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.

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.

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.