Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2023

Observability Pillars: Exploring Logs, Metrics and Traces

The ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs is called Observability. A system becomes 'observable' when it is possible to estimate the current state using only information from outputs, namely sensor data. You can use the data from Observability to identify and troubleshoot problems, optimize performance, and improve security. In the next few sections, we'll take a closer look at the three pillars of Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces.

Unveiling Past Incidents: Accelerating Incident Resolution with Historical Context

Having the context of how similar issues were handled in the past can be invaluable. It can help incident responders grasp the nature of recurring problems, their causes, and effective solutions that have worked in the past. Introducing Squadcast’s Past Incidents feature that assists incident responders by presenting them with a list of similar past incidents related to the same service they are currently investigating.

Product Spotlight: Enhancing Incident Resolution with Blameless' Microsoft Teams Integration

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, swiftly responding to incidents is paramount for engineering teams. Downtime is not just costly; it can tarnish your organization's reputation. The pressure felt by engineering operations, DevOps, and SRE leaders to architect and run an effective incident response process is immense. Fortunately, over the last several years, effective engineering organizations have developed a standard toolkit for running a good incident response process.
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Status Pages 101: Everything You Need to Know About Status Pages

Status Pages are critical for effective Incident Management. Just as an ill-structured On-Call Schedule can wreak havoc, ineffective Status Pages can leave customers and stakeholders, adrift, underscoring the need for a meticulous approach. Here are two, Matsuri Japon, a Non-Profit Organization and Sport1, a premier live-stream sports content platform, both integrate Squadcast Status Pages to enhance their incident response strategies discreetly. You may read about them later. Crafting these Status Pages demands precision, offering dynamic updates and collaboration.

The Ultimate Guide to DORA Metrics for DevOps

In the world of software delivery, organizations are under constant pressure to improve their performance and deliver high-quality software to their customers. One effective way to measure and optimize software delivery performance is to use the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics. DORA metrics, developed by a renowned research team at DORA, provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of an organization's software delivery processes.

Bill Kennedy: The mistake boot, building ACs, Black boxes & AI in software - The Reliability Podcast

The Reliability podcast aims to speak with engineers who have worked on large, complex systems and glean through their learnings. What best practices should one imbibe? What are non-negotiable learnings to become better at a craft? What’s ‘engineering’ going to be like with the advent of AI? We answer these and more tracing personal journeys of engineers who have built stellar careers around decoding the innumerable intricacies of software engineering.

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.

Mastering Incident Resolution: Process and Best Practices

For DevOps and IT teams, incident resolution is an important aspect of predicting, resolving, and documenting service disruptions. It refers to the part of the incident management process where responders restore the service to functioning. Modern technology has come a long way, but it’s not without flaws. When businesses suffer from cyber-attacks, system crashes, and network outages, it impacts the organization on many levels.

Implementing Zero Trust: A Practical Guide

According to the Harvard Business Review, 2022 saw more than 83% of businesses experiencing multiple data breaches. Ransomware attacks, in particular, were up 13%. With cyber security being such a hot topic for business owners, it’s no surprise implementing a zero trust policy has become so important. In this guide, we’ll cover how to implement zero trust and why it’s important for your business to do so. Let’s get started.

Streamlining Incident Management with our latest feature update: Merge Incidents

Hey folks! We‘re back with another nifty feature to your Incident Management tool arsenal. You now have the ability to merge incidents with a few clicks! With this latest update you can reduce the noise while dealing with a complex incident by merging incidents across services under a parent incident. Typically this can occur when multiple incidents stem from the same underlying issue or root cause.

Journey from Junior to Senior SRE: Key Insights and Strategies

As Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) continues to grow in popularity, many professionals are looking for ways to advance from junior to senior roles. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, the transition from junior to senior SRE is marked by a gradual increase in experience and a set of key skills. In this blog, we will explore the valuable insights and strategies shared by experienced SREs.

What's the Difference Between an Agile Retrospective and an Incident Retrospective?

Blameless Chief Operating Officer Ken Gavranovic recently sat down with Lee Atchison, a renowned expert in system reliability, to discuss the topic of conducting effective incident retrospectives. You can watch their engaging, informative discussion below, or read on for our overview of the greatest hits from their talk. ‍ Agile development and incident management are the backbones of any tech-driven development cycle. At the heart of these practices lies the art of retrospectives.

Elastic AI Assistant for Observability

Harness the power of generative AI to turn insights into actions. Powered by the Elasticsearch Relevance Engine™ (ESRE™), Elastic’s AI Assistant (in technical preview for Observability) transforms problem identification and resolution by eliminating manual data chasing across silos to an interactive assistant that delivers accurate and context-aware remediation for SREs.

Seven Models of Cloud Native Applications

In today's cloud-driven landscape, organizations are transitioning from legacy monolithic systems to agile, scalable, and secure cloud-native solutions. Some are even forging new cloud-native applications. However, the concept of cloud-native design remains subjective, lacking a universal blueprint. This blog aims to provide clarity and guidance for designing precise cloud-native applications and container deployment.

How to Set Up an IT War Room

IT issues can happen at any time and significantly impact an organization. Hence, it's essential to have a plan to handle these issues quickly and efficiently. And one way to do this is to create an IT war room. An IT war room is a dedicated space for teams to collaborate and resolve issues. Establishing an IT war room enhances an organization's capacity to swiftly and efficiently address IT problems, ultimately reducing their impact on the business.

Enhancing Incident Management: Seven Integrations to Complete Your Ticketing Systems

Squadcast offers some powerful integrations to simplify Incident Management processes and make your work easy. These integrations enhance Incident Management processes and complete your ticketing systems, ensuring seamless collaboration and timely issue resolution.

Practical guidance for getting started as a site reliability engineer

At the beginning of May, I joined incident.io as the first site reliability engineer (SRE), a very exciting but slightly daunting move. With only some high-level knowledge of what the company and its systems looked like prior to this point, it’s fair to say that I didn’t have much certainty in what exactly I’d be working on or how I’d deliver it.

SLO Driven Incident Response: Service Level Objectives for Effective Incident Management | Squadcast

In today's tech-driven landscape, effective Incident Management is vital for seamless service and customer satisfaction. This webinar explores ways to uncover the role of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in structuring incident response processes while acting as a compass, guiding incident prioritization and resolution to minimize customer impact and downtime. The webinar will help you demystify SLOs, their data-driven role in incident decision-making, and how to prioritize incidents to lessen customer impact by identifying critical incidents.

Observability vs Monitoring: What's the Difference?

Observability and monitoring: These terms are often used interchangeably, but they represent different approaches to understanding and managing IT infrastructure. If you are new to these terms or are often confused between the two, this blog is for you! In this blog, we'll explore the key concepts of observability and monitoring, their evolution in IT operations, their differences and similarities, and their importance in modern infrastructure.