Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Mattermost is a platform based on collaboration — not built simply for facilitating team and asynchronous communication, but built on the philosophy that having the ability to collaborate efficiently makes the world safer and more productive for everyone. This is true in many day-to-day situations in an organization, but it is especially true in the world of DevOps. When an emergency arises, information needs to be moved from person to person and team to team as quickly as possible.

It’s not everyday we are given a chance to get a first-hand look at how one of today’s leading and most advanced enterprises operates its IT stack. That’s why we were very excited when three senior IT executives from Expedia accepted our invitation to participate in a webinar discussing the company’s IT modernization journey.

Imagine the following scenario: A large retailer experiences a major IT incident that impacts their point-of-sale systems. Their on-call engineers are alerted to the issue and begin their work to resolve it immediately. Behind the scenes, teams are collaborating on a fix, but in the storefront, frustration and tension are growing. Customers are complaining about not being able to check out, and in-store personnel have no good answers as to why the outage happened—or when it will be resolved.

Digitalization of business has transformed the world and its industries. Software that upkeep digital initiatives are no longer categorized as a support function. Rather, they are integral to every business process. Modern organizations require infrastructure monitoring tools to detect anomalies and alerting systems to automate remediation processes.

Today, more than ever, mobilizing remote teams to triage and resolve outages separates is separating enterprises able to accelerate their digital initiatives from those who don’t. Observability has elevated our ability to quickly detect problems and ask questions in our system to triage and reduce “time to clue” — an increasingly important metric.

Welcome back! In the last blog we set up bidirectional communication between ServiceNow and Elasticsearch. We spent most of our time in ServiceNow, but from here on, we will be working in Elasticsearch and Kibana. By the end of this post, you'll have these two powerful applications working together to make incident management a breeze. Or at least a lot easier than you may be used to!

Our reliance on digital services continues to be heightened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For work, school, and play, digital remains the primary channel. This puts huge pressure on ITOps and DevOps teams, making it critical that they can collaborate easily to resolve incidents rapidly. Many modern ITOps and DevOps teams rely on one of PagerDuty’s key integration partners, Slack, to meet this need.

Black Friday is one of the biggest days of the year for online consumers and retailers alike. This year, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is reshaping Black Friday shopping — and digital consumers and retailers must plan accordingly. The coronavirus pandemic will likely cause Black Friday shopping to decline this year. As such, many digital retailers are launching early Black Friday sales, so they can capture consumers’ interest ahead of the competition.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. With the rising concern over cyberattacks in the distributed workforce, this week we explore the concept of cybersecurity incident response during a pandemic.