Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If not tackled early, increasing toil can affect the morale and productivity of your SRE team. In this blog we look at some of the ways you can counter toil with the help of better alerting systems in place. Are you an SRE or On-call engineer struggling to manage toil? Toil is any repetitive or monotonous activity that can lead to frustration within an incident management team. Also at the business level, toil doesn't add any functional value towards growth and productivity.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts exploring the role that intelligent observability plays in the day-to-day life of smart teams. In this post, Sarah and company discover how AIOps gives them "the time to save time!"

We won an award! We're excited to share that we were named the Major Incident Software Innovation of the Year 2020 at the MIM Awards. Our CEO, Robert Ross (better known as Bobby), accepted over video on our behalf (watch the video below). A lot happened for us in 2020 -- not only from winning new business, but growing as a team, and maturing our product. We're excited that MIM felt the same way about us and we're honoured to recieve this award!

The Suez Canal has been big news over the last couple of weeks. We wondered how a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) might conduct a postmortem on what happened with the Ever Given, and what that might mean if a comparable incident occurred at a modern tech company.

When you start researching how to improve the reliability of your software, you will soon run into terms like SLOs and SLAs. It can sound intimidating, but it's quite straightforward to understand. In this post, we will introduce these terms, the differences between them and how to start using them to make your systems more reliable.

Financial services institutions have been facing pressure to modernize their operations for years. But legacy architecture and processes—along with compliance regulations—have made rapid innovation difficult to achieve. Adding to this pressure are new, digital-first competitors who accelerate the need for financial services to deliver better digital customer experiences both more consistently and at scale.

Event and alert filtering matters because alert fatigue is one of the most crucial issues in alerting and alert management. SIGNL4 implements a lightweight and effective way of filtering events. The overall process is based on alert categories. Alert categories are applied using a keyword search across the entire payload of incoming third-party events. But assigning alert categories, e.g. for alert augmentation, is not filtering.

Software development pipelines typically cycle through key four processes—design, development, testing and software or update releases. Traditional pipelines perform quality and security tests only after completing the development phase. Since there is no such thing as a perfect code, there are always issues to fix. However, if significant architectural changes are needed, fixing them at the end of the process can be highly expensive.

Background We recently released the biggest overhaul to one of the core features of Spike.sh - On-call schedules. Software teams use on-call schedules to designate first responders who will handle issues when they occur.

Unplanned work is rising, with consequences ranging from unhappy customers and lost revenue, to employee churn and burnout. So what is the true business cost of wasted time? In this blog, we will explore how one employee’s wasted time can impact the whole company—from operations, to development and beyond.