Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In my past experience as an SRE I’ve learned some valuable lessons about how to respond and learn from incidents. Declare and run retros for the small incidents. It's less stressful, and action items become much more actionable. Decrease the time it takes to analyze an incident. You'll remember more, and will learn more from the incident. Alert on pain felt by people — not computers. The only reason we declare incidents at all is because of the people on the other side of them.

Software is eating the world. Digital Transformation is top of mind for companies looking to meet ever-growing consumer demands and digitize manual processes. This isn’t unique to the technology industry. Ecommerce, finance, healthcare, and other industries are all moving in this direction.

Major-incident war rooms are synonymous with stress. Pressure from executives, digging for a needle in a haystack, too much noise—it’s all weight on your hardworking technical teams. Incident responders clearly need a more effective way to collaborate across various technical teams. A method that both minimizes interruptions and keeps stakeholders up to date while ensuring everyone has the right level of context to do their job.

You have identified a data breach, now what? Your Incident Response Playbook is up to date. You have drilled for this, you know who the key players on your team are and you have their home phone numbers, mobile phone numbers, and email addresses, so you get to work. It is seven o’clock in the evening so you are sure everyone is available and ready to respond, you begin typing “that” email and making phone calls, one at a time.

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.

Teams are always looking for a speed advantage, and that comes from planning, crisp execution, and teamwork. To this end, we’re excited to release new enhancements to Incident Collaboration to help make life easier for DevOps teams during incident response. The Mattermost platform includes built-in Incident Playbooks with predefined response plans and task lists. Playbooks can be customized to your environment and specific use cases.

Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizational consultant, helps people declutter their homes in order to live happier, better lives. She once said: Similarly, in security, operational teams are constantly bogged down by a “visible mess” that inhibits their ability to effectively secure their organization.