Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

2020 is (finally) over, and it’s safe to say that this very challenging year taught us once again that (as the old Danish proverb says) it’s difficult making predictions, especially about the future. Who would have imagined in January 2020 that we would find ourselves where we are today… And yet, as Tim Harford once wrote in the Financial Times, predictions are like Pringles: nobody thinks that there’s any great virtue in them but we find them hard to resist.

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!

Moving full speed ahead into 2021, a year that is slated to be marked by unpredictability, fast-paced change, and (still) a lot of disruption – no organization can afford to allow such disorder to impact productivity, operations, and the business overall.

Building Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams is hard! There are so many articles and explanations of what SRE means, it’s easy to get lost. Going beyond understanding what the individual SRE role is into building and scaling a team of SREs is more of a challenge. It’s important to find the right information that will help you take your SRE team to the next level.

Today’s organizations face ransomware, malware, and other cyber attacks, and managed service providers (MSPs) need an incident response plan (or “IRP”) to mitigate against these threats. In a recent survey of 200 MSPs, 74% of respondents said they have suffered a cyber attack, and 83% noted their small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers experienced one as well. Yet, with an incident response plan (IRP), MSPs can protect themselves and their customers against cyber attacks.

Incident management tools allow technology and security teams to resolve major incidents faster including urgent issues that may lead to businesses seeing application and site downtime affecting their users.

SIGNL4 now includes a new app for connecting to ConnectWise Manage (“Manage”). This makes 2-way integration with Manage a breeze, and responding to service desk tickets can now be done conveniently via mobile app in SIGNL4. This blog article has all the important details.

We’ve been doing some Ruby on Rails development lately, in preparation for PagerTree 4, and we wanted to put together a Ruby on Rails Cheat sheet. This is a quick reference guide to common ruby on rails commands and usage.

We knew that the most loved feature in our ServiceNow 7.0 release would be the CMDB features. And in our ServiceNow 7.5 release (available now), we’ve expanded our CMDB capabilities even further—based on your feedback—around the importance of reducing the effort it takes to re-create the same services within PagerDuty.

2020 was an unpredictable year that presented several challenges, such as the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As part of the “new normal,” the world has adopted infection prevention procedures. The 2020 calendar year was defined by face coverings, constant sanitization and physical distancing. At its core, the year was an exhausting, surreal 12-month period for many.