Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’ve worked on a team that has adopted Agile techniques, you’ve probably heard of a retrospective. If not, here’s the TL;DR: A retrospective is a meeting in which a team connects regularly to reflect on what happens throughout a project and continuously improve how they work moving forward.

TL;DR: Fast-moving IT stacks see frequent, long and painful outages. Thousands of changes – planned, unplanned and shadow changes – are one of the main reasons behind this. Until now, IT Ops, NOC & DevOps teams didn’t have an easy way to get a real-time answer to the “What Changed?” question – the answer that can help reduce the duration of outages and incidents in these fast-moving IT stacks. Now, with BigPanda Root Cause Changes, they do.

Whether you’re slinging code, managing developers, wrangling servers, or filling most other roles in the modern tech firm, you care about keeping your software running while bringing home the bacon. If your website or application is down, you’re not making money. (Or, if you aren’t in this for profit, your message isn’t getting to the people who need it.) Therefore, it’s everyone’s job to keep things running smoothly.

Is your InfoSec or DevSecOps team ready to resolve issues as quickly as possible? To help accelerate response times, we’re happy to announce the alpha release of the Mattermost Incident Response Workflow application for Enterprise Edition, supported in Mattermost 5.12 and later. The app is designed specifically for incident response and enables you to connect all your workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and collaborate on incidents—all without leaving Mattermost.

Many organizations today are dealing today a lot of complexity and disconnected tools. Teams and departments are running in parallel but siloed from each other. People are burned out from a lot of manual work, and everyone is crunched for time. This is not a happy ecosystem to live in. If this digital ecosystem doesn’t work together, your teams don’t know what’s going on and they lack the right information.

I’m going to assume most people who read this blog are familiar with PagerDuty. But just in case anyone isn’t, PagerDuty is a tool we use in IT to notify us if some predefined check has failed. Maybe a key process has died or maybe we’re not seeing our expected traffic volume or maybe our server has stopped responding to ping. Whatever it is, PagerDuty will relentlessly, remorselessly, and loudly notify whoever is on call that something needs attention.

Software teams seeking to provide better products and services must focus on faster release cycles. But running reliable systems at ever-increasing speeds presents a big challenge. Software teams can have both quality and speed by adjusting the policies around ongoing service ownership. While on-call plays a large part in this model, advancement in knowledge, more resilient code, increased collaboration, and practice also mean engineers don’t have to wake up to a nightmare.