Seriously… What are people trying to say by “Your approach to IT Operations needs to mature”? Fair question. Billions of dollars are spent every year on software solutions to help IT organizations operate more efficiently. How could it be that with all that investment, we’re still not netting enough efficiency gains? The truth is, our technology landscape has evolved, our operational models have evolved, we have evolved.

How does an incident management workflow look? We give a step-by-step guide to the ITIL process and best practices for an effective resolution.

Wondering about SLAs and SLOs, and SLIs? We explain service level agreements, and service level objectives, service level indicators, their differences, and the importance of each.

Effective communication is critical during incidents. In order to minimize the impact of an incident and resolve it quickly, it's important that all stakeholders are kept informed and updated throughout the incident response process. However, communicating during an incident can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and a high level of stress. On-call engineers can have their focus disrupted by switching out of their diagnostic tools to issue communications.

When an incident occurs, it's important to take the time to review what happened, understand all the contributing factors, and identify systemic changes to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. This process is known as an incident retrospective. However, conducting incident retrospectives can be time-consuming and difficult, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and a large amount of data.

How do you create a great engineering team? Exclusively hire brilliant, tenured computer science PhDs. There we solved it. You can skip the next 400 words. (I can hear my college professor in my head saying “Humor might not be your strong suit”) Building a great engineering team isn’t easy. Understatement of the year. It’s not even a problem to be solved per se. We need to think about it as preparation to solve an infinite set of constantly evolving problems.

In the opening moments of an engineering incident, the most important aspect of a response plan is speed. Getting out of the gate quickly by leveraging automation to assemble the team can save precious moments during a critical engineering incident and make the difference between happy and unhappy customers downstream. This is why we’re excited to announce the integration of Blameless with OpsGenie.

SRE is a field defined by its constant evolution: from Google’s in-house secret recipe, to the hottest new practice for the biggest enterprise orgs, to a diverse and holistic mentality practiced by orgs of all sizes. Earlier this year, we co-sponsored the Catchpoint State of SRE survey, where we took the temperature of SRE where it was. Now, as we did in 2021 and 2020, we’ll turn to the future to speculate on what 2023 will bring for SRE. ‍

Software is hard… Maintaining software reliability is harder than it used to be. Software systems have grown dramatically in complexity, as they’re applied in a wider range of applications and environments. Many of which have become fundamental to the everyday function of our society. On the other hand, the pace of software development and release is also faster than ever. Innovating new features faster than competitors has become the key to success in a rapidly-changing market.