & Lawrence Jones of incident.io

For a lot of teams, incident management can be a bit of a headache. It's stressful. It's not optimized. The whole process can feel like it's being held together with tape. Worst of all? Responders are the ones feeling the brunt of it. But in reality, your customers are, too. Think about it: But honestly, the situation doesn't even have to be so dire. Things can be, generally speaking, totally fine.

Demystifying Digital Operations: A Comprehensive Overview

In today's hyper-connected world, digital operations underpin every successful organization. Yet, with countless tools, processes, and complexities involved, it can be challenging to understand the big picture and optimize performance. This blog aims to demystify digital operations by providing a comprehensive overview. We'll explore key topics, illustrate them with real-world examples, and highlight practical use cases to shed light on this vital aspect of modern business.

Navigating the Waters of System Performance: A Deep Dive into a Recent Incident

In digital transactions, even the slightest hiccup can ripple through the system, causing significant disruptions. Our recent encounter with an unexpected system slowdown and a noticeable drop in transaction success rates is a testament to the intricate balance required to maintain seamless operations. This post aims to shed light on the incident, our findings, and the measures we’ve taken to fortify our system against future disturbances.

Simplify Service and Alert Management at Enterprise Scale with Squadcast Global Event Rules (GER)

Tired of managing a web of webhooks for your various services? Squadcast's Global Event Rulesets offers a centralized solution. Define alert routing rules from a single configuration point and apply them across all services, reducing complexity, boosting your efficiency, and simplifying your Incident Management process. This explainer video dives into GER, your secret weapon for.

The Causes Of IT Incidents

In the realm of IT, disruptions and outages are not just inconveniences—they are critical events that can undermine the operations of businesses, impacting services, and user experiences. The landscape of IT incidents is vast, encompassing everything from minor glitches to significant outages that can halt operations and cascade into major business failures. Recognizing that there are various potential culprits for these disruptions, this blog will delve into the myriad causes of IT incidents.

How to streamline your ITIL incident management process

Are you trying to streamline your sluggish ITIL incident management? Maybe you’re facing challenges with incident routing, lengthy resolution times, or inconsistent team communication. If so, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) can help you improve IT reliability and incident resolution. This blog unveils the secrets to optimizing your ITIL incident management processes to take your incident response from slow to stellar.

What is incident response?

Incident response is the process of responding to and managing the aftermath of a security breach or cyber attack. It involves a systematic approach to identifying, containing, and mitigating the consequences of an incident in IT, OT or Cybersecurity, with the goal of minimizing the impact on the organization and its stakeholders. It is often exclusively related to Cybersecurity.

Are organizations finding value in the incident metrics they track?

See the full report—Incident metrics pulse: How organizations are measuring their incident management What metrics do you look at to measure how efficient your incident response is? This is a question we get asked all the time and one we empathize with deeply. While there are several well-established incident metrics that organizations commonly use, like MTTR and raw counts of incidents, a vast number of them are ineffective, or worse still entirely misleading.

How Do You Monitor Dynamic Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Architectures?

david.arrowsmith • Feb 15, 2024 Comprehensive visibility across all your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments plays an important part in maintaining the availability, and performance of applications hosted in AWS. Leveraging Interlink Software’s AIOps and Business Service Observability Platform, enterprises can greatly enhance their capability to monitor, manage and optimize the health of applications and act swiftly resolving issues before they impact on customer experience.

The Power of Building a Blameless Culture in IT Operations

In the world of high-scale, high-availability, high-performance web applications, mistakes in IT operations are inevitable. Systems fail, bugs slip through, and outages occur. Your team's approach to responding to these incidents significantly impacts their overall productivity, morale, and effectiveness. Company culture, such as that associated with a blameless culture, is crucial to driving the behaviors that make your business a success.

Application Migration: 5 Things that Can Go Wrong

Application migration is the process of moving an application from one environment to another. For example, you may choose to migrate an application from an on-premises enterprise server to a cloud provider’s environment, or from one cloud environment to another. The aim is typically to improve the flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the application. Application migration is a complex process that requires careful planning and execution.

