In the world of always-on services, many organizations have taken the path to modernize their IT operations to provide greater agility, lower cost, and most importantly, to deliver frictionless digital customer experiences. Is your DevOps team deploying more frequently than operations can support? Are you struggling to keep up with the maintenance issues associated with aging software? Modernizing your IT operations can be the key to overcoming these complexities.

Although IT incidents have always been a concern, the increase in customer-facing technology adds the cost of a bad customer experience to the cost of responding to and remediating an incident. While in a perfect world, you’d be able to prevent incidents from happening in the first place, the reality is they do happen and more often than most of us would like to admit.

When an incident strikes, an organization’s reputation and revenue, as well as customer trust are at stake. Assembling an effective incident response team is critical to minimizing the incident’s impact. But what exactly is an incident response team? Who should be a part of the team and what are their responsibilities? Successful incident responses require a team with a diverse set of problem-solving and communication skills.

With Halloween behind us and the holiday shopping season fast approaching, engineering and product teams know what that means: code freezes! At xMatters, code freezes are a part of our product release process in anticipation of the busiest — and most important — time of the year for many of our customers. But code freezes are just one piece of the puzzle in how we ensure our customers have the most reliable experiences. The way our product releases are designed is much more than that.

As infrastructure stacks grow increasingly complex and involve an ever-growing number of services, system failures are becoming more and more common. There can be a variety of reasons why systems fail: software bugs, misconfiguration or interactions between services that cause unexpected behavior, the network is down, and of course, those rare occasions where natural events can render data centers inoperative.

The concept and development of DevOps have significantly changed the way IT teams work in the last decade. Small and large teams alike can see the difference when they switch from traditional software development cycles to a DevOps cycle: accelerated innovation, improved collaboration, faster time to market. And the list of benefits continues to grow. To effectively embrace DevOps, however, is not an easy task. Thankfully, there are ways to navigate this challenging journey.

xMatters is a crucial tool for DevOps teams, and no one knows that better than our customers. Over the years we’ve published countless DevOps case studies, but when it comes to the test of time, some have stood up and have continued to make an impact.

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.