Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Around six years ago on a Wednesday morning, software professionals worldwide were startled by a tweet from GitLab stating that they had accidentally deleted their production data, causing their site to go offline. Unfortunately, at that point in time, the open-source code repository giant had no idea that it would take them another 36 hours to restore their systems only to learn that 5,000 projects and 700 new user accounts were affected while they were fixing the outage.

IT people know that data is king, especially in optimizing IT operations. However, figuring out which metrics to collect and how to collect them can be challenging. IT teams have to factor in what IT directors, team managers, and the people overseeing operations want, what they’re concerned about, and what they consider important.

Several challenges impact customers and operations of utilities and energy companies, including aging infrastructure, cybersecurity threats, inclement weather, operational failures and transmission interruptions. These challenges can cause prolonged service disruptions, potentially leading to customer attrition and irreversible damage to businesses. Responding quickly and efficiently to incidents is critical to minimize damages or contain potentially dangerous scenarios.

Think about this—what was the last incident that challenged you? Did you learn anything from it? It will be shocking to no one to hear that we deal with our fair share of incidents. These run the gamut from tiny bugs to significant outages (thankfully, the latter happening only very rarely 😮‍💨). Either way, we always take the time to learn from them in some way. This might look like changes to our response processes or revisiting systems we’re using.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is an approach to cybersecurity that combines advanced technologies, skilled analysts, and a proactive response process to detect, investigate, and remediate cyber threats. MDR is typically delivered as a service by a third-party provider and includes a range of security capabilities, such as threat intelligence, behavior analysis, anomaly detection, and incident response.

This is the story of an insurance company that was getting six million IT alerts every 90 days and how they used BigPanda’s AIOps to reduce it to less than 50,000. Before we get into that though, let’s take a step back. How did we, as an IT sector, get to a place where organizations receive 6,000,000 IT alerts in the first place?

Be sure to register for the launch webinar on Thursday, March 30th to learn more about the latest release from the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Rundeck by PagerDuty has long helped organizations bridge operational silos and automate away IT tasks so teams can focus more time on building and less time putting out fires. And while this mission still rings true today, our vision is to extend this reality and revolutionize all operations while continuing to build trust.