I often hear folks in my network being triggered by interactions with product managers within their companies whenever they follow up on certain product-related issues. The triggering phrase invariably is “It’s a known issue”. And they often wonder, well if it’s a known issue, why on earth isn’t anything done about it?

Regardless of where you are in your product journey, it is impreative that you constitute a customer advisory board who can share perspectives into their business challenges so that you can gain insights on how to shape our road map, develop new features, formulate your vision and give you constant feedback on your product. So, how many customers should to include in a customer advisory board? Should you target higher level stakeholder or individual users?

One of the primary things you need to figure out whenever your team is formulating your incident management process is describing in words what a Sev0(your highest incident priority) looks like. “Website doesn’t work” is certainly no enough. “Website is up but a key resource (ie CSS file) is missing, rendering the website unusable” is still not enough. “A single page on the website is 404’ing” is not a major but could be a minor incident.

Nagios is one of the most widely used open-source network monitoring software used by thousands of NOC teams globally to monitor the health of a vast array of their hosts and services. Most teams rely on Emails as their primary Nagios alert notification channel, which may take a few minutes to respond to by your NOC team.

Most companies today compile a set of metrics for their product teams to regularly report on to the company management. This includes a variety of product performance metrics(usage frequency, churn rate, NPS, etc.). But a lot of them struggle a bit with product discovery activities. So how do your track discovery?

Constantly talking to your users about their business problems and incorporating those solutions is key to the success off your product and company. There are many ways to incorporate the voice of your users into your product planning. Formulate an experience brief that’s less than 2 pages, or a 5-minute clip of user interviews. The best is to have devs in the interviews and discovery activities with you as well.

Over the years there have been a bunch of great talks on site reliability and incident response. Below are a few we thought stood out(in no specific order) and is defintely worth a peek.

For folks who’ve made post mortems more meaningful at your company, it is important that you spread that learning around. A lot of companies have teams that do postmortems really well and a lot of engineering managers(EMs) want to spread it organically, but writing and following postmortems is the kind of practice that a lot of devs really just don’t think about or care about and it can get extremely hard to force this practice, especially without support from upper management.

In the following example, we will be creating a histogram in Grafana. Our datasource is Prometheus’s cumulative histogram. I have captured the metrics using micrometer’s distribution summary.

One of the most popular cloud disaster recovery models in the industry today is the “pilot light” model where critical applications and data are in already place so that it can be quickly retrieved if needed. A simple question one must ask before adopting this model is what thought has been given to whether the AWS/GCP/Azure APIs will work and if the requisite capacity will be available in the alternate region.