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Rootly

Incident Commander Training Strategies: What The Books Don't Tell You

It has been lightly revised and reposted with his permission from the original article on Medium. So, you’re training incident commanders (IC), and you have your group read Google’s SRE books. Everyone knows what they are supposed to do and you are ready for any incident, right? Not quite. Half of your team complains that the descriptions are too vague or don’t apply to their situations, and the other half just starts to improvise. The result?

Breaking Down the 2024 VOID Report: "Exploring the Unintended Consequences of Automation in Software"

In an era where automation and artificial intelligence are increasingly integral to software development and operations, the 2024 VOID Report sheds critical light on the nuanced impacts of these technologies. Here, we delve deeper into the report's key findings and explore predictions for the near future, weaving a comprehensive narrative highlighting challenges and opportunities.

Building a Privacy-First AI for Incident Management

At Rootly, we're integrating AI into incident management with a keen eye on privacy. It's not just about tapping into AI's potential; it's about ensuring we respect and protect our customers’ privacy and sensitive data. Here's a quick overview of how we're blending innovation with strong privacy commitments.

Enhancing Service Reliability: Uniting Rootly's Incident Management and Backstage's Software Catalog

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, ensuring the reliability of services is paramount for businesses aiming to deliver seamless user experiences. However, as the complexity of companies' environments grows, ensuring your services, infrastructure and applications are reliable and resilient to failure is challenging. It’s naive to think all services and infrastructure are operating 100% as designed.

Does Every Incident Need a Retrospective? Here's What the Experts Have to Say

Every quarter, we host a roundtable discussion centered around the challenges encountered by incident responders at the world’s leading organizations. These discussions are lightly facilitated and vendor-agnostic, with a carefully curated group of experts. Everyone brings their own unique perspective and experience to the group as we dive deep into the real-world challenges incident responders are facing today.

Lessons in Incident Response I Learned While Waiting Tables

Before I stumbled into the tech industry (a story for another day), I spent several years in the customer service world as a server and front-of-house manager in restaurants. It was in these jobs that I first honed some critical skills that would later lead me on the path to incident response.

When More Incident Commanders are Better

It has been lightly revised and reposted with his permission from the original article on Medium. Leading major incident responses can be extremely stressful. You have to quickly gather an ad-hoc team, figure out what went wrong, identify a fix and make sure this doesn't make things worse, all the while with senior leadership breathing down your neck. Are we having fun yet? Many people think having a dedicated incident commander role will solve the problem.

Status Pages 101: How to Create a Status Page You and Your Customers Will Actually Want to Use

This blog post is adapted from my talk at SRECon EMEA 2023 - original slides are available here! Status pages are a simple yet underutilized element of incident communication. Done well, they’re a low-lift way to keep your customers and stakeholders informed when incidents impact them. But without a solid approach, updating status pages can easily become a tedious and often neglected task during incidents. In this post, we’ll cover some tips to get your status page right.

Top 5 Resiliency Trends of 2023

In today’s world, resilience is no longer a conditioned desire or methodology to try but has become a necessity for sustained success in software development and IT operations. As DevOps and Agile teams keep moving forward to cross boundaries, come up with new methodologies, and drive innovation, it is now important to have the ability to quickly recover from failures, adapt to changing conditions, and maintain high performance under pressure.