Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

WFH tips: a technical guide to video conference calls

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to require employees to work from home. It’s a new normal for many, but at Grafana Labs our team has always recruited and operated with a remote-first culture in mind. To help everyone transition to a home office environment, we launched a new WFH series in which Grafana team members share their best advice for staying productive at home – yes, even if you have kids around.

Running effective meetings in a remote company

As a remote-first company, we’ve spent a lot of time optimizing how we work together as a team. In these challenging times, teams around the world are working to flatten the curve by trying their hand at remote working for the first time. To help these teams succeed, we thought it was the perfect time to share some of the practices and culture we’ve developed to run meetings effectively on Mattermost. Here are seven tips for successful remote meetings.

Work from home better with secure and reliable enterprise service

Today, we are facing an unprecedented situation. The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting everything we know -- our families, our businesses, our communities, and our way of life. In these tough times, many organizations have resorted to mandatory remote working for employees so they can still be productive and safe. Saas productivity tools like Zoom, Slack, G-Suite and Office 365 became seemingly mandatory in this new distributed workplace.

Remote work: Being productive in a pandemic

With coronavirus (COVID-19) wreaking havoc across the globe, its disastrous effects are felt in the IT world, too. The lack of a complete work environment, as well as communication issues in development and production, will likely cause a total slowdown in every industry’s growth. Remote work is now mandatory in almost every enterprise.

Modern shadow IT demands visibility, not control

“Shadow IT” can be a divisive subject depending on how long you’ve been in the IT field. There is a legacy attitude within many IT teams that shadow IT must be controlled – but it can bring significant benefits to an organization. Modern IT teams understand these benefits, and focus on balancing shadow IT’s value and risk. Moving past that legacy attitude and developing a modern IT mentality in your organization can be difficult.

Lessons Learned Implementing ChatOps

Email overload, distributed teams and excessive meetings have caused many organizations to move their DevOps teams to messaging platforms and thus adopt ChatOps workflows. With thousands of open source installs and hundreds of customer implementations, we have a few lessons to share on interesting DevOps workflows, how incidents can be effectively communicated across distributed teams and what messaging in secure and regulated environments should look like.

Lessons Learned Building Messaging Software with a Fully Remote Team

Our experience working with hundreds of customers who use Mattermost, an open source messaging workspace, and a distributed team with hundreds of additional contributors all working remotely, has taught us several lessons about communications tools and how to get work done across time zones.