The principle of fail fast is either the best thing since the transistor or nothing but hot air. It depends on the size of your organization and the cohesiveness of your teams. If your team members have a strong working relationship, and dev is well integrated with everyday work company-wide, you already have a good foundation for this particular agile thinking. Most companies that have grown beyond startup-size, and even some startups, may find this idea a bit jarring.

DevOps fits this odd niche between development and oversight. Like any “Wild West” type of position, pretty much anything goes. Your job is to think of everything including the stuff you haven’t thought of yet. You make the rules, and as long as the lights are on you’re considered a success. But alongside that freedom come the rumors and SLA myths that inspire such dread that you write them off as jokes.

Speed and function. Two words to live by when analyzing and optimizing your site, but 2021 comes with the need for an additional word: accessibility. From color blind accessibility in your UI, to increasingly detailed SLAs and speed requirements, where should you be spending your valuable resources to keep your competitive edge? Welcome to the future where, Time is Money, is relevant down to the millisecond.

Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) are part of the package when it comes to defining contracts, particularly with technology service vendors. An SLA serves to define the metrics, expectations, and penalties that the service provider will adhere to, and SLA reports create accountability.

This year, you tell yourself, you are going to be prepared! You will arm yourself with a new status page, and create web monitoring for every important service in your arsenal. Like the proverbial Eye of Sauron, nothing will escape your omnipotence. But too many tools in your set can contribute to alert fatigue. Alert fatigue occurs when your team starts to feel like they are always on call. They might already secretly feel this way.

Of all the polls, round-ups, and end-of-year wrap-ups, none gives us as much trepidation as the 2021 projected line-up for MVP hacks. As provider lists grow longer, and monitored data grows broader, we decided to distill our list of culprits down to the most likely suspects you’ll need to monitor. Ready? Okay!

Hacks that make headlines are painful for everyone involved, but with some clever preparation and web monitoring at your side you can avoid the worst of this pain. Those who have been victimized face a steep uphill battle to reclaim trust and authority. Unwitting victims, like customers and end users, suffer downtime or leaks containing personally identifiable information. If your eye is not on security, your organization is inviting these kinds of attacks.

Running synthetic monitoring thinking it will match up with a user’s reality throw for throw is a fool’s game. While you can test in prod, your testing parameters are limited by an insider’s knowledge of the transaction’s pathways – making true objectivity challenging to achieve in testing. Yet still, every transaction tells a story.

Waking up at 3 AM to deal with a downed service is a special kind of pain, isn’t it? A cross between annoyance, fury, and half-asleep melodrama. Maybe you curse yourself or your team. It’s ok. We’ve all been there. Here at Uptime.com we want to help you get through life’s painful little moments with some advice on how to choose a web monitoring provider. It’s what we do, so we hope our advice and suggestions will lead you to a good fit.

Big features make headlines, but they can be a challenge to deploy without staying dedicated to the finish line. Even the best laid projects can fall victim to time creep as more features are added and the idea gets refined. What’s on paper looks great!