Get ready for something exciting coming your way! xMatters latest release, Ninja, is on the horizon and will be available in production next week. Named in honor of the classic video game Ninja Gaiden, this latest batch of xMatters updates is sure to pack a punch — pun definitely intended. This release rolls out exciting new features like an intelligent Service Dependencies map and integrations with the broader Everbridge platform, among many other things.

Maybe it’s the time of year or the change in temperature, but sometimes using xMatters Flow Designer can seem a little… spooky? Maybe it’s the unlimited capability it offers, or maybe it’s that it can make changes for you without you being aware they’re taking place. But every once in a while, we’re not sure if we’ve just set up workflows too effectively, or that something a touch paranormal is happening with xMatters.

ChatOps has become an integral part of software development and IT operations, as teams rely on automated notifications to take the place of manual alerts. In the past, if there was an alert, someone would need to manually find that notification. Then, they would have contact team members to notify them one by one so they could start working on a resolution. In this complex network of communications, it was easy to lose information, duplicate work, and simply waste time coordinating the team.

Technology companies are at the forefront of innovation, changing the way consumers and the general public interact with their everyday lives. As the late Stan Lee so wisely stated, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and this heightened pressure often leaves little room for error when an issue arises—which happens more often than you’d think.

Atlassian’s Opsgenie is a leading incident alerting and on-call management tool, helping business manage their incident response and resolution needs. As part of the Atlassian product suite, Opsgenie has become one of the most popular solutions in the industry. But it’s not the only incident management tool on the market, and it’s vital when looking at Opsgenie and its alternatives, you do a deep dive into its features and abilities.

xMatters is part technology, part service reliability, and a little bit of magic. If you’ve spent time on the xMatters website, you’ll likely have seen a number of valuable use cases for the platform—it can alert SREs when there’s a website outage, it can accelerate product development for DevOps teams, it can manage on-call schedules and alerts for support teams.

Splunk On-Call (Formerly VictorOps) is a popular incident response and on-call management platform that allows engineering and operations teams to collaborate with ease and resolve issues faster. As part of the Splunk Observability Suite, Splunk On-Call is combined with related products to achieve the goal of bringing monitoring, troubleshooting, and investigation, into a single, comprehensive view — simplifying the process from incident detection to resolution.

When was the last time you read a good book? How about the last time you listened to an interesting podcast? For many, the latter is likely the more popular pastime. With routines disrupted and people housebound, podcasts exploded in popularity during the lockdown.

Distributed systems are everywhere. Although many teams don’t think of their applications as distributed systems, if they’re developing using container-based microservices and serverless functions instead of a monolith, they’re creating a distributed system. This change also means that monitoring needs are becoming more complex.