During major incidents, it’s crucial that all stakeholders are provided with the status updates they need. Those communications however need to be tailored to what the stakeholder actually needs, and provided in a streamlined format that works best for them. Just like alert fatigue, communication fatigue can be detrimental during an outage or other service reliability issue.
Business continuity is a crucial part of any scalable operations plan, but many businesses fail to realize how important it is until their first critical emergency. Only then does business continuity management come to the forefront of planning exercises, and stakeholders are forced to reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and determine if they can avoid it happening again, or be better prepared if it does. The true business continuity management lifecycle begins long before an incident.
Digital transformation is accelerating rapidly to include virtually all enterprise functions. Organizations of all size, across all industries, are leveraging digital technology to enhance customer service and improve work efficiency. Integrating automation into core business functions has become a must to stay aligned with the ongoing digital revolution. The growing migration to the cloud has resulted in the distribution of company data and applications across multiple locations. This means that many complex business processes must leverage IT resources from the cloud and on-premises. This is where automation and orchestration can greatly improve the performance and efficiency of these complex tasks.
Your new release tested fine on staging, but it’s not playing nicely with applications and services in the wild. Your monitoring application notices something going wrong and raises the alarm. But often raising the alarm isn’t enough – to solve complex issues, you might need to roll back to the last good deployment while you figure out the root cause and get multiple people working together on the solution.
You likely deal with major incidents regularly, but do you know who first coined the term? You also probably use the best tools on the market to help you fix those incidents, but do you know what some of the first tools were? When incident management is part of your day-to-day, it’s easy to think you know it all. But we have a hunch that there are some interesting facts that haven’t crossed your mind yet!
What’s one of the fundamental principles of DevOps? Automation. There are many ways to leverage automation to facilitate DevOps practices for enabling consistency, reliability, and efficiency within the organization. That’s why we’re taking serious strides to ensure that xMatters can allow full automation and coordination of the many tools we use to make incident management easier and more efficient for front-line responders.
Picture yourself trying to resolve a code error when you notice an additional issue outside your realm of expertise that's making matters worse. Your instinct is to get in touch with the right contact as quickly as possible to resolve the issue so that there's no further impact on the system's uptime. But what if you can't get in touch with them immediately, or don't know who to contact? Instead of trying to solve the problem without support, a DevOps toolchain could have mitigated this chain reaction from the start.
In the past five years, DevOps adoption has almost doubled. In fact, 74 percent of companies now use DevOps in some form. As a growing number of organizations seek to implement DevOps practices, the need for qualified DevOps engineers is soaring. But what exactly does a DevOps engineer do, and what skills are required to succeed in this in-demand role?
What makes an engineering team? Communication, collaboration, process, order, and common goals. Otherwise, they would just be a bunch of engineers. The same is true of their tools. Connectivity and process turn a bunch of tools into a DevOps toolchain. If you need a DevOp toolchain, you can use it to easily build an incident response process.
System outages happen to the best of us. Communicating with your customers and other stakeholders effectively during downtimes is vital to maintaining a solid relationship with them. When a system outage occurs, technical teams are tasked with swiftly locating the cause and resolving the issue, while communications teams are tasked with notifying stakeholders and customers about the outage to maintain transparency.
