Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Sponsored Post

7 Downdetector Alternatives

Downdetector is one of the best-known outage-tracking platforms, but its consumer-first approach has limitations for technical teams. Its reliance on user-submitted incident reports makes it prone to noise, false positives, and incomplete coverage of B2B and cloud-specific services. That's why we're exploring the best Downdetector alternatives available today, and highlighting which ones work best for businesses.

Recapping SEV0 San Francisco 2025

Earlier this week, we gathered in San Francisco for our second SEV0—almost a year after our very first event. SEV0 has always been about shining a light on the biggest challenges (and opportunities) in incident response. Last year, we were still talking about the fundamentals: blameless culture, strong processes, and lessons from the best in reliability. This year felt different. AI has moved from background noise to front and center in every conversation, every team, everywhere.

Introducing Runner Replicas: Scalable, Reliable Automation for Modern Ops

When you’re responsible for the reliability of complex systems, the execution layer of your automation is not something you want to think about—it should just work. Whether you’re deploying code, patching servers, or responding to an incident at 3 a.m., your automation engine should be as resilient and scalable as the infrastructure it’s operating on.

Service Intelligence Is the Future of Proactive Incident Management

This is the third post in our series on the future of incident management, which builds upon The Future of Incident Management: Your Blueprint for Operational Excellence and How Native Process Automation and Auto-Remediation Drive Operational Excellence. Organizations are facing increasing complexity across their IT landscapes.

What Does a Customer Support Technician Do?

A customer support technician is a technical professional who helps customers solve issues with hardware, software, and IT systems. They’re often the first point of contact when something breaks, whether that’s a computer glitch, a network outage, or a software error. The role is all about troubleshooting, guiding users through solutions, and making sure technology runs the way it’s supposed to.

My Criteria for Automated Incident Response Tools

Managing incidents manually isn’t realistic when their number keeps growing. That’s where automated incident response tools come in. They handle routine tasks so you can focus on actual problem-solving. In this blog, I’ve put together a list of the 9 best automated incident response tools for you. I looked at each one based on four key areas of the incident response process. This will help you see how they handle everything from start to finish.

The Next Wave of Automation Makes More Room for Humans

When a system goes down, the impact isn’t just technical. It’s the people in the center of it who adapt, improvise, apply their judgment, and keep the business moving forward. I’ve worked in operations for more than 25 years, and one thing I’ve learned is that in any system, it’s the humans who are the truly resilient part.

Demo Roundups! Breaking the MTTR Bottleneck: Automating Diagnostics for Modern Incident Response

Discover how PagerDuty Automation eliminates the manual triage bottleneck that's slowing down your incident response. In this demo, you'll see how automating diagnostics can compress resolution times from hours to minutes by instantly analyzing your environment, correlating events across systems, and identifying root causes with transparent AI reasoning.

From plan to practice to prevail: my conversation with Chris Johnson, host of the MSSP 1337 podcast

In cybersecurity, prevention often gets most of the attention. But no matter how strong your defenses are, incidents will happen. And how you respond in that moment of truth defines resilience. That’s why I really connected with a framework Chris Johnson shared with me on the MSSP 1337 podcast, the 3 P’s – plan, practice, prevail.

PagerDuty Joins Glean's AI Ecosystem: Unlocking More Seamless Incident Management

Today, we announced that PagerDuty is now officially part of the Glean MCP Directory! This partnership brings together two leaders in AI-powered productivity and operations, making it easier than ever for organizations to connect PagerDuty’s incident data directly to any AI tool or agent in their stack through the standardized Model Context Protocol (MCP). PagerDuty is the first (and currently only) incident management partner that is available via Glean’s AI ecosystem.

Introducing the BigPanda observability and monitoring tool rationalization framework

When enterprises run dozens of monitoring and observability tools, performance gaps almost always emerge. By applying the BigPanda Observability Scorecard, our customers consistently see their tool portfolio fall into three groups: In some cases, removing bottom-tier tools can reduce portfolio complexity by double digits while cutting operational noise by as much as 35-40%. This simplification reduces costs while creating a leaner, more reliable monitoring environment that strengthens service availability and operational efficiency.

How to analyze observability and monitoring tools for actionability

Choosing the right observability tools is critical so ensure your teams get actionable insights. In this video, we explore how to evaluate observability platforms based on their ability to detect anomalies, link causes, and trigger effective responses.

Physician On Call Schedule: How to Create an Effective, Fair & Reliable Call System

Providing continuous, high-quality care takes more than clinical expertise—it depends on well-designed physician on call schedules that balance patient safety, physician wellness, and operational efficiency. Whether you manage a residency program or a multi-specialty group, creating an effective physician call schedule—or a broader provider on call schedule—is critical for 24/7 coverage and clinician well-being.

You don't need a real outage to find your weak spots.

