There is a famous quote that goes like this…‘For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.’ At least in the world of incident response, nothing is more apt than this. Digital infrastructure these days is made up of multiple services, an outage could result from either one impacted service or multiple impacted services. So it's essential to have a catalog of all the services along with the point of contact (service owner) responsible for maintaining it.

It may surprise you to hear, but Honeycomb doesn’t currently have a platform team. We have a platform org, and my title is Director of Platform Engineering. We have engineers doing platform work. And, we even have an SRE team and a core services team. But a platform team? Nope. I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to build a platform team up from scratch—a situation some of you may also be in—and it led me to asking crucial questions. What should such a team own?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers 100+ services, each focusing on a specific area of functionality. However, it can be challenging to pick the right services for the task and also to provision them. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, lets you easily deploy and manage applications without the need to learn about the underlying infrastructure that runs these applications.

Looking into incident tracking? We explain what incident tracking is, how it’s done, and why it matters.

We explain what infrastructure monitoring is, how it works, how to overcome the challenges in complex systems, best practices for monitoring, and the tools you need.

You know that old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees? In our Authors’ Cut series, we’ve been looking at the trees that make up the observability forest—among them, CI/CD pipelines, Service Level Objectives, and the Core Analysis Loop. Today, I'd like to step back and take a look at how observability fits into the broader technical and cultural shifts in technology: cloud-native, DevOps, and SRE.

Google has had an outsized impact on the world, from its unrivaled search engine to its expansion into a range of customer-focused services. It would be difficult to make an impact of this magnitude without also leading the way in the software development industry. One of its biggest contributions to the community is a set of principles known as site reliability engineering or SRE.

Reliability and availability have different meanings when it comes to software. What are the differences and what is the importance of each?

To many engineers, the idea that you can accurately and comprehensively track your application's user experience using just a few simple metrics might sound far-fetched. Believe it or not, there are four metrics that aim to do just that. They're called the four Golden Signals and should be a core part of your observability and reliability practices.

So you’ve decided to take advantage of Site Reliability Engineering by hiring SREs for your company. Now, you have a second decision to make: Exactly how many SREs to hire. Do you need just one or two SREs? Or should you build a sprawling SRE team, with a dozen or more SREs on hand to support your organization’s reliability needs? The answers to these questions will, of course, vary; every business’s needs are different.

Hey folks, We’re back with another feature update for all our customers! We have recently gone live with the incident watchers feature which nests within an incident details page. This blog will outline how you can access the feature, its primary functionalities and how we foresee it helping improve your incident management process. Note: This feature will be available to pro, premium and enterprise plan users only.

Are you looking to start an SRE team or add to your existing team? We explain the SRE hiring process and how to find and evaluate an SRE.

Spring Cloud and Kubernetes both complement each other to build a cloud native platform and run microservices on the Kubernetes containers. Kubernetes provides many features which are similar to Spring Cloud and Spring Config Server features. Spring framework has been around for many years. Even today, many organizations prefer to go with Spring libraries because it provides many features. It's a great deal when developers have total control over cloud configuration along with business logic source code.

For the last few years, Squadcast has been building out a market-leading on-call and alert management solution. Over the past few quarters, we have significantly enhanced our on-call product by releasing and improving features related to Incident Response - including Slack / MS Teams integration, Runbooks, Postmortems, Service Level Objectives, and Status Pages. We believe that a reliability platform involves both on-call and incident response - one cannot work effectively without the other.