Incidents are inevitable but how you react to them can make all the difference. Not all incidents are created equal but the main challenge that many SRE teams face is to find a way to react to the incidents properly. When an incident occurs, the major question you need to answer is "how severe is it?" We use incident severity levels that help determine the severity based on some predefined guidelines.

In an always-digital world where users expect reliable services, businesses must measure two critical metrics: reliability and availability. However, reliability and availability are terms often used interchangeably but understanding the difference is crucial when building systems that users can trust and depend on. Both metrics are vital, but depending on your use case, you might prioritize one over the other. Take the 2017 AWS S3 outage.

When something breaks, customers don’t wait. They expect fast solutions. In fact, 90% of customers expect a quick response when they reach out. If your team can’t handle high-severity tickets quickly, it’s trust lost, revenue impacted, and customers looking elsewhere. The good news? There’s a better way to stay ahead of critical issues. Before we jump to the solution, let’s deep dive into the major problems businesses face when incident response gets delayed.

The incident response lifecycle is the backbone of any organization’s security and reliability strategy. Handling a data breach or security incident effectively requires structured incident response steps that help secure systems, prevent further damage, and restore normalcy. In this blog, we’ll explore the incident response life cycle, break down its phases, and uncover best practices to enhance your organization’s security posture and resilience against incidents before they occur.

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.