Modern digital services rely on complex systems, and chaos can strike at any layer. But the most effective teams don’t wait for failure to learn. They simulate it. By introducing controlled performance degradations, you can stress your systems, test your dependencies, and uncover hidden risks without touching production. In our latest webinar, Catchpoint experts walk through how teams are building resilience through proactive, safe failure testing, and why it’s become a cornerstone of digital reliability.

Agentic AI Becomes Essential: Why Adoption Is Accelerating and What Comes Next

The cautious optimism business leaders held towards AI agents has evolved into more widespread enthusiasm. In our last survey from April 2025, just over half (51%) of companies had deployed AI agents in their organization. Six months later, 75% of companies are deploying more than one agent, according to PagerDuty’s latest research.

Goodbye Email-to-Text: Why Modern Mobile Alerting with SIGNL4 Is the Smarter Choice

Over the past year, major U.S. mobile carriers have shut down their free email-to-SMS and email-to-text services – once common ways to send a text message directly from an email account. AT&T terminated its SMS gateway service in mid-2025, Verizon discontinued its SMS gateway domain in late 2024, and T-Mobile retired its gateway domain in December 2024.

Automate or Elevate? 5 Steps to Build an AI-Powered Incident Playbook

Modern development tools, CI/CD infrastructure, and AI have accelerated the pace at which companies release software. This speed supports innovation, but it also increases complexity and the chance of something breaking in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Teams now deal with more operational data, complex failure patterns, and systems where a small configuration change can ripple across dozens of microservices.

Derdack Achieves ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Certification

Derdack attaches great importance to the confidentiality, availability and integrity of information. Therefore, Derdack has undergone a ISO27001:2022 audit and received a certification that Derdack has implemented and maintains an Information Security and Management System. ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is essential for organizations aiming to protect their information assets and comply with best practices in information security management.

Alerts and Notifications - What's the Difference?

In digital systems, communications, apps and IT/operations, the terms alerts and notifications are often used somewhat interchangeably – but there are important distinctions. Understanding these differences helps design better user experiences, reduce overload, and improve response to critical issues. Here are some of the defining contrasts: A few concrete examples help illustrate.

You Don't Need a Five-Year AI Plan. You Need a Five-Week One.

In my travels, I constantly hear about plans that promise to “unlock the full power of AI” down the road. The usual advice is to start small with a few pilots, then gradually scale up from there. It looks good on paper, but in practice, it becomes a months-long slog of one-off experiments that burn a lot of capital, but usually generate little impact on their own.

How to connect ServiceNow to Grafana Cloud IRM incidents

Companies rely on a variety of services to streamline their workflows, which often requires data synchronization or information sharing across platforms. But are your tools flexible enough to connect with external systems? ServiceNow is widely recognized for its robust and complex workflow support for enterprises. However, it may not always offer the most intuitive or user-friendly experience when handling incidents.

How to Choose Incident Management Software

Choosing the right incident management software can make or break your organization’s operational resilience. Modern IT environments are growing complex, and so are customer expectations for always-on services. Having robust incident management capabilities isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential for business continuity.

Eliminate Manual L1 Workflows: BigPanda Enhances AI Detection and Response with New Features

We introduced our vision for BigPanda AI Detection and Response (ADR) at our annual customer event earlier this year, and shared how we’re going to automate L1 operations and eliminate the need for manual investigations. We’re pleased to announce the continued evolution of ADR with a brand-new set of capabilities.

BigPanda was recognized in 10 Gartner Hype Cycles in 2025

Every day, BigPanda redefines how enterprise operations teams prevent disruptions and streamline incident management. Our agentic IT operations platform helps enterprises detect, respond to, and resolve incidents faster and ensure that IT remains scalable, effective, and sustainable. I’m proud to announce that in 2025, BigPanda received recognition across ten Gartner Hype Cycles, which we believe is a testament to our relentless innovation and customer focus.

A Leader's Guide to Upskilling Teams for the AI Era

Every week, we hear about new AI breakthroughs. AI models write code, create videos, or analyze data in ways we couldn’t imagine just months ago. But there’s a gap: While most companies have adopted AI tools, the majority of employees still don’t use AI in their everyday work. As a manager, you see AI’s potential to change how your team works. Yet your employees struggle to figure out how AI fits into their daily tasks.

SIGNL4 + Microsoft Teams Integration - Streamline Critical Alerts and Incident Response

Enhance your incident management workflow with the SIGNL4 Microsoft Teams integration. In this video, we walk you through how SIGNL4 connects seamlessly with Microsoft Teams to deliver real-time, mobile push notifications, chat-based incident collaboration, and faster response times for your team. Whether you’re in IT operations, DevOps, security, or facility management, this integration ensures that the right people are alerted instantly and can take immediate action – directly within Teams. What you’ll learn in this video.

