Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Fear, Identity & Flaky Tests: AI in Reliability w/ Dana Lawson (CTO, Netlify)

The self-healing systems that SREs have dreamed about for a decade aren't a distant promise anymore — they're already being built, and the biggest barrier left is cultural. Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify, has spent over 25 years in the trenches of developer infrastructure, from sysadmin roots to running the platform that powers 5% of the internet.

Incident Management in 2026: Best Practices, Tools Guide & More

When systems go down, every minute counts. You need more than just quick fixes. You need a solid system to spot problems early, take action fast, and learn from each incident to keep your users happy. That's what incident management is. In this guide, we'll walk through everything you need to know about incident management, from basic concepts to advanced strategies used by top DevOps teams.

Building an Alert Routing setup that never misses a critical incident

Critical incidents have a direct impact on your business revenue and the trust your customers place in you. The longer a critical incident goes unnoticed, the higher the stakes. A reliable alert routing setup automatically catches these incidents the moment they trigger and gets them to the right person without delay. This guide walks you through how to build that reliable routing setup.

How to handle midnight incidents without waking everyone up

When a midnight incident triggers, the goal is not to wake your entire team. It’s to reach the one person who can act on it. Everyone else should sleep through it undisturbed. The difference between a team that handles midnight incidents well and one that doesn’t usually comes down to a few decisions made ahead of time. Which incidents actually need a midnight response? Who should get the call? And what should happen to everything else? This guide walks through those decisions.

Routing incidents the way their severity and priority demand

Severity and priority are two labels that describe different things about an incident. Severity covers the blast radius: how much of your system or how many customers are affected. Priority covers the urgency: how quickly someone needs to act. Routing rules then use these labels to load the right escalation policy for each incident. This guide covers how to define your severity and priority levels and map them to escalation policies.

The Modern Incident Management Playbook: From Alert Fatigue to AI-Driven Orchestration

A complete guide to modern incident management and how it’s transforming into a strategic business function. Kamalesh Srikanth , Product Strategy Leader at AlertOps If you’ve worked in IT, infrastructure, or operations for any length of time, you’ve lived through the chaos of a critical incident. Systems down, alerts blaring, Slack pinging, emails piling up and somewhere in that noise, your team is trying to figure out what actually broke and how to fix it fast.

The Interface Is the Intelligence: Why Action-First UX Beats Conversational AI in Incident Response

It’s 2:47 a.m. A P1 alert fires. The on-call engineer opens ilert, sees the AI has already investigated, and is presented with three remediation options. What happens next is the moment we obsessed over. ‍ Most AI tooling at that moment hands the engineer a numbered list in a chat window and waits. The engineer reads, selects mentally, types a reply, and the agent resumes.

Introducing OnPage's Next-Gen Enterprise Management Console | Faster Incident Response Starts Here!

OnPage has introduced a next-generation Enterprise Web Management Console, designed to modernize how critical response teams manage on-call, incident alerting, and HIPAA-compliant communication workflows at scale. This platform-wide upgrade goes beyond a UI refresh. It delivers a more intuitive, visible, and controllable experience for teams operating in high-stakes environments across IT, healthcare, and other industries.

(2026 Buyer's Guide) Best On-Call Management and Incident Alerting Platforms for On-call IT Teams

Disclosure: This comparison is written by our product marketing team that works closely with IT operations and on-call workflows. While we build on-call management and incident alerting software ourselves, this guide is designed to help teams understand how different tools fit different operational needs. We believe there is no single “best” tool. Only the right fit for a given team.

How to route incidents based on what their payload says

Every incident arrives with a payload, and that payload usually tells you far more than whether something broke. It points to which service is affected and how serious the issue looks. It also carries context about which customers are on the receiving end of that failure. The service name, severity, customer context — all of it can feed directly into routing decisions. This guide explores how to read those parts of the payload and use them to route incidents automatically.

