Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on Service Reliability Engineering and related technologies.

Monitoring Third Party Vendors as an Ops Engineer/SRE

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops? As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

Convert OpenTelemetry Traces to Metrics using SpanMetrics Connector

What if your have already implemented tracing but lacks robust metrics capabilities? Enter SpanConnector: a tool that bridges this gap by converting trace data into actionable metrics. This post details the workings of SpanConnector, providing a guide on its configuration and implementation.

Automating SLO Management: Boost Efficiency, Accuracy, and Reliability

82% of organizations plan to increase their use of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), with 95% reporting that SLO adoption drives better business decisions, according to the Nobl9 2023 State of SLOs report. The traditional manual management of SLOs often results in inefficiencies and human errors, hindering productivity. Automating SLO management transforms these processes, enhancing accuracy and operational efficiency.

Decoding Severity: A Guide to Differentiating Major vs Critical Incidents

Recognizing the difference between major and critical incidents is essential for IT operations, as downtime can result in significant financial losses for businesses. Gartner highlights that effective incident management can cut downtime by as much as 40% . Major incidents disrupt business operations but are typically confined to specific systems or processes.

Round Robin escalation policies: do's and don'ts

The concept of Round Robin comes from sports. And it has nothing to do with anyone called Robin, but the french word ruban (ribbon). In a Round Robin tournament, all participants face each other by taking turns. When applied to on-call schedules, a Round Robin escalation policy means that responders assigned to a level will take turns responding to alerts. When is this strategy useful and when isn’t?