Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network/Security Operations Center (NOC/SOC) engineers and service desk personnel are tasked to process numerous incidents as quickly as possible. However, to resolve an incident they are required to to perform various activities including collecting various operations data including metrics, logs, traces and more from different tools. In many cases, the process also involves coordinating with other IT personnel or creating a war room to bring the incident to closure.

One of my concerns as COVID-19 took hold in the US was what the impact on teams that are oncall in tech would be. It can be extremely challenging to be oncall during a “normal” time, and this has been anything but normal. So, I decided to create a survey to learn more about what people’s experiences have been. The survey was conducted from April 8 to April 27, 2020, via a Google Form. It was anonymous and had 141 respondents.

Ten years ago NewRelic, DataDog, Splunk, Dynatrace and SolarWinds built tools we loved to use. They were easy to implement and solved problems quickly and efficiently. Each company was known primarily for a single, well-conceived product. NewRelic’s APM. Splunk’s log file analyzer. DataDog’s server monitor. SolarWinds’ network performance monitor. These companies were beloved by users during the 2000s. Fast forward to 2020 and the world is very different.