When looking to invest money in your engineering teams, what gives the best return? Hiring more staff to enable bigger projects and more diversified skill sets? Training engineers to uplevel their ability and productivity? Increasing salaries to retain the best talent? These are all great ideas that should be exercised often. But there’s one other investment worth considering that can offer huge benefits for relatively small amounts of money: tooling.

DevOps engineers and Site Reliability Engineers are vitally important to the continued health of your product and business. We all know it’s true, and yet people in these roles often feel underappreciated and undervalued. This sort of work runs into the issue of “when process and infrastructure break, it gets shoved in the spotlight; but when everything works perfectly, no one notices.” ‍

From the very beginning of Blameless, we had two vital missions. First, to offer a solution to what we saw as a mounting crisis of reliability by offering a comprehensive, easy-to-use, reliability platform. Second, to educate the companies facing this crisis on the fundamentals of incident management, cutting-edge best practices, and the cultural values that sustain learning and growth.

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.