Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Everyone experiences stress at work—thankfully, it’s a topic folks aren’t shying away from anymore. But for on-call engineers, alert fatigue is a phenomenon closer to home. Unfortunately, like stress, it can be just as insidious and drastically impact those it affects. First discussed in the context of hospital settings, this phrase later entered engineering circles.

Today, incident management is a core part of organizations both big and small. But what if you don't have a program in place...where do you start? Or what if incident management is already a key part of your org, but you're looking to optimize it—where do you kick things off in that case? Consider another situation: What if you're an established organization with years of incident management experience—what are some things that you can do to take things to the next level?

On this weeks' episode of The Debrief, we chatted with Jeff Forde, an Architect on the Platform Engineering team at Collectors. With a background spanning finance, healthcare, and various product-led startups, Forde has honed his expertise in DevOps, site reliability, and platform engineering. Beyond his professional life, he's also a dedicated volunteer first responder and certified fire instructor in Connecticut, offering him a unique perspective on managing incidents of all typesz.

It’s 3am. You wake up to a blaring alarm, the sound burned into your soul from countless sleepless nights. You reach for your phone, ‘press 4 to acknowledge’ and bleary eyed, you open your laptop, grab a coffee and get to work. The next hour is a whirlwind—bringing services back online, keeping colleagues in the loop, maintaining a list of action items, updating a status page that will be seen by millions of customers. Potentially for the fifth time this month.