In the world of SRE, incidents are unplanned investments in reliability. Why? Because they are valuable opportunities to learn and grow. This perspective can be difficult to communicate to other stakeholders. Some may be upset about the cost incurred or the affected customers. Others might not understand why incidents happen in the first place. It is important to show how the lessons of an incident are relevant to each stakeholder role.

New year, new SRE! We’ve said goodbye to 2020 and hello to 2021. Here’s some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community so far this year.

Downtime costs more than dollars. It also costs customer happiness and trust. So how do teams maximize for reliability while scaling? Tooling, communication, observability, and more all play into a complete reliability strategy. In a recent industry leaders’ roundtable hosted by Blameless, top experts discussed best practices for responding to incidents, scaling for reliability, and how to engineer with the customer in mind.

Gartner’s Market Guide for Emergency Mass Notification Solutions (EMNS) is a trusted report for security and risk management leaders. It provides insight into effective crisis communication procedures and identifies solutions that help perfect emergency management plans. The EMNS Market Guide has a large, loyal readership in several industries including, state and local government, healthcare, IT support and higher education.

If productivity is the engine that helps optimize how a business operates then being proactive is the oil and knowing how to effectively maintain productivity is regularly checking and replacing said oil. Whenever a service outage occurs it throws a wrench into the whole process and can put an entire organization in flux, mainly because the outage.

Is your organization on the lookout for an incident management tool? If yes, you may wonder- am I better off building my own? Our latest blog outlines some of the key factors to consider while choosing whether to build or buy an incident management software.

Incidents happen. They’re disruptive, they can be stressful, and if they aren’t managed well, they can cause chaos on your team. How your team manages incidents is only half the battle. How you let other stakeholders know what is going on is the other half. Alina Anderson from Smartsheet joined the Community team in our booth this year at PagerDuty Summit to talk about Incident Communications, and we’ve shared that conversation as an episode of our Page It to the Limit podcast.

2020 is (finally) over, and it’s safe to say that this very challenging year taught us once again that (as the old Danish proverb says) it’s difficult making predictions, especially about the future. Who would have imagined in January 2020 that we would find ourselves where we are today… And yet, as Tim Harford once wrote in the Financial Times, predictions are like Pringles: nobody thinks that there’s any great virtue in them but we find them hard to resist.

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!