FireHydrant 4-Minute Demo

Get a quick walkthrough of the FireHydrant platform. FireHydrant is the all-in-one incident management platform that helps teams resolve incidents up to 90% faster — and prevent them from happening again. From flexible alerting and powerful automation to retros and AI insights, it brings clarity and control to every step of your response.

Do You Get Paid for Being On-Call? What the Law Says (and What Workers Actually Get)

Being “on call” sounds simple: you’re not actively working, but you need to be available if something goes wrong. The real question many employees ask is: do you actually get paid for being on call? The short answer is: it depends. Your pay may hinge on labor laws, company policies, and how restricted your time really is.

The End of "Good Code"? AI, Throughput, and Reliability with CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber

Is “good code” still the right measure of engineering success in an AI-driven world? In this episode of *Humans of Reliability*, Rob Zuber, CircleCI CTO, joins Sylvain to explore how coding assistants are reshaping developer workflows and changing what teams value. Rob shares what he’s seeing across CircleCI’s customer base: a clear boost in throughput, new bottlenecks shifting from code creation to code review, and the rise of “vibe coding,” where engineers trust AI-generated code they may not fully understand.

SIGNL4 Onboarding: Completing Your Purchase

Welcome to SIGNL4! In this onboarding video, we’ll walk you through how to complete your purchase so you can unlock the full power of SIGNL4 for your team. Whether you’re just getting started or upgrading from a trial, this quick tutorial makes it easy to activate your subscription and start benefiting from advanced incident alerting and on-call management. In this video, you’ll learn how to: Whether you’re in IT operations, DevOps, SOC, or MSSP environments, SIGNL4 helps your team stay connected to every critical incident — anywhere, anytime.

Apica + ilert: Closing the gap between detection and resolution

ilert now offers a native integration with Apica that connects telemetry events to ilert’s alerting, on-call, and incident communication. It helps SRE, DevOps, and IT operations teams turn detection into action faster, reduce alert noise with the aid of AI, and keep stakeholders informed without unnecessary notifications.

The Secret Cost of Pagers

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘pager?’ For most people its either the ’90s or doctors. Which to me, feels like an oxymoron. A decades old device mixed with an industry based on innovation? It’s a recipe for disaster. Yet somehow, pagers still accompany doctors on their daily rounds. And while there are plenty of supposed “reasons” why, most of them don’t hold up, especially now.

Ultimate Tools for Wordpress Uptime Monitoring

Running a WordPress site is a dynamic endeavour that goes beyond publishing content. To maintain your online presence, it is essential to ensure website availability, improve performance, and provide a positive user experience. Frequent downtime, slow loading times, or unexpected errors like PHP errors or permissions errors can harm your website's reputation, drive away visitors, and negatively impact search engine rankings.

What is Automated Incident Response

While writing our 2024 recap, we found that teams handled over 2.2 million new incidents. Critical incidents alone tripled, increasing from 3,000 in 2023 to 9,200 in 2024. Dealing with such a large volume of incidents is not an easy task. And dealing with them manually is definitely not easy. Your valuable time goes into routine tasks like creating tickets, setting up war rooms, and notifying stakeholders. These keep you from fixing the actual problem.

What is Single Pane of Glass Monitoring and How Can Enterprises Leverage It for Enhanced Visibility?

Large enterprises today grapple with increasingly complex IT environments - spanning multiple cloud services, hybrid infrastructures and countless applications. Exacerbated by technology silos, the sheer volumes of data generated in such environments can quickly overwhelm IT teams, impairing their ability to identify and respond to customer impacting issues before outages strike.

From Alert to Resolution: How Incident Response Automation Cuts MTTR and Closes Gaps

Every minute of downtime costs money. Every manual handoff adds risk. And every incident without a standardized fix becomes an opportunity for inconsistency, delay, and escalation. That’s why more operations and SRE teams are turning to Incident Response Automation. Through the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, teams can leverage safe, pre-defined remediation actions, enabling responders to go from alert to resolution in minutes, not hours, reducing MTTR and improving response consistency.

What are agentic IT Operations?

The rise of hybrid cloud, CI/CD, agile methodologies, and microservices has dramatically accelerated innovation, but it has also brought corresponding increases in complexity, fragmentation, and chaos. Enterprise IT departments are struggling to keep up. To stay ahead of these complex environments, enterprises have dramatically increased their spending on observability and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools. However, despite a 20% year-over-year increase in spending, incident detection remains poor.

Ecommerce Security Incidents: Stripe, Pandora, and OpenCart

Cyberattacks against ecommerce businesses are accelerating, and recent incidents show just how many different angles attackers are exploiting. Whether it’s phishing campaigns, third-party data breaches, or malware injections, ecommerce stores are a prime target. Here are three recent incidents making headlines, and what they mean for ecommerce operators.