I recently had a call with a long-term customer who had been using Enterprise Alert for years without any major incidents. But in light of a recent proactive monitoring project, he also revisited Enterprise Alert and reached out to me to ask for my opinion on how he could improve the monitoring of Enterprise Alert from within the solution.
To many, incident management and operations management may seem similar though they differ significantly. This difference, which lies in their end goals, also suggests that operations management is much more than incident management. To better understand why, it helps to look at the purpose of each one.
Digital service providers (DSP) are valued for their ability to provide access to digital content on demand. A high-quality customer experience and instant access to digital services are the greatest expectations of consumers and vital aspects of successful DSPs. Therefore, it's crucial that incidents, when they occur, don't impact your operations. With a robust incident management strategy, DSPs can provide their teams with tools for automating, coordinating, and quickly resolving issues without-or with minimal-service interruptions.
It’s no secret that the digital transformation essentially broke IT operations. With the rise in technology came a rise in outages capable of bringing organizations to a screeching halt. Those outages are expensive, and for years, the same number was thrown around as the authority on how much an outage cost (around $5,600 per minute). This number took off and was used in presentations, sales decks and other resources for years. But how could this number have stayed the same year over year?
It’s that time of year where you may feel pressured to pick your New Year’s resolutions. Well, we went ahead and tried to give you a head start. 2023 is the year we tame toil so we can focus on the fun stuff like engineering and innovation. Hopefully you have had the chance to follow along with us for the month of December for Seasons Freezings, the time of year you are locked out of production, so you have time to explore new ideas like automation 🙂.
FireHydrant received three G2 Winter 2023 awards — High Performer, a High Performer in the Enterprise category, and a High Performer in the United Kingdom. We are honored to be recognized by G2 because these awards are based on customer reviews.
Having all relevant information pertaining to a critical incident is vital for quickly identifying the issue and prioritize its importance. SIGNL4 optimizes the perception, response and handling of incidents through customizable alerts with enriched parameters, images, sounds files, links to tickets or PDFs, as well as maps with geo-location information.
As your experience and knowledge of a system grow, change becomes inevitable. Your application requirements change, your bug fixes require code changes, and your APIs evolve. A key challenge in the software ecosystem is managing changes—especially when they concern APIs. Because you’re likely using APIs in multiple applications, you must document all updates and changes made to your APIs. This is where API versioning becomes crucial.
Over the years, as companies have moved from monolith to cloud-native architectures, maintaining high availability has become more challenging. After all, today’s IT ecosystems are complex, distributed and ephemeral, making it increasingly difficult (and, in many cases, downright impossible) for DevOps practitioners and SREs to identify and fix issues manually.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: we’re going into 2023 on a high-note. We’ve closed deals with some of the most respected companies in both the UK and US, we’ve hired in the double-digits, expanded into New York, and revenue is growing steadily. But we aren’t hanging up our football boots just yet. Yes, we can take some time to celebrate our wins, but we’re all hands on deck for 2023 planning.
An Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is a network security and threat prevention tool. Its goal is to create a proactive approach to cybersecurity, making it possible to identify potential threats and respond quickly. IPS can inspect network traffic, detect malware and prevent exploits. IPS is used to identify malicious activity, log detected threats, report detected threats, and take precautions to prevent threats from harming users.
IT Operations has always been difficult. There is always too much work to do—and not enough time to do it. The frequent interruptions and high levels of toil certainly don’t help. Moreover, there is relentless pressure from executives that question why everything takes too long, breaks too often, and costs too much. In search of improvement, we have repeatedly bet on new tools to improve our work.
Using anonymized data from 50,000 incidents, the Incident Benchmark Report reveals insights into the when, what, who, and how behind incidents and highlights behaviors that correlate to faster response times.
How many of us can say with confidence that we know a tool inside and out? If you’re like most, you probably use just a small fraction of a product’s features. When it comes to feature-rich software like Microsoft Word or Excel, it’s a safe bet that most users are aware of less than half of the features, and use even less on a regular basis. And the longer we’ve been using a piece of software, the more likely we fall into this trap of feature underutilization.
Incident Commanders play a crucial role in the successful operation of IT service management (ITSM) teams. By applying best practices, they can ensure that incidents are handled quickly and efficiently, so that downtime for end users is kept to a minimum. This article provides an overview of the requirements for an effective Incident Commander in ITSM. It discusses the skills and competencies needed for effective incident management, and highlights some best practices for this role.
Kubernetes Lens is an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows users to connect and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters on Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms. It is an intuitive graphical interface that allows users to deploy and manage clusters directly from the console. It provides dashboards that display key metrics and insights into everything running on a cluster, including deployments, configurations, networking, storage, and access control.
Amazon recently concluded their five-day long conference, AWS re:Invent 2022. This year’s conference was hybrid with the company streaming a significant portion of their in-person conference for free. For ten years now, the event has seen attendees across the cloud continuum come together to learn, share and get inspired. This year was no different as we saw some of the biggest names in cloud computing make their presence felt at the conference in Las Vegas.
In this podcast, the three incident.io co-founders Stephen, Chris and Pete take a trip down memory lane, revisiting the story of how they came to found incident.io and the major milestones of the first 12 months in business.
In this post, we’ll dig into the difference between a bug and an incident, why alignment on how they are defined matters, and how to ensure you’re still learning from the issue, even if it’s “just a bug.”
As we settle into the time of year when we reflect on what we're thankful for, we tend to focus on important basics such as health, family and friends. But on a professional level, IT operations (ITOps) practitioners are thankful to avoid disastrous outages that can cause confusion, frustration, lost revenue and damaged reputations. The very last thing ITOps, network operations center (NOC) or site reliability engineering (SRE) teams want while eating their turkey and enjoying time with family is to get paged about an outage. These can be extremely costly - $12,913 per minute, in fact, and up to $1.5 million per hour for larger organizations.
The ITIL definition of an incident is “an unplanned interruption to or a quality reduction of an IT service”. In your IT ecosystem, an incident may be caused due to a malfunctioning asset, or a network failure. Common incidents include issues with the printer, Wi-Fi connectivity, application locks, email service, laptop, file sharing, unresponsive servers, or even authentication errors.
On-call management is one of the most important aspects of seamless IT service. Its aim is to ensure that the right person is notified in the case of an incident, so that they can react accordingly as quickly as possible. In certain cases, many people have to be notified. To achieve this as efficiently as possible, it is vital to have an up-to-date and smoothly functioning system.
In the world of IT, there are two main approaches to managing changes—the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) and continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD). Both have their own benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to understand the difference between them before deciding which one is right for your organization. In this article, learn about the difference between CI/CD and ITIL, and find out which approach is best for your needs.
Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.
