Complex incidents are both exhausting and commonplace. In this case, incidents that I am referring to as “complex” are incidents that involve multiple, disparate, notifications in your alert management platform. Perhaps these incidents are logically separated because the underlying systems or services were seen as less coupled than they turned out to be in reality.

In this article, we’re exploring how status pages can help you deliver bad news to customers in a “good way,” starting with the psychology of news delivery and how you can use this knowledge for future incidents.

As a commercial pilot landing at night on an unfamiliar runway, the last thing you want is a cockpit alarm telling you the passenger in 14A wants more ice in their soda. You need to concentrate on the job at hand. At that critical moment in flight, you only want visibility into the alarms that matter. It’s the same with your monitoring environment. Too often, you can be overwhelmed by a tsunami of alarms—thousands of monitoring alerts that all point to the same problem.

Nearly two-thirds of IT executives say they plan to implement automation technology within the next year and a half. Despite this ambitious goal, however, 50% of those IT leaders admit that a lack of automation skillsets is currently hindering their progress. As the demand on IT infrastructures continues to grow at an astronomical rate, an epic increase in complexity has inevitably followed.

BASF is the largest chemical producer in the world with a revenue of EUR 59bn, 247 manufacturing sites and 110,000 employees. BASF’s Coatings division employs 11,000 people and develops, produces and markets innovative solutions for automotive OEM and automotive refinish coatings and industrial coatings as well as architectural coatings and related coating processes.

IT organizations are challenged with delivering quick, effective resolution to customers’ database, hardware or software downtime issues. Contractually binding service-level agreements (SLAs) place further pressure on IT engineers to accelerate incident resolution time and minimize downtime. Though engineers are obligated to meet their SLAs, they are unable to do so without the help of an automated alerting system.