When systems fail, every second counts. The difference between prolonged downtime and swift resolution often comes down to one critical role: the Incident Commander (IC). ICs are the backbone of calm and clarity in the middle of chaos. Let’s unpack what an Incident Commander does, why they matter, and how you can step into this crucial role.

If you’ve ever spent hours trying to figure out what went wrong in your code, you know how frustrating it can be without a clear trail to follow. Logs give you that trail, showing the steps your system took before something broke. Think of stack traces, they’re helpful for showing you where an error occurred. But they don’t always explain how it occurred. That’s where logs come into place.

As tech grows more dynamic, SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams constantly seek smarter, more efficient tools to manage incidents and alerts. While PagerDuty has been a go-to solution, many teams are discovering the limitations of outdated legacy tools. With high costs, rigid integrations, and feature bloat, it’s understandable why so many are exploring PagerDuty alternatives that offer streamlined, budget-friendly, and innovative solutions for incident management.

Uptime is a metric often used by organizations to measure website or application availability to their end users. Or as defined by Techopedia, uptime is a metric representing the percentage of time hardware, an IT system, or a device is operational. It indicates when a system is working, while downtime refers to when it is not. In today's fast-paced digital world, a website or application's availability is of utmost importance.

Downtime isn’t just about systems going offline. It’s about how well your business can adapt and keep moving forward. Whether it’s a minor glitch or a large-scale outage, it affects revenue, productivity, and the trust your customers place in your services. For instance, in July 2024, CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform faced an outage that cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion. Businesses that had proactive strategies recovered faster, minimizing the damage.

As an SRE, you constantly juggle proactive tasks to improve reliability and scalability with reactive firefighting when issues arise—often leaving little time to address the root causes. This is not unlike the firefighters of Ancient Rome, the Vigiles, who were tasked with not only responding to fires but also preventing them. Established in 6 AD under Emperor Augustus, the Vigiles patrolled the streets of Rome, looking for potential fire hazards.

Logs play a critical role in monitoring your applications and systems in terms of health, system behavior, and problem diagnosis. However, logs can assuredly bring value only if they are structured and well-formatted. Effective log formatting can help identify an issue to fix on time rather than having to sift through unorganized, hard-to-read logs. In this blog, we delve into 7 super-effective practices for production logging to help you maximize your log analysis capabilities.

In today’s complex environments such as cloud-native technologies, containers, and microservices-based architectures, reliable log monitoring is crucial for keeping your systems secure and resilient. Continuous monitoring enables organizations to stay in-control, providing proactive insights into system health and performance. With platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure churning out massive amounts of logs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

One of the biggest challenges for some of our customers was allowing non-engineering teams, such as Support, Sales, or Sustomer Success teams, to raise incidents for specific Dev/Infra/Security/Ops teams on Zenduty in a structured and efficient manner as soon as a customer reports an issue. In many organizations, we observed that non-technical team members often needed to switch between platforms, fill out complex forms, or reach out to multiple stakeholders manually to ensure that an issue is escalated.

In an increasingly connected world where businesses operate around the clock, the importance of having an effective on-call system cannot be stressed enough. With technological advances and the expectation of immediate attention to business-critical issues, creating a reliable on-call rotation and schedule is essential for ensuring operational continuity. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the various aspects of on-call rotations and schedules that you need to consider for 2024.