Introducing Squadcast and ServiceNow Integration For Enhanced Operational Efficiency & Faster Incident Management

We are excited to announce our bidirectional integration between ServiceNow and Squadcast, designed to elevate your Incident Management capabilities. ServiceNow provides a robust platform-as-a-service, delivering advanced automation and process workflow tailored for enterprise environments. Through this integration, you can harness ServiceNow's workflow and ticketing features alongside Squadcast's strong On-Call scheduling and SRE-driven incident response capabilities.

What is Ping Command: A Deep Dive into Network Diagnostics

The Ping command is an essential tool in network diagnostics, crucial for checking connectivity, solving problems, and measuring network performance. In the complex world of digital communication, where connections stretch across long distances and pass through many devices, knowing how to use the Ping command is extremely important. In this detailed exploration, we will examine the Ping command thoroughly, exploring its uses, and highlighting its importance in keeping networks strong and reliable.

What is an event?

Terms like ‘event’ play an important role in understanding IT and OT operations. There is usually an abundance of interpretations and definitions. You will also find different naming conventions with each vendor of tools for monitoring and service management. So, let’s dive in. How does ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) define an event? ITIL links events and notifications directly by saying.

What is an alert?

Terms like ‘alert’ play an important role in understanding IT and OT operations. There is usually an abundance of interpretations and definitions. You will also find different naming conventions with each vendor of tools for monitoring and service management. So, let’s dive in. How is an alert defined? Some define alerts as events that meet a certain thresh-hold, have a specific relevance (as in ITIL – events of warning/alert type) or require action.

New MTTX analytics to drive your reliability roadmap

Analytics are great. We can all agree there. But not all analytics are created equal. FireHydrant has long offered incident analytics dashboards that provide an in-depth look at the entire incident lifecycle. You can see how incidents impact services and teams, understand retrospective participation and completion, and even get insight into follow-ups. But great analytics do more than simply organize data. They help you tell a story.

Building a Privacy-First AI for Incident Management

At Rootly, we're integrating AI into incident management with a keen eye on privacy. It's not just about tapping into AI's potential; it's about ensuring we respect and protect our customers’ privacy and sensitive data. Here's a quick overview of how we're blending innovation with strong privacy commitments.

The revolution in critical incident response at Dock: efficient integration and service improvement

In this article, we will explore how Dock is working to significantly enhance its response time to critical incidents, emphasizing effective integration between tools as key to success. We will address how we challenge the conventional approach by shifting the focus from Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) to Mean Time to Combat (MTTC), a customized metric that measures the time between incident detection and effective communication involving professionals capable of resolving it.

What value you can expect to get from Assistant

In this clip of The Debrief, Charlie explains exactly what teams can look forward to getting from Assistant. Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Charlie, the project lead for Assistant, to get a peek behind this game-changing product.

How we aligned on what "good" looked like for Assistant

In this clip of The Debrief, Charlie explains how we determined what "good" would look like during the process of building out Assistant. Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI.

Why design parters were critical during the Assistant project

In this clip of The Debrief, Charlie explains why design partners, and the feedback they gave, was so crucial to the product we ended up building. Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI.

Why prompt engineering can be so frustrating

In this clip of The Debrief, Charlie explains why prompt engineering can be so challenging. Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Charlie, the project lead for Assistant, to get a peek behind this game-changing product.

How to set up on-call compensation

Once you set up an on-call team, the next step is to decide their compensation. There might be several questions in your mind right now: "How do we fairly value on-call time?" "Is it a flat rate or hourly?" and a few others. So we are here to help you set up an on-call compensation system because we know compensating people fairly lays the foundation of a healthy business. Are you still stuck on setting up an on-call team? Read this guide first: 7 steps to set up an on-call team.

The Debrief: How we built a "game changing" AI assistant feature

Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Charlie, the project lead for Assistant, to get a peek behind this game-changing product.

Conquer The Storm: Hit with Downtime? Find Solutions with StatusCast!

