Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Managing on-call schedules is a critical challenge for many industries, including healthcare, IT, customer support, and emergency services. As technology evolves, on-call scheduling software has become an essential tool for streamlining workflows, reducing burnout, and improving team efficiency. In 2025, the best on-call scheduling software not only simplifies schedule creation but also integrates with other tools, enhances communication, and ensures compliance with labor laws.

Modern IT environments are complex and interconnected, making observability essential for maintaining system and application performance. The challenge is not just about ensuring systems run smoothly; it’s about understanding the complicated web of data, services, and user interactions that drive your operations. This is where observability comes into play. Observability offers a deeper understanding of why issues arise in the first place.

BigPanda was honored to be a premier sponsor of Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. This event allowed us to showcase the latest BigPanda capabilities, connect with industry leaders, and gain valuable insights into the future of IT operations. For those who couldn’t attend, here are the three most impactful insights from my conversations with the customers, vendors, and analysts at IOCS 2024.

As we step into the new year, we’re excited to continue providing early detection and updates for the services you rely on. But before we dive into 2025, let’s take a moment to recap some of the most notable outages from December 2024. From login issues to platform-wide disruptions, December was eventful, and StatusGator was there to keep users informed ahead of time. Here’s a look back at the top outages we detected.

In today's tech world, clear communication during incidents is crucial. Whether it's a small issue or a major outage, how you communicate with stakeholders can build trust and speed up resolution. This post explores the essential elements of incident communication templates, providing a straightforward guide to crafting clear and concise messages. From planned maintenance to critical system failures, we'll cover a range of templates for different situations, so you're prepared for anything.

On December 26, 2024, A ChatGPT outage disrupted access for countless users worldwide. This was a major outage affecting not just the ChatGPT web interface but the entire OpenAI platform including their APIs. The incident was traced back to a power issue in Microsoft Azure’s South Central US data center which took down many other Azure customers. StatusGator customers received Early Warning Signal notifications before either provider updated their public status pages.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly is essential for maintaining operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. On-call management software plays a pivotal role in organizing and scheduling teams to respond to emergencies or urgent situations at any time, but especially after business hours when offices and operations centers are not or sparsely staffed.

This article is part of a series on setting up an end-to-end monitoring and alerting stack using Prometheus. Continuing our series on setting Prometheus in a Docker container, we will add a Grafana instance to our Prometheus setup. Please refer to the previous article where we use docker compose to run Prometheus and Alertmanager together as that forms the basis to run multiple related containers. We will add a container to run Grafana to the same compose file in this article.