When it comes to managing IT services, there are two schools of thought: DevOps and ITIL. DevOps is a newer approach, while ITIL has been around for decades. Both have their pros and cons, but which method is the right one for your business? Is ITIL still relevant in an era of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain and IoT?
Incident Commanders play a crucial role in the successful operation of IT service management (ITSM) teams. By applying best practices, they can ensure that incidents are handled quickly and efficiently, so that downtime for end users is kept to a minimum. This article provides an overview of the requirements for an effective Incident Commander in ITSM. It discusses the skills and competencies needed for effective incident management, and highlights some best practices for this role.
On-call management is one of the most important aspects of seamless IT service. Its aim is to ensure that the right person is notified in the case of an incident, so that they can react accordingly as quickly as possible. In certain cases, many people have to be notified. To achieve this as efficiently as possible, it is vital to have an up-to-date and smoothly functioning system.
At ilert customers are already benefitting from our easy to setup private or public status pages and auto generated SLA uptime graphs for their business services. However, we decided to push the graph topic a bit further with custom metrics. Using ilert metrics customers can showcase additional business data and insights into their services on their status pages.
This post highlights some of the features and improvements that we have released in the last month. If you want to submit your own ideas or vote on existing feature requests, you can now use our new public roadmap at roadmap.ilert.com.
On-call is a special working hour arrangement under employment law. It comes into effect when the employee is obliged to be contactable at least by phone, so they can start work in an emergency. On-call duty is generally counted as time specifically meant for work purposes. In practice, this means that employees are normally not allowed to work while on-call. However, there may be exceptions. For example, on-call employees may also work from home if they can be reached through their work device.
Status pages are a clever solution to bundle all your services, and see the status of them at one sight. We at iLert took this one step further: why not build your status page as code using Terraform? We want to show you how we make it possible, and how you can set it up for your own infrastructure - a real SaC solution.
More than 16 months ago we provided a solution to integrate HashiCorp Consul with our alerting and on-call management platform by using consul-alerts - a dedicated application that allows for communication between a deployed Consul instance and an existing iLert account. With more code infrastructure being moved to the cloud to ensure better security and availability, we too have ensured that our service integrates with the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP).
