SREs Say There’s Plenty of Room to Improve Incident Management
A global survey of site reliability engineers (SREs) found diagnosing issues is the most difficult aspect of incident management.
Cloudflare Outage Outrage | Yet More FAA 5G Stupidity
In this week’s The Long View: Cloudflare suffers another huge outage while the FAA and FCC still disagree over 5G/NR near airports.
5 Tips If You’re the First SRE Hire
Site reliability engineers (SREs) have a considerable set of tasks to juggle no matter where they work or how long their company has had an SRE practice. But if you’re the very first one to join an organization—as many SREs are these days, given that the trend is trickling down into smaller and smaller companies—you […]
What SREs Can Learn From the Atlassian Outage of 2022
What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive site reliability engineering turns out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question teams at about 400 businesses presumably asked themselves in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud. The incident offers a number of insights for […]
ServiceNow Launches Incident Management Platform Infused with Observability
ServiceNow added an incident management platform based on the Lightstep observability platform it acquired last year to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio. Ben Sigelman, general manager of Lightstep at ServiceNow, said Lightstep Incident Response gives DevOps teams access to observability tools that, via a self-service portal, enable them to determine the root cause of any incident […]
The Evolution of Incident Management
Have you ever thought about the history of incident management? If you’re an SRE, you might be so caught up in the day-to-day work of managing reliability and responding to incidents that you never take time to step back and reflect on the evolution of your role and your responsibilities. And that’s a shame because […]
Verica Launches Database for Sharing IT Incident Reports
Verica, a provider of an incident management platform, announced this week it is making available a database to make incident reports publicly available via a single repository. Courtney Nash, senior research analyst at Verica, said the Verica Open Incident Database (VOID) initiative is part of an effort to enable organizations to learn from outages and […]
Choosing an Incident Management Platform
When you’re feeling the stress and pain of manually managing incidents and incident response, making the decision to find an incident management tool is a no-brainer. But how do you choose the one that will work best for you, your team and your business? You might be asking yourself, “Where do I start? What do […]
5 Ways to Reduce DevOps Toil
Over the last several years, DevOps has become a bit of a buzzword. It has become simultaneously a practice, a culture, a team, a job title and a vendor product. You can hire some DevOps, buy some DevOps, adopt DevOps and sprinkle a little bit of DevOps on top for good measure. But, at its […]
Why You Should Embrace Incidents and Ditch MTTR
The cliché is that everyone in IT hates incidents, and the natural reaction when assembling incident response metrics is to look for numbers that you can lower over time. Fewer incidents and shorter incident response times must be better, we think. You might already be familiar with the common metrics associated with these goals, including […]
Best Practices for Cloud Incident Response
Cloud computing is now mainstream, with almost all organizations running at least some resources in the public cloud—whether software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Security teams have been scrambling to adapt to cloud environments, and with the growing adoption of DevSecOps, they are working together with DevOps teams to secure cloud systems from the […]
PagerDuty Allies with JFrog to Modernize IT Incident Management
PagerDuty has integrated its IT incident management platform with the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform from JFrog as part of an effort to streamline troubleshooting of application environments. Steve Gross, senior director of strategic business development at PagerDuty, said the overall goal is to make it easier for IT operations teams and developers to collaboratively […]
Three Ways Machine Learning Can Change Incident Management
Incident management for important applications has many connotations, many of them negative. Most are well-deserved. Stress, panic, hurry, urgent, drop-everything, all-hands-on-deck, emergency, to name a few. Typically, there is a critical problem, ranging from complete failure to loss of certain functionality or performance. The problem or outage potentially means loss of revenue, loss of customers, […]
Using RPA for DevOps Process Automation
Modern operations teams today are at the cutting edge of automation. DevOps and SRE practices are entirely based on an automation-first philosophy. CI/CD is fully automated and the next generation of automated testing is now being adopted. However, these same teams are still running their human processes based on hastily thrown-together wiki pages. The increase […]
Blips and Downtime: Incident Management 101
Nothing gets the blood pumping like seeing an IT incident alert flash across the screen. Is the network traffic anomaly a potential intrusion? Are we about to have an outage? Is it just a random blip on the radar? The implications of these different potential incidents vary wildly, and each requires a different set of […]
7 Important Truths About Chaos Engineering
As a relatively new practice, chaos engineering has plenty of myths surrounding it, from randomly shutting down production systems to requiring huge investments of time and money. There’s a lot of confusion over the purpose, the value and the practice of chaos engineering. This presents a problem for DevOps teams, especially since more than half […]
Mattermost Offers DevOps Command Center in the Cloud
Mattermost today launched Mattermost Cloud, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing DevOps workflows using pre-built playbooks that comes integrated with a wide variety of third-party developer tools. Chandar Venkataraman, executive vice president and chief product officer for Mattermost, said Mattermost Cloud enables IT teams to take advantage of a single-tenant DevOps platform that they don’t […]
The CMDB Is Dead – Long Live the CMDB
Many enterprise IT organizations have a configuration management database, or CMDB, in place. These systems are important for overall configuration management, governance and DevOps coordination. Yet, these legacy data repository systems can fall short in our dynamic IT environment. They require manual updating and can’t always support real-time decision-making. Furthermore, we have new requirements since […]
What Is Resilience Engineering?
Admitting things will go wrong isn’t easy for anyone or any team. But modern engineering practices have moved beyond this fear, giving birth to a new practice in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) known as resilience engineering. Resilience engineering today isn’t thought of as a function. However, just as DevOps was a description of […]
PagerDuty Looks to Streamline IT Incident Management
PagerDuty has added more automation and analytics capabilities into its portfolio of incident management tools, at a time when organizations are looking to significantly reduce the total cost of IT. Jonathan Rende, senior vice president of product at PagerDuty, said the general release of Intelligent Triage advances the level of AIOps that can be applied […]
Incident Resolution for Remote Teams
People working in IT support and incident management right now are faced with unusual difficulties supporting large remote workforces and managing unpredictable workloads. On Reddit, system admins and other IT pros are bemoaning the hiccups and hassles of working in isolation while trying to resolve issues and maintain high SLAs. You can’t go grab your […]
PagerDuty Focuses Incident Response Efforts on the Cloud
After helping to pioneer the adoption of incident management software in on-premises IT environments, PagerDuty is now focusing its attention on the cloud with the launch of PagerDuty for Cloud Operations. Jukka Alanen, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy for PagerDuty, said that as cloud computing evolves to include containers and serverless […]
Four Steps to Implement an Observability Strategy for Microservices
You’ve finally decided. You’re making the move to microservices and re-architecting your entire infrastructure. Some services will still be on-premises (those databases and their legacy apps are never moving), but a cloud-based microservices architecture will allow your teams to build and bring new products to market faster. But how do you handle the complexity that […]