The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.
When an issue happens in your software in production, the channel to send the alert on depends on multiple factors. If it's a critical issue requiring immediate attention, you should alert the team member via phone call. But not all issues require a phone call, and in fact it may become annoying if your phone keeps ringing for minor issues. This is where other channels like SMS, Slack and mobile push notifications come in.
Imagine you have a hole in your car's tire. To fix it quickly and get on your way, you apply a patch. Then it happens again. You apply another patch. Before you know it, you're driving on the highway and you blow a tire. The risk was always there. You were simply hiding it because you didn't solve the problem. We see this often when it comes to IT issues. Teams take a band-aid approach to fixing problems without addressing the underlying causes.
The widespread adoption of Agile methodologies in recent years has allowed organizations to significantly increase their ability to push out more high quality software. Previous development practices revolved heavily around centralized applications and infrequent updates that were shipped maybe once a quarter or even once a year.
What precisely are the requirements of a DevOps practitioner, as opposed to an SRE, legacy developer, or operations manager? And do those specific requirements require a different approach to monitoring?
Mean time to repair (MTTR) is an essential metric that represents the average time it takes to repair and restore a component or system to functionality. It is a primary measurement of the maintainability of an organization’s systems, equipment, applications and infrastructure, as well as its efficiency in fixing that equipment when an IT incident occurs. Key challenges with MTTR arise from just trying to figure out that there is actually a problem.
As an on-call engineer, you might deal with the day-in, day-out occurrence of alerts. These alerts may come from your alerting provider (PagerDuty, OpsGenie, etc.), Slack notifications telling you the site is down, or the ever concerning text message "Hey, is the site down?". These alerts elicit reactions that range from "shit" to "again?" and in many cases, both.