How to Reduce MTTR with AI

The quick download: AI reduces MTTR by helping teams detect issues sooner, pinpoint root causes faster, and resolve incidents with less manual effort. IT downtime costs organizations an average of $9,000 per minute. AI-powered observability can cut incident resolution time by up to 70%. Here’s what it takes to get there. Every minute an incident goes unresolved, the meter is running.

Incident correlation: Cross-domain visibility. Smarter triage. Faster L1 teams.

IT incidents are rarely isolated. A network disruption can trigger degradations in infrastructure, which can ripple and cause application errors and end up causing a flood of user complaints. When an L1 operator looks at a single incident, they see only part of the story. Outside their immediate scope, other incidents are actively occurring that are either directly related or impacted by the same underlying cause. Without broader visibility, there is no way to know.

Still writing Manual Postmortem Reports? Do it in one click with SIGNL4!

Stop wasting hours on postmortem incident reports. With SIGNL4’s new Postmortem Report feature, you can generate a complete incident review in seconds — directly from any alert. See who acknowledged or resolved the alert Track response times instantly View full notification history (with delivery status) AI-generated summary for fast insights No more manual documentation. No more missing details.

Meet Your Virtual Responder: PagerDuty's SRE Agent for AI-Driven Reliability

Modern SRE teams face an overwhelming challenge: too many signals, too little time. Incidents are faster, systems are more complex, and reliability targets only get stricter. What if you had a teammate who could jump in instantly—context-aware, tireless, and armed with your runbooks, metrics, and alert data? Introducing PagerDuty’s SRE Agent, the next evolution in AI-driven operations.

Top 5 Incident Response Platforms for 2026

An incident response platform helps organizations manage, track, and resolve IT incidents quickly and efficiently. With the right platform, teams can minimize downtime, reduce the impact of incidents, and lower their Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). ‍ In this article, we’ll explore the top 5 incident response platforms for 2026, helping you choose the best solution for your needs. ‍

How to set up Incident Alert Routing rules effectively

When an incident triggers, the question is not just what broke but also how urgent it is and who on your team needs to respond. Alert Routing rules answer those questions automatically. You define the conditions once and the right response follows every time an incident triggers. Every Alert Routing rule does one or more of these three things: Three conditions drive all of it: incident payload, time of occurrence, and frequency.

How to migrate your paging tool without breaking your team

Most engineering teams don’t migrate their on-call and paging systems unless absolutely necessary. No matter how painful their current solution, it's one of those changes that people put off for as long as possible because the cost is real. The disruption, the retraining, the risk of missing a critical page during the transition. It's not something you do on a whim.

Best On-Call Management Software for Teams that Need Faster Response Time

Teams running modern infrastructure can’t afford slow incident response. On-call management software ensures the right person is alerted instantly, incidents are escalated intelligently, and downtime is minimized. This guide breaks down the best on-call management software for 2026, helping teams choose the right platform based on their specific use case, response requirements, and operational complexity.

Best Incident Management Tools & ITSM Practices to Reduce MTTR in 2026

Here’s a scenario most IT teams know too well: a single error message lights up the monitoring dashboard at 2 a.m. Within seconds, calls are coming in from customers. Within minutes, the revenue meter is running. If your team is still figuring out who owns the incident while that meter ticks, you’ve already lost precious time. According to 2024 EMA Research, unplanned IT downtime now costs organizations an average of $14,056 per minute, rising to $23,750 per minute for large enterprises.

The Hidden Failure Points in Your AI Strategy

New models, new agents, new capabilities. It seems like every week there’s a new must-have AI function. It’s no surprise that leaders are feeling pressure to move quickly. At a PagerDuty on Tour event, a customer joked that they couldn’t fathom having a five-year AI strategy; it makes way more sense to have a five-minute one. There’s truth in that comment.

Eliminating Manual Steps in Alerting Processes

Many alerting processes still rely heavily on manual work. In some situations, this is necessary – for example, when human approval is required. However, in many operational and incident-response scenarios, manual handling is simply the result of outdated workflows. In these cases, automation can significantly improve response times, efficiency, and reliability.

