In the fast-paced world of IT operations, the culture permeating an organization is critical to its success. It drives behavior, efficiency, and organizational accomplishment. A blame-centric culture is particularly detrimental, creating an environment where finger-pointing is more important than problem-solving and fear reduces innovation. This negative culture damages individual morale and erodes the organization's collective resilience.

What's the secret to achieving the right balance for your platform?

I wish someone had told me that I shouldn’t hop between frameworks. Just like learning four programming languages in your first year, in my experience spending time content switching as a beginner is wasted effort. If I’d spent a solid year learning how to deploy services on AWS, then when it was time to learn Azure, I’d see more similarities than differences and find it a lot easier to pick up a second public cloud.

To become battle-tested, you need to go through battles, not just read books or mentor newcomers. Both are helpful but the stakes are low. On the other hand, high stake jobs, such as running a big project or managing a team, are hard to get when you lack experience. So how can we solve this dilemma? Enter incident response.

The 2024 SRE Report highlights a pivotal shift in how organizations approach the reliability and monitoring of their services, especially those that extend beyond their direct control. According to the report, 64% of organizations now recognize the importance of monitoring productivity or experience-disrupting endpoints, even beyond their physical control.

Software complexity makes it harder for teams to rapidly identify and resolve issues. IT service management has evolved from an afterthought to a central part of DevOps. Microservices architectures are prone to delay or missed identification of such concerns. Monitoring mechanisms need to keep up with these complex infrastructures. Maintaining reliability and performance while harnessing this complexity requires a considered, data-driven approach.

In most engineering organizations, everyone agrees that in complex systems, failure is inevitable. It’s possible to prevent the recurrence of certain incidents, reduce their impact, or shorten the time to resolution. However, it’s impossible to avoid them altogether. In the past, we asserted failures are a result of people’s mistakes. It was all about “the bad apple theory,” focused on finding the “guilty party” and removing them to prevent future failures.

When your organization faces outages, errors, security breaches, and other incidents, you need to have a plan in place to take appropriate actions as needed. However, you also need a capable team of experts filling critical roles and responsibilities to execute those actions and effectively collaborate to resolve issues quickly. An incident response team, therefore should be developed in a way that avoids skills gaps in expertise.

Automated incident management is the process of automating incident response to ensure that critical events are detected and addressed in the most efficient and consistent manner. In incident management, time is of the essence and the primary benefit of automated incident management is speed. With automation, you can accomplish time-consuming tasks much quicker. This brings down the incident response time and allows the team to focus their attention on matters that require their expertise.