Ready to tackle downtime head-on? Join us in this informative video, "Conquer The Storm with StatusCast," where we explore strategies to navigate and overcome unexpected IT downtime challenges. In the fast-paced world of technology, downtime is inevitable. Whether you're a seasoned IT professional, business owner, or just curious about safeguarding your digital operations, this video is a must-watch!

Centralize, triage, and track tickets with Datadog Case Management

Complex systems require many different monitors to assess the health of their infrastructure and applications, creating a wealth of alerts that can be hard to track. Due to a lack of effective triage processes, many organizations page engineers for every alert that comes in, making it difficult to separate false positives from issues that actually require immediate attention.

Why Love A Status Page: IT Transparency & Trust

In our interconnected world of technology, where we work tirelessly even on this Valentine’s Day, the reliance of our businesses on digital platforms and services has never been greater. Amidst this, the efficiency and efficacy of large organizations depend on openness and transparency from their IT systems and the professionals managing them. One of the unsung heroes in this realm is the often-overlooked status page.

Forrester study reveals Everbridge ROI of 358%

Although the benefits of deploying Critical Event Management (CEM) are becoming widely accepted, organizations can often struggle to demonstrate the tangible ROI to their key stakeholders, and can face an uphill battle when it comes to securing budget. So, is it possible to put a value on Critical Event Management?

Resolving a Critical Incident in Core Banking: A Deep Dive into Application Patch Malfunction

In the dynamic environment of core banking systems, maintaining seamless operations is crucial. However, unforeseen complications can arise, leading to critical incidents that demand immediate and effective resolution. A recent incident involving an application patch malfunction presents a compelling study on the intricacies of managing and resolving system anomalies in real-time.

Becoming the Office IT Hero: Put An End To "Are You Down?" Chaos

Downtime is an inevitable reality in the fast-paced world of Information Technology. When systems go offline, the pressure mounts, and colleagues begin to bombard IT professionals with the dreaded question: "Are you down?" The good news is that there's a way to transform this frustrating situation into an opportunity to shine. By implementing a Private Status Page from StatusCast, you can not only proactively communicate issues to affected employees, but also position yourself as the office hero.

Your Practical Guide to Reducing MTTR

Let’s face it. Incidents will always happen. We simply can’t prevent them. But we can strive to mitigate the impact incidents have on our product and customers. Ensuring high reliability depends on quickly and effectively finding and fixing problems. This is where the metric MTTR, standing for “mean time to restore” or “mean time to resolve,” becomes valuable for organizations.

Use ilert mobile app to take someone else's on-call shift

Use the ilert mobile app to receive push notifications about alerts and gain access to essential incident management features so that you can take immediate action from anywhere. The app also allows you to quickly take over your colleague's on-call shift while on the go. Check out the video to learn more about this feature.

The Show Must Go On - Incidentally Reliable with Piyush Verma (CTO at Last9)

Catch Piyush Verma, Co-Founder and CTO at Last9 in conversation with Ankur Rawal, Co-Founder and CTO at Zenduty — discussing what reliability means to the modern consumer, why SREs make excellent decision-makers, and the current state of observability. Exclusively on The Incidentally Reliable podcast — made by SREs for SREs, hosted by Zenduty. Zenduty is an advanced incident management platform that gives you greater control and automation over the incident management lifecycle.

Automating On-Call Scheduling With Squadcast: Simplify Managing Schedules

Navigating an extensive excel sheet to determine On-Call schedules and vacation plans can be daunting. The struggle of maintaining On-Call Schedules manually is real. But we've got a solution that can help. This blog addresses the challenges associated with manualOn Call Scheduling processes.

Understanding IT discovery for ITSM and modern IT stacks

IT discovery is the process of systematically identifying all existing IT components within a tech stack. It involves discovering hardware and software, understanding their configurations, and mapping their interdependencies. Much like your annual doctor visit can proactively identify potential health issues, your IT discovery process can also flag problems and deliver insights to ensure improved operational well-being.