How agentic ITOps overcomes observability tool gaps

As enterprise ITOps teams monitor increasingly complex, cloud-based, containerized systems, traditional observability practices are struggling to keep up. As IT infrastructure complexity increases, the typical response is to layer on more monitoring, logging, and instrumentation.

How Catalog changes the game for long-term maintenance

Every incident platform needs to know who owns what. Which team owns which service. Which backlog to send follow-ups to. Which escalation path to page when something breaks. The problem is that most platforms encode this ownership logic separately in every configuration: alert routing, workflows, ITSM ticket syncing, and more. Each one maintains its own copy of the same information, in its own format.

Product Update - March 2026

IncidentHub's latest product updates focus on improving the public status page, adding integrations with ticketing systems, private status page ingestion, and making the notifications more useful to the end user. Some of these improvements are driven by user feedback. Feedback is what makes the product better, and I am personally grateful to all our customers who have shared their feedback with us.

How agentic AI for ITOps overcomes observability tool gaps

As enterprise ITOps teams monitor increasingly complex, cloud-based, containerized systems, traditional observability practices are struggling to keep up. As IT infrastructure complexity increases, the typical response is to layer on more monitoring, logging, and instrumentation.

The Incident You Never Had: Deterministic Simulations w/ Will Wilson (Antithesis CEO)

Most reliability engineering happens after something breaks. Will Wilson thinks that's the wrong place to be. As co-founder and CEO of Antithesis, the autonomous testing platform that just raised $105M in a Series A led by Jane Street, Will has spent years building the infrastructure to catch failure modes before they ever reach production. His starting point is uncomfortable: the testing practices most teams rely on are structurally incapable of finding the bugs that cause real incidents.

Beyond the pager: what to do when Opsgenie sunsets

OpsGenie is going away in 2027, forcing a migration decision for thousands of teams. But this isn't just a tooling swap — it's a rare chance to upgrade how you respond to incidents. Because the real pain in incident response isn’t paging. It’s everything that happens after the alert: coordination, clarity, communication, ownership, and follow-through. Most teams solve this through heroics and tool-juggling across chat, tickets, and docs. That approach doesn't scale.

incident.io product showcase: Post-mortems

A full walkthrough of our completely rebuilt post-mortems experience. We cover AI-generated first drafts from your incident data, accuracy review, inline rewriting, a collaborative editor with live incident context, meeting notes with Scribe, and management tooling including dashboards, exports, and analytics. Post-mortems are included in incident.io Response. AI features and Scribe are available on Pro and Enterprise plans.

Announcing the 2026 State of AI-First Operations Report

For years, our annual State of Digital Operations report has been the industry benchmark for understanding how organizations manage incidents, build resilience, and evolve their operational practices. Each year, we survey hundreds of business and operations leaders worldwide to capture the challenges, priorities, and emerging practices shaping digital operations.

Event Intelligence for Agentic IT Operations

Modern IT teams are experimenting with AI agents. But individual agents, working in isolation are not enough. To truly achieve Agentic IT Operations, organisations need a platform — one that coordinates, governs, and contextualises AI-driven actions across the entire IT landscape. That’s where Interlink Software comes in.

Incident Response Reimagined: Accelerating Resolution with AI Agents

Learn how PagerDuty is leveraging Agentic AI to transform the incident lifecycle from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention. Manuel Reis, Software Developer at PagerDuty, demonstrates how new tools like the SRE Agent and Scribe Agent assist engineers during high-pressure outages by autonomously triaging alerts, querying logs in tools like Grafana, and transcribing context directly into incident channels.

8 Video Workflows That Optimize IT Operations

It wasn't that long ago when Agile revolutionized IT workflow, introducing a feedback-forward process that ensured each project task was perfected and approved before moving on to the next. To execute a task with high precision, an assigned team needs a reliable arsenal of tools, including video. Project managers also need updated tool stacks to lead complex projects to completion.

