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Latest Posts

FireHydrant is now AI-powered for faster, smarter incidents

Over the last five years we’ve seen our customers run 583,954 incidents more efficiently thanks to a shared workspace, powerful Runbook automations, and auto-captured data. Yet despite a great deal of progress, incident efficiency hasn’t achieved peak potential. We talk to a lot of folks that are still stuck in the muck: new responders struggle to get up to speed quickly, incident commanders wade through post-incident drudgery, and knowledge silos prevent comprehensive improvements.

3 questions to ask of any DevOps tool in 2024

Is your DevOps tool stack out of control? I feel like every day, I talk to someone who feels this pain. The technological golden age of the past few years created a lot of niche tools, but now that CFOs and boards alike are demanding budget restraint, many of these tools are being scrutinized. The reality of the situation is that it’s not good enough for a tool to do one thing anymore.

Finally: alerting and on-call scheduling for how you actually work

TL;DR You deserve a better alerting and on-call tool. So we built Signals. In our early days, we often used the tagline, “You just got paged. Now what?” It encapsulated how FireHydrant solved for all of the messy bits that come after your alert is fired, from incident declaration all the way through to retrospective. At the time, we saw alerting and on-call scheduling as a solved problem.

New MTTX analytics to drive your reliability roadmap

Analytics are great. We can all agree there. But not all analytics are created equal. FireHydrant has long offered incident analytics dashboards that provide an in-depth look at the entire incident lifecycle. You can see how incidents impact services and teams, understand retrospective participation and completion, and even get insight into follow-ups. But great analytics do more than simply organize data. They help you tell a story.

The revolution in critical incident response at Dock: efficient integration and service improvement

In this article, we will explore how Dock is working to significantly enhance its response time to critical incidents, emphasizing effective integration between tools as key to success. We will address how we challenge the conventional approach by shifting the focus from Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) to Mean Time to Combat (MTTC), a customized metric that measures the time between incident detection and effective communication involving professionals capable of resolving it.

The alert fatigue dilemma: A call for change in how we manage on-call

Once the unsung heroes of the digital realm, engineers are now caught in a cycle of perpetual interruptions thanks to alerting systems that haven't kept pace with evolving needs. A constant stream of notifications has turned on-call duty into a source of frustration, stress, and poor work-life balance. In 2021, 83% percent of software engineers surveyed reported feelings of burnout from high workloads, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets.

Now in beta: alerting for modern DevOps teams

Although FireHydrant has spent five years focused on what happens after your team (erg, I mean service 🙄) gets paged, the topic of alerting often comes up in discussions with our community. People are tired of paying big bucks for software that’s expensive, bloated, and hasn’t seen much innovation. Clearly, there’s a problem here – and we’re tackling it head on.

Captain's Log: Diving into our scheduling design

On-call scheduling is tricky. Like, really tricky. It was one of the scariest parts when we decided to build a modern alerting system earlier this year. We knew we couldn't cut any corners on Day One of our release because it needed to be a fully loaded feature for someone to realistically use our product (and replace an incumbent). This meant including windowed restrictions, coverage requests, and simple to complex rotations.

Your guide to better incident status pages

Your status page (or lack thereof) has the opportunity to signal a lot about your brand — how transparent you are, how quickly you respond to incidents, how you communicate with your customers — and ultimately, this all seriously impacts your reliability. After all, as our CEO Robert put it in a recent interview on the SRE Path podcast, you don’t get to decide your reliability; your customers do.