As IT and DevOps teams rely more heavily on third-party services, the likelihood of an external incident affecting your customers increases. The 2017 Amazon S3 outage comes to mind as a particularly large downtime event that took thousands of websites down with it. When things go wrong with either an internal or external service, the right people need to be alerted to properly respond to the issue and communicate with customers.

You’re at dinner with friends, messages start coming in, and your favorite football team is about to win their first game in a very long time. You jump on the mobile app to see the last five minutes live. Then you get that dreaded error message… “Service is unavailable, please try again” On the other end of the message, it’s also just as frustrating—the call to war has sounded and the generals start assembling. The team meets in the war room—be it physical or virtual—and the clock is ticking.

One critical aspect of application support is an on-call strategy allowing the management of application issues outside of typical business hours. The effectiveness of a DevOps or IT on-call strategy is defined by its ability to resolve high-priority incidents in a timely manner. VictorOps provides a solution for the challenges associated with incident management through the use of collaborative incident management software.

Imagine you are driving a car on a freeway. Your speedometer is telling you you’re going 62 mph. But you “gotta go fast”. Faster than then 65 mph speed limit. So you go for it: first 68mph, then 75mph, then 80mph. Then you pass a police officer hiding in a speed trap. To your dismay, they pull you over and give you a ticket. All is not lost: there is a silver lining here. It’s the perfect analogy is to understand how indicators, objectives, and agreements all work with each other.