Understanding Linux File System: A Comprehensive Guide to Common Directories

Welcome to an in-depth exploration of the Linux file system! In this comprehensive guide, we'll demystify the various directories found in a typical Linux distribution, explaining their purposes and functionalities. Whether you're a seasoned sysadmin or a curious newcomer, this article will enhance your understanding of the backbone of Linux's structure and operation.

SRE Metrics: Availability

Understanding SRE metrics and how they impact your platform's availability are fundamentals of Site Reliability Engineering. How available is your website, service, or platform? What must you monitor and measure to ensure availability? How do you translate uptime into availability? This chart has numbers that every Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) should know.

Leverage Past Incidents for Faster Incident Resolution with Squadcast

Squadcast's Incident Management platform helps you learn from the past to resolve future incidents faster. In this video, we'll show you how to use Squadcast's Past Incidents feature to: 🔑Gain historical context for new incidents🔑See how similar incidents were resolved in the past🔑Identify patterns and trends in past incident activity By leveraging past incidents, you can improve your incident response times and reduce the impact of incidents on your business.

A Practical Introduction to Incident Management Metrics

Tracking your incident management metrics is necessary for any intended optimizations within your organization. Whether your team is looking to align with the company’s business goals, to benchmark and elevate performance, to increase customer satisfaction, or more, scrutinizing these metrics is the way to go.

Insights from PagerDuty's 2024 State of Digital Operations Report: The Year of Action, Transformation, and AI Adoption

Organizations must balance the day-to-day needs of the business with large-scale, long-term digital transformation as they continue to modernize their operations in service of growth. For our 2024 State of Digital Operations Report, we asked over 300 technical and business leaders at US-based Enterprise and upper Mid-Market companies about the challenges to their business and the initiatives they are prioritizing this year.

Enhancing On-Call Efficiency with Squadcast's Custom Content Templates

Critical information during Incident Management includes the incident's nature, impact, urgency, affected systems, and current status, enabling efficient resolution. Yet, the excessive details in incident notifications frequently hinders rather than aiding the process.

Navigating the IT Maze: A SIGNL4 Journey of Clarity and Efficiency

In the dynamic realm of IT, every alert is a crucial piece of information. As an IT technician, I often found myself lost in the complexity of third-party alerts, grappling with deep-level tech details that felt like a maze. I lost valuable time trying to decipher an alert and got frustrated over missing important details.

How we built Suggested Summaries

In this clip of The Debrief, Milly walk through how the incident.io team actually built out our latest AI feature: Suggested Summaries Recently we went live with one of our biggest product launches to date AI. And this product was unique in that it was broken up into four smaller projects: So naturally most folks might be wondering: What were the biggest differences between these projects and what went into actually building out each of these features?

Why aren't incident responders updating summaries more frequently?

In this clip of The Debrief, Milly explains why incident responders don't update summaries as frequently as they should. Recently we went live with one of our biggest product launches to date AI. And this product was unique in that it was broken up into four smaller projects: So naturally most folks might be wondering: What were the biggest differences between these projects and what went into actually building out each of these features?

Why is prompt engineering so hard?

In this clip of The Debrief, Milly explains the challenges of prompt engineering. Recently we went live with one of our biggest product launches to date AI. And this product was unique in that it was broken up into four smaller projects: So naturally most folks might be wondering: What were the biggest differences between these projects and what went into actually building out each of these features?

What are Suggested Summaries?

In this clip of The Debrief, Milly explains what Suggested Summaries are and how they can be a huge benefit for teams. Recently we went live with one of our biggest product launches to date AI. And this product was unique in that it was broken up into four smaller projects: So naturally most folks might be wondering: What were the biggest differences between these projects and what went into actually building out each of these features?

Getting started with Incident Management

When it comes to incident management, the end result is a smoothly running engine with incidents resolving on time, systems always operational, and your team in sync at all times. In this post, we will guide you through getting started with your first integration, a simple alert escalation and actually getting your first alerts with Spike.sh.

Incident management is a team responsibility

Effective teamwork plays a crucial role in maintaining system stability and preventing incidents. By collaborating and leveraging the diverse skills and perspectives of team members, potential issues can be identified and addressed proactively, ensuring a smooth and incident-free operation of the system.

