Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

That’s a wrap! Gremlin hosted Failover Conf 2: Fail Smarter on April 27, 2021. In attendance were over 500 SREs, developers, sales engineers, product managers, DevOps experts, C-level execs, and other reliability pros from around the globe! This year’s conference included discussions around the future of DevOps, strategies for building reliable teams, analyzing human error to create better systems, and more.

Let's all face it, on call work isn't fun. But it can be better. Even if you have to work on call, it would be nice to have at least some of the work done for you, before you drag yourself out of bed at 3am to respond to an incident.

A protracted, exasperating customer service experience popped into my mind while reading this sentence in the Ivanti Voice data sheet: “One of the most frequent customer complaints about call centers is having to repeat information.” Ain’t that the truth. Here’s a brief personal experience.

Coined by Gartner in 2016, the term ‘AIOps’ refers to the combining of big data AI and machine learning to automate and improve IT operations processes. Back then, this very broad definition led to some confusion, with different IT vendors characterizing AIOps differently, depending on what they were actually offering.

Cutting-edge messaging systems simplify communication and collaboration for organizations with complex communication needs. These systems are equipped with secure mobile messaging and a full suite of automation capabilities that can route notifications and voice calls across on-call teams. These platforms simplify on-call management through digital on-call schedules and escalation policies.

DevOps is a term for, “a cross-disciplinary practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating, rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” (Jez Humble) There is no wall between development and operations so they work simultaneously and without silos. The system focuses on uniting the developmental and operations teams in a continuous process. Agile is a software development strategy that focuses on responding to change with cross-functional team communication.

You have identified a data breach, now what? Your Incident Response Playbook is up to date. You have drilled for this, you know who the key players on your team are and you have their home phone numbers, mobile phone numbers, and email addresses, so you get to work. It is seven o’clock in the evening so you are sure everyone is available and ready to respond, you begin typing “that” email and making phone calls, one at a time.

SRE best practices are disrupting and catalyzing change in the ways organizations approach IT Operations. In this blog we look at 7 ways SRE is bringing this transition. ‍Site Reliability Engineering is a new practice that has been growing in popularity among many businesses. Also known as SRE, the new activity puts a premium on monitoring, tracking bugs, and creating systems and automations that solve the problem in the long term.

Kubernetes makes it easier in certain ways to manage reliability. But incident response teams and SREs must also be prepared to handle the unique reliability challenges that K8s creates.