Turning team knowledge into Alert Routing rules

Over time, on-call teams build up a quiet layer of knowledge about their systems. Someone learns that a specific error code always means phone calls are failing. Someone else figures out that a particular background job fires a warning every night and has never once needed attention. That knowledge shapes how your team responds to incidents every day. But when it only lives in people’s heads, your response depends entirely on the right person being available at the right time.

Do Veterinarians Go On Call? Reinventing OnCall Management for Veterinary Clinics

Veterinary clinics typically operate during standard 9–5 business hours. But emergencies don’t follow a schedule. The puppy you just brought home might decide that the rubber duck your toddler dropped on the floor looks like the perfect snack. Or your dog might get into a box of Valentine’s Day desserts you left on the counter. Suddenly, what seemed like an ordinary evening turns into a frantic search for help.

The Hidden Cost of AI Productivity: When Efficiency Turns Into "Brain Fry"

A new HBR study reveals that the race to build and manage AI agents may be pushing knowledge workers toward a new form of cognitive overload. If you spend any time on LinkedIn these days, you’ve probably seen the same type of post over and over. Someone proudly announces they built an AI agent that now writes their emails, analyzes data, drafts presentations, and maybe even ships code.

The Path to Autonomous Operations: PagerDuty Spring 26 Release

Shipping velocity has never been faster, but reliability can’t be the trade-off either. For engineering leaders, deploying AI for operations is no longer optional. The question is whether you’ll lead the transformation or fall behind. The hard truth? Organizations can’t keep relying on humans as the first line of defense. Not when the pace of shipping has never been faster. It’s simply not scalable.

On-call compensation for IT engineers in 2026

Imagine it’s 2 AM and a critical system flatlines without warning. A bleary-eyed on-call engineer scrambles to restore service, shielding customers from a major outage that could torpedo your next Service Level Objective (SLO) review. Yet when daylight returns, debates over fair on-call compensation start all over again: What’s “just” pay for sleepless nights, unpredictable pings, and rapid-fire incident responses?

Do Veterinarians Go Oncall? And How Does It Work?

Veterinary clinics typically operate during standard 9–5 business hours. But emergencies don’t follow a schedule. Having the option to reach an on-call veterinarian through a dedicated after-hours emergency line provides peace of mind not only for pet owners, but, believe it or not, for veterinarians as well. So how does ONCALL work for veterinary clinics? Find out more through our Doggy Explain video.#dog.

On-call Engineers - Stop Incidents before They Turn into Disasters

Critical incidents don’t follow your schedule. With SIGNL4, you’ll ���������� �������� ���� ���������� - even while you sleep. SIGNL4’s mobile app delivers critical alerts that can ���������������� ������������ ��������, ensuring you �������� ���������������� ��������������, ����������������. ������������ ����������������: Real-time alerting via mobile push, SMS, email, and voice calls Mobile push notifications that can override “Do Not Disturb” Built-in on-call scheduling Persistent alerts that repeat until acknowledged Customizable ringtones and notification sounds.

How to set up Alert Routing rules effectively

Different incidents need different levels of attention. Some need a phone call at 3 AM and others can wait until morning. Alert Routing rules are what let you act on that understanding without doing it manually every time. An effective routing setup does three things: Getting all three of these working is what makes a routing setup useful.

Global Industrial Leader Coordinates Severity 1 Incidents with Clarity and Speed

“The first 15 minutes of a Sev-1 incident often determine the next 15 hours.” For a multi-billion dollar global industrial leader, managing Severity 1 incidents across a complex, distributed infrastructure is a high-stakes operation. When systems go down, the impact is felt instantly across production lines and global logistics.

What is Ambient AI in Healthcare? Revolutionizing Clinical Care, Efficiency, and Outcomes

You probably use ambient AI every day without even knowing it. When your Apple Watch is telling you to stand up after sitting too long, your CGM recommends you eat a snack, or even when your smart home lights dim around the time you go to bed, every night…that’s ambient AI. Among other things, ambient AI is there to help you stay healthy, tracking what you do in the background and making decisions based on your previous actions and preferences.