The Debrief: Stale incident summaries? AI can fix that for you

Incident summaries are the source of truth for responders joining an incident at any point. But the reality is that with so many things happening at once—like needing to respond to the actual incident—updating these summaries can fall by the wayside. Enter, Suggested Summaries, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Milly, the project lead for Suggested Summaries, to get a peek behind the curtain of this game-changing feature.

The benefits of using an incident management tool

In this clip of The Debrief, Jack dives into the several benefits of adopting and incident management tool to respond to data issues. Full episode description below: If you're on a data team, have you ever considered using an incident management tool to respond to pipeline issues? If the answer is no, then you might want to check out this episode. Here, we chat with Jack, Data Analyst at incident.io, to better understand why data teams can—and should—look to incident management tools like incident.io to manage issues. We chat about.

The ease of using an incident management tool

In this clip of The Debrief, Jack talks about how easy it has been for him and his team to start using incident.io to management data incidents. Full episode description below: If you're on a data team, have you ever considered using an incident management tool to respond to pipeline issues? If the answer is no, then you might want to check out this episode. Here, we chat with Jack, Data Analyst at incident.io, to better understand why data teams can—and should—look to incident management tools like incident.io to manage issues. We chat about.

The role of incident management for data teams

In this clip of The Debrief, Jack talks about why it just makes sense for data teams to adopt an incident management tool to manage data incidents. Full episode description below: If you're on a data team, have you ever considered using an incident management tool to respond to pipeline issues? If the answer is no, then you might want to check out this episode. Here, we chat with Jack, Data Analyst at incident.io, to better understand why data teams can—and should—look to incident management tools like incident.io to manage issues. We chat about.

The Domino Effect Of IT Outages On Business Operations

When IT systems falter, the ramifications extend far beyond the IT department, rippling through the entire organization. The complex web of digital systems and dependencies that undergird core functions of modern businesses are such that an interruption in one area can lead to complications across the board.

Automate Major Incident Management Step-by-Step for Better, Faster Response

Organizations looking to win the market and drive great customer experiences need to deliver on the promise of exceptional service, meaning fewer interruptions and faster resolution. This can be done by embedding automation across the incident management lifecycle for major incidents, and bringing in humans where it makes sense.

Reduce Alert Fatigue and Improve Your Kubernetes Monitoring

Alert fatigue is a state of exhaustion caused by receiving too many alerts. This can happen when the alerts are not actionable, are irrelevant or too frequent. Misconfigurations or configurations with the wrong assumptions or that lack Service-level objectives (SLOs) can have a dual impact, leading to alert fatigue and, more alarmingly, the potential of overlooking critical alerts We spoke with more than 200 teams using Prometheus Alertmanager. Many face alert fatigue from trivial, nonactionable alerts.

Alert payload standardization: Your secret to better AIOps alert correlation

Monitoring tools share alerts in a variety of formats, with inconsistent data points and crucial information missing. That leaves you and your team stuck in the middle, trying to analyze and act on incomplete or irrelevant alerts requiring lots of manual intervention, time, and energy to communicate and coordinate during incident response. Standardizing your alert payloads is a key starting point if you want to improve your alert correlation.

Getting Buy-in from Management on Reliability Investments

If you’re reading the Blameless blog, you probably have a good idea of how important reliability is to your customers’ happiness, your business’s bottom line, and your overall sanity. Unfortunately, this perspective is frequently downplayed by management. Even if they understand the importance of reliability, they often see it as something that should emerge automatically from having the right mindset, and not something that requires investment.

Best practices for creating a reliable on-call rotation

It's fair to say that effectively managing an on-call rota is crucial for ensuring the 'round-the-clock availability of your services. But it's more than that. Spending the time getting your rotas right also empowers and protects the folks who make it all possible: your team. Some best practices for doing this include using software to automate scheduling, setting up teams with clearly defined responsibilities, establishing escalation policies, and defining time limits for issue resolution.