Imagine you’re in the middle of a critical project, and suddenly, your system crashes. Or perhaps it’s the middle of the night, and your server goes down, affecting countless users. Some IT incidents are inevitable, but the way you manage them makes all the difference in minimizing their impact. You know that proper incident management is critical – and that incidents can become costly.

Incidents put systems and organizations to the test. They pose particular challenges at scale: in complex distributed environments overseen by many different teams, managing incidents requires extensive structure and planning. But incidents, by definition, break structures and foil plans. As a result, they demand carefully orchestrated yet highly flexible forms of response. This post will provide a look into how we manage incidents at Datadog. We’ll cover our entire process.

In a world where efficiency and precision are the cornerstones of progress, automation has become the unsung hero across diverse industries. From manufacturing floors to customer service, its transformative power has reshaped the way we work and deliver services. Today, we embark on a journey to explore the profound influence of automation on healthcare, where each automated process is a progressive step towards optimizing care delivery and reshaping the future of patient-centered care delivery.

Alert noise is a common problem for IT teams that monitor and manage complex systems. Excessive unactionable alerts triggered by various sources, such as applications, servers, network devices, etc., can cause alert fatigue. The higher volume of alerts can be overwhelming, reducing the ability to respond to critical alerts. One event of possible alert noise is during scheduled maintenance, awhich is a common practice in the digital realm.

Network monitoring and alerting provide the foundation for efficient IT operations and cyber resilience. By keeping track of the status and performance of network infrastructure and applications, network monitoring tools can automatically generate alerts when defined thresholds are exceeded or specific events occur. These network monitoring alerts allow IT teams to detect outages, performance degradation, and potential security incidents so they can respond swiftly to minimize disruption.

Status Pages represent an invaluable asset for websites and SaaS businesses, particularly in today's environment with prevalent outages and heightened user expectations for seamless uptime. Integral to any robust website monitoring strategy, these pages serve as centralized hubs, offering users a singular, authoritative source for tracking the status of websites and applications.

This blog post is adapted from my talk at SRECon EMEA 2023 - original slides are available here! Status pages are a simple yet underutilized element of incident communication. Done well, they’re a low-lift way to keep your customers and stakeholders informed when incidents impact them. But without a solid approach, updating status pages can easily become a tedious and often neglected task during incidents. In this post, we’ll cover some tips to get your status page right.