Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Thales Cloud Protection & Licensing, part of the Thales Group, was looking to improve how it handles critical incidents. Whenever an incident hit just gathering up the incident team would be a cumbersome and time-consuming task that involved a lot of manual work . Multiple calendar invites would be sent to different people in and outside of the organization, multiple times, urging them to join calls and meetings.

This is the first in a two-part blog series deconstructing AIOps for ITOps leaders. If you gave me a dollar for every company that claims that they use “A.I.,” I’d be doing pretty well. But as a marketer, I can’t help but be a little skeptical about those claims. Let me explain.

This post outlines how to use Zabbix and iLert with multiple on-call teams, where each team is responsible for a set of host groups in Zabbix, and therefore, will only receive alerts for the services it is responsible for. But first, let’s start with the basic needs when being on-call.

This is the first in a series of posts we’ll be publishing on trends we’re seeing in the retail industry and how IT organizations tasked with deploying and maintaining flawless digital customer experiences can take advantage of PagerDuty to ensure always-on reliability. It’s been a tough year for retail.

Fiserv, the Fortune 500 payments and financial technology provider, needed to streamline and automate its IT incident management process to detect and fix issues earlier and more quickly. The incident management workflow was complex, primarily because mergers and acquisitions over the years had made Fiserv’s IT environment very heterogeneous. “The challenges we were facing were enormous,” IT Director Chris Kreps says.

DevOpsDays Chicago 2020 was held on September 1, online. It was the first time the conference was held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. I was excited to attend for a couple of reasons. First, DevOpsDays Chicago is one of the better known and respected DevOpsDays held in the US. I’d never been able to attend it before, so it was great to get the opportunity. Also, I’d been missing the DevOpsDays community.

Last week I went camping with some friends. One of them did the shopping for all of us, so I sent him my share using a payment app. It took me less than 2 minutes to complete the transaction. A few years ago, a similar transaction would have me going to the bank to complete the task, or at a minimum, calling a bank teller and having him do it. Try to imagine a bank asking its customers to do any of these things today. It would probably lose all its customers in no time.

Datadog is an awesome tool for aggregating and visualizing the metrics that matter to you. Recently, Datadog launched a new Incident Management feature, which allows you to coordinate the activities around a problem that affected your service. In this example, I’ll walk through using Relay to roll back a Kubernetes deployment that caused a service impact, and show how the Datadog Incident timeline can keep everyone working on the incident in sync.

A new article in the September issue of German magazine LANLine (“Automation creates productivity”) summarizes typical challenges and problems in network monitoring very well and is worth reading. I would like to briefly discuss some of the problems addressed and how our product SIGNL4 was developed as a solution for exactly these problems.