Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As consumers, we expect the products and software we buy to work 100% of the time. Unfortunately, that’s impossible. Even the most reliable products and services experience some disruption in service. Crashes, bugs, timeouts. There are a ton of contributing factors, so it's impossible to distill disruptions down to a single cause. That said, technology is becoming more and more sophisticated, and so is the infrastructure that supports it.

Enterprise IT is just a different animal. Whether it’s operating at scale, undertaking massive migrations, working across scores of teams, or addressing tight security requirements, engineers at these organizations can face different obstacles than their counterparts at smaller organizations and startups.

The travel industry is experiencing an unprecedented surge in demand from people seeking adventure and eager to explore new destinations. Given an abundance of choice and the desire to have a personalized experience, customers are turning to tour operators to remove complexity from planning so they can focus on the holiday and not on the process of planning it.

Sometimes, two concepts overlap so much that it’s hard to view them in isolation. Today, incident management and problem management fit this description to a tee. This wasn’t always the case. For a long time, these two ITIL concepts were seen as distinct—with specialized roles overseeing each. Incident management existed in one corner and problem management in the other. Then came the DevOps movement and the lines suddenly became blurred. So where do they stand today?

Incident management is a critical aspect of IT service management (ITSM) that revolves around restoring normal service operations as swiftly as possible after an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality. Also referred to as “incidents,” these interruptions could range from a minor issue like a single user being unable to access a service to a significant problem such as a server crash or network outage affecting many users.

Alexander is Senior SRE at Prezi, a video and visual communications software company. As a team, the Prezi SREs provide multiple services within the company. One of those is the observability stack where Prezi heavily relies on Grafana. Companies are always evolving to run more smoothly, serve their customers better, and operate in a way that is cost-effective.