Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on Incident Management, On-Call, Incident Response and related technologies.

Beyond MTTR: 7 incident metrics that matter and 3 that don't

Pets.com was an online pet supply retailer founded in 1998, during the dot-com craze. In February 2000, it raised $83 million to go public based mainly on metrics like user acquisition, website traffic, and brand recognition. However, the profit margins were minimal and the marketing costs exorbitant, which led Pets.com to file for bankruptcy nine months after its IPO. The industry now recognizes these metrics as vanity metrics.

Execution Incident management on Slack

‍ ‍The article discusses streamlining on-call and incident management, focusing on the implementation of a new workflow. One key issue highlighted is the complexity of integrating various tools and platforms used for incident response, which can lead to fragmented communication and delayed resolutions. Another challenge is ensuring the efficiency of escalation protocols, where delays or missteps can impact response times.

Transfer to the on-call using Slack

‍Handover for on-call schedules in this workflow can be problematic due to inconsistent communication and lack of clear documentation. Misunderstandings can occur when shifts change, leading to missed alerts or incomplete information being passed along. Relying solely on Slack can result in important details being buried in message threads, making it hard to track ongoing issues.

Enhancing Incident Collaboration: Jira Notes Now Integrated with Squadcast

We're excited to share a significant improvement to our Jira integration aimed at enhancing your incident management workflow. With our latest update, you can now seamlessly sync notes between Jira tickets and Squadcast incidents. This bidirectional sync ensures that any comment added in one platform automatically appears in the other.

What's happening with ITSM in 2024?

The lines between IT service management (ITSM) and AIOps are blurring. The Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM, 20241 discusses this exciting convergence. Traditionally, ITSM has focused on structured processes and best practices. AIOps brings valuable new capabilities to service management, including automation, correlation, machine learning, and real-time insights. This convergence augments established ITSM frameworks and processes rather than replace them.

BYO Payload: Custom event sources for Signals have landed

Automated event payloads come in many shapes and sizes. These infinitely different event structures pose a problem for users who want to send them all to the same place to page on-call staff. Unless that on-call solution supports the schema directly, you’re out of luck. While we’re proud of the number of integrations we support today for event sources into on-call, we also think the best number that we should support is infinity.

Evaluating PagerDuty Alternatives in 2024 (Updated)

We live in times of instant gratification, where customers expect same-day delivery, round-the-clock tech support, and seamless browsing experiences. Disruptive technologies and continuous innovation have raised expectations for faster and uninterrupted delivery of services. This shift is compelling organizations to adapt their operations to meet these new demands and stay competitive.

Learning from Major Incidents: The Opportunities We're Missing

While they are untimely, stressful and likely to highlight communication breakdowns within an organization; incidents can be a powerful tool for learning and growth in organizations. When an incident occurs with a large impact, which it feels like we read about this happening in the news on a weekly basis, oftentimes the focus is on two things: stabilizing the situation, and controlling the narrative. Organizations often miss the opportunity incidents present: learning.

The Microsoft-CrowdStrike Outage: An In-Depth Analysis

On July 19, 2024, a significant outage impacted globally, causing widespread disruptions across various industries. This outage was primarily linked to a faulty update from CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, which led to severe issues on Windows systems. CrowdStrike is a leading cybersecurity company that specializes in protecting businesses from online threats.