Recognizing the difference between major and critical incidents is essential for IT operations, as downtime can result in significant financial losses for businesses. Gartner highlights that effective incident management can cut downtime by as much as 40% . Major incidents disrupt business operations but are typically confined to specific systems or processes.

March 5th was a big day for incident.io as we released our on-call product to the world. Nine months of listening to our customers, coding, fixing, testing, and polishing came together for our biggest product launch to date. Releasing On-call was a huge milestone and represented the next step in our journey as a company.

ServiceOps is a technology-enabled approach that unifies IT operations and IT service management (ITSM) teams to improve incident management. In a recent survey of more than 400 global IT leaders by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 96% of respondents reported positive results from implementing the approach. Adoption rates are high: 75% have either an active effort or a formal initiative to streamline collaboration between ITSM and ITOps teams.

The concept of Round Robin comes from sports. And it has nothing to do with anyone called Robin, but the french word ruban (ribbon). In a Round Robin tournament, all participants face each other by taking turns. When applied to on-call schedules, a Round Robin escalation policy means that responders assigned to a level will take turns responding to alerts. When is this strategy useful and when isn’t?

Incidents are unavoidable in software development and IT. As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), one of the tools you’ll use frequently is an incident timeline. The incident timeline provides a real-time report on any incident, including alerts, system updates, issue severity changes, manual chat entries, and more.

The age of information technology has rapidly expanded to include a wide range of necessary roles to manage and optimize operational frameworks. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), Development Operations (DevOps), and Platform Engineers have become invaluable within this digital landscape. Here, you’ll learn more about each role, how they differ, and what they bring to the table.

At incident.io we use infrastructure as code for configuring everything we can, and we feel that there’s no reason we should exclude our own product from that. As well as configuring things like Google Cloud Platform, Sentry and Spacelift via our infrastructure repo, we also configure incident.io. On your first day as an engineer here, the first PR that you make is to our infrastructure repo.

Are you documenting your incident response process, and are unsure which you should be writing—a runbook or a playbook? Could these be two names for the same kind of document? Read on to learn about two different and complementary structures: playbooks and runbooks. The two are used in tandem, and because the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they can be mistaken for one another.