Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2023

How to Route Alerts to Subject Matter Experts Using Squadcast Tagging & Routing Rules?

Effective Incident Management is crucial for ensuring customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. As systems grow more complex, efficiently directing alerts to the right teams becomes crucial. This article delves into the challenges, implementation, and benefits of automating incident categorization.

Navigating the New SEC Data Breach Rule A Blameless Blueprint for Compliance

The new SEC rule on material security breaches goes into effect on December 18, 2023 for larger publicly traded companies and all other public companies within 180 days. If you're not already in compliance, it’s important for you to prepare for the new rule now by developing a plan for incident response and disclosure.

Unlocking Visibility and Control: Introducing Squadcast's Service Graph Feature

To ensure efficient Incident Management, it is crucial to proactively anticipate and address potential disruptions The need for a comprehensive, high-level view of the status of all services is paramount. Enter Squadcast's Service Graph – a feature designed to transform the way organizations approach Incident Management.
Sponsored Post

Comparing the Top 9 Pagerduty Alternatives in 2023

Pagerduty is a popular Incident Management platform that helps teams respond to alerts and incidents quickly and efficiently. However, its pricing structure can be complex and expensive for scaling businesses and Incident Response teams. In this blog post, we will compare the top 9 Pagerduty alternatives in 2023, and help you to choose the best one for your needs.

14 DevOps and SRE Tools for 2024: Your Ultimate Guide to Stay Ahead

As we approach 2024, the DevOps and SRE landscapes continue to evolve, bringing forth a new generation of tools designed to enhance efficiency, scalability, and reliability in software development and operations. In this post, we'll dive into some of the most promising tools that are shaping the future of Continuous integration and deployment, monitoring and observability, infrastructure/application platforms, incident management & alerting, security, and diagramming.

Top 5 Incident Response Tools to Watch Out for in 2024

Having effective incident response tools is crucial for IT organizations. Improving your incident response process is enhanced when equipped with the appropriate tool that includes intelligent features tailored to your needs. Whether you're just beginning your venture into efficient Incident Management or in search of the finest incident response tools, we present the top five options for your consideration.

Top SRE Tools for Enhanced Site Reliability

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) stands out as a crucial discipline, ensuring the smooth operation and scalability of intricate software systems. SREs employ a diverse toolkit, automating tasks, monitoring system health, and proactively tackling potential issues. The goal? To elevate site reliability and keep downtime at bay. In this blog, we'll dive deep into the realm of SRE tools, breaking down what each tool brings to the table.

Improving Customer Support with Squadcast Webforms: A Smart Solution for MSPs

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) handle a multitude of customer support cases, each requiring efficient routing to the right team member. Squadcast's Webforms provide a solution to expedite issue reporting and streamline resolution. In this blog, we will explore how MSPs can leverage webforms to enhance the customer support experience.

Introducing Workflows: Enhancing Automation in Incident Response

At Squadcast, we advocate for the principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), which emphasize the critical importance of automating routine tasks to boost efficiency in Incident Management. We're aiding organizations in implementing these principles with one of our newest features: 'Workflows'. Workflows has been designed to automate manual facets of your Incident lifecycle, all while ensuring human-in-the-loop execution for critical decisions.

Weathering Black Friday and Other Storms Reliably

If you work in eCommerce, you can see the storm on the horizon. Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year both online and off, is only a few days away. Your services are going to hit usage spikes you possibly have never seen before. And it will be all aspects of your services pushed to your limit – people won’t just be searching, or just buying, or signing up for programs, they’ll be doing all of these at once. ‍ Most crucially, everyone else is offering deals too.

Guide To Best Incident Management Software

Avoiding downtime is imperative. To keep you sturdy against any unplanned disruptions there are Incident Management tools ensuring quick response, efficient resolution, and minimal impact on operations. This blog aims to be your go-to guide for navigating the diverse landscape of Incident Management platforms.

Incident Priority Matrix: A Comprehensive Guide

When multiple users are affected by an incident, it can quickly escalate into a chaotic situation. To effectively manage and prioritize such incidents, organizations need a robust incident priority matrix. An incident priority matrix is a tool organizations use to deal with critical issues quickly. It’s a roadmap for handling incidents efficiently.

Security - A Pillar of Reliability

When you think about making your service reliable, what standards and benchmarks are most important? The availability of services? Consistently fast responses? Accurate data? Prioritizing critical and common use cases? These are all important and deserve some focus, but today we’ll put the spotlight on an often overlooked pillar: security. ‍ Cybersecurity incidents can be the most devastating types of incident for your organization.

Introducing Workflows: Enhancing Automation to Incident Response

At Squadcast, we advocate for the principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), which emphasize the critical importance of automating routine tasks to boost efficiency in Incident Management. We're aiding organizations in implementing these principles with one of our newest features: 'Workflows'. Workflows has been designed to automate manual facets of your Incident lifecycle, all while ensuring human-in-the-loop execution for critical decisions.

The New SEC Rules and You

The Securities and Exchanges Commission published new rules for SEC registrants around disclosing incident details and response policies. Compliance with these new rules should be top of mind for any company – even if your org hasn’t hit the milestone of registering with the SEC, you should be prepared to be compliant when you take that step. ‍

Mastering Root Cause Analysis: A Guide for Site Reliability Engineers

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) play a vital role in ensuring the stability and performance of web services and are key in incident management. One of the core skills SREs need is the ability to conduct effective Root Cause Analysis (RCA) when issues arise. This guide is about how to improve your RCA skills for more effective post-incident analysis.Let's dive in.🔖 What is Prometheus Alertmanager? Read here!

Suppressing Alert Noise during Scheduled Maintenance

Alert noise is a common problem for IT teams that monitor and manage complex systems. Excessive unactionable alerts triggered by various sources, such as applications, servers, network devices, etc., can cause alert fatigue. The higher volume of alerts can be overwhelming, reducing the ability to respond to critical alerts. One event of possible alert noise is during scheduled maintenance, awhich is a common practice in the digital realm.

Building a Culture of Reliability: Why SREs Can't Do It Alone

Join Gremlin CTO and Founder Kolton Andrus to hear practical strategies for building a collaborative culture of reliability. High-velocity DevOps orgs and complex cloud-native architectures have made reliability harder than ever. Organizations are turning to SREs to make sure systems are reliable, but with so many stakeholders and competing priorities, many companies are still struggling to get ahead of the outages and incidents—SREs simply can't do it all by themselves.

Status Pages That Deliver: Top 10 Favorites

Status Pages represent an invaluable asset for websites and SaaS businesses, particularly in today's environment with prevalent outages and heightened user expectations for seamless uptime. Integral to any robust website monitoring strategy, these pages serve as centralized hubs, offering users a singular, authoritative source for tracking the status of websites and applications.

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.