Win by Being Bold

Everyone your sales team is reaching out to is drowning in emails. The way to cut through isn't to send more of them. It's to get personal, get creative, and get bold. That's the philosophy baked into incident.io's sales culture: experiment constantly, celebrate the inputs as much as the wins, and never play it safe. This video gives you a real look at what it's like to be part of a sales team at one of the most exciting startups right now. There are many more wins to come, and we want the right people here for them.

SharePoint Online outage on March 6, 2026

On March 6, 2026, SharePoint Online experienced a disruption that prevented some users from loading sites, accessing files, or authenticating successfully. The incident did not affect every user, but reports came in from multiple regions including North America and Europe. StatusGator detected the problem early through user outage reports and triggered an Early Warning Signal before Microsoft officially acknowledged the issue.

Escalation policy for critical incidents

When a critical incident triggers, there’s no time to figure out who to call. That decision needs to be made well before the incident arrives. A dedicated escalation policy for critical incidents gives your team a clear path to follow the moment things go wrong, rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be around. This guide covers the key decisions involved in building that policy.

A compass for setting up your escalation policy

Setting up an escalation policy for the first time can feel like standing at a crossroads with no clear sign pointing the way. You could escalate based on severity, by team, or by who’s available and all of them are valid. Knowing which one fits your situation is the hard part. Think of this guide as your compass for that decision.

Top 12 AI and LLM Observability Tools in 2026 Compared: Open-Source and Paid

Artificial intelligence has moved far beyond experimentation. In 2026, AI systems are embedded into customer support workflows, clinical decision support tools, fraud detection engines, and internal copilots across nearly every industry. Adoption is accelerating quickly. According to McKinsey, 23% of organizations are already scaling agentic AI systems, while another 39% are actively experimenting with them. Yet the path to reliable production AI remains uncertain.

Service Status Update: March 5, 2026

On March 2, 2026 at 23:30:24 UTC, we experienced an issue where the Zoom AI scribe was unable to join calls, rendering Zoom meeting transcription unavailable for all users. On March 2, 2026 at 23:30:24 UTC, we experienced an issue where the Zoom AI scribe was unable to join calls, rendering Zoom meeting transcription unavailable for all users. The issue persisted from approximately February 28 through March 5, 2026.

The post-mortem problem

Post-mortems are one of the most consistently underperforming rituals in software engineering. Most teams do them. Most teams know theirs aren't working. And most teams reach for the same diagnosis: the templates are too long, nobody has time, and nobody reads them anyway. These aren't wrong observations. But they're symptoms, not causes. The actual problem is that somewhere along the way, the post-mortem stopped being a piece of communication and became a compliance artifact.

Burnout Doesn't Ask Permission: Recognizing, Recovering, and Rebuilding w/ Stephen Townsend

Burnout doesn't announce itself. For Stephen Townsend, SRE team lead and host of the Slight Reliability podcast, it crept in over months of mounting pressure on a massive transformation program, and announced itself overnight with an inability to sleep. In this episode, Stephen shares his personal burnout story with rare honesty: the physical symptoms he dismissed, the org structure that left him without autonomy, and the full year it took to recover.

Attention, Incident Responders! This mobile app makes you an Incident Response Superhero

�������� ������������, ������ ������ �������� ����������������������: Never miss a critical alert againStay ahead of critical incidents - respond 10x faster Reach the right people at the right time Tracking, Escalations & Acknowledgements Resolve issues from anywhere Full auditability Empower your operations team.

What are the MOST Promising and High-Demand IT Jobs Right Now

Jobs in the technological sector have been shrinking. The Chief Economist at Glassdoor states that in the first half of 2025, tech employment shrank by an average of 1,583 jobs each month. Looking at tech employment cumulatively, it has declined by 1.9% since peaking in 2022. Despite this downturn, opportunities still exist for skilled professionals who can adapt to evolving industry demands. Companies continue to invest in high-impact positions that drive innovation, efficiency, and growth.