Sentry is one of the most popular error tracking tools, which monitors your application for errors and exceptions. Sentry also has an open source version of the product that you can host yourself, but today we will talk about their cloud hosted product.
When you start researching how to improve the reliability of your software, you will soon run into terms like SLOs and SLAs. It can sound intimidating, but it's quite straightforward to understand. In this post, we will introduce these terms, the differences between them and how to start using them to make your systems more reliable.
Background We recently released the biggest overhaul to one of the core features of Spike.sh - On-call schedules. Software teams use on-call schedules to designate first responders who will handle issues when they occur.
Adding alerts across your monitoring tools is taking a proactive approach to reliability. But if there are too many alerts, then it can become counterproductive because team members will start ignoring alerts or remove the alerting altogether. Which is why you need a systematic approach to adding alerts and dealing with them.
An on-call schedule tells you and everyone in the team who will be the first responder when an issue happens in production. The on-call team member is responsible for investigating the issue, either fixing the issue herself or adding other people who can help fix it. Having an on-call schedule is important for building reliable systems because making someone responsible for production issues makes sure that they're not ignored.
Love 'em or hate 'em, mobile push notifications can be very useful. They are not as intrusive as a phone call and have better information formats and control than text messages. Which is why it can be very frustrating to not get push notifications for your favorite product because it doesn't have a mobile app. In this post, we will see how to get mobile push notifications from any service, even if they don't have a mobile app.
When an issue happens in your software in production, the channel to send the alert on depends on multiple factors. If it's a critical issue requiring immediate attention, you should alert the team member via phone call. But not all issues require a phone call, and in fact it may become annoying if your phone keeps ringing for minor issues. This is where other channels like SMS, Slack and mobile push notifications come in.
Passwords are dying. The cost of creating and maintaining passwords is becoming untenable. Which can be seen in the rise of users logging in with social products and developers outsourcing their pain to Auth0 and the likes. We decided to sidestep the password based authentication and went passwordless on our new product. Read on to see how you can go passwordless too.
We’re excited to announce Incident Timer - a “days without an incident” timer for software teams to keep track of major engineering incidents. As the people behind Spike.sh, we keep discussing how to build a culture of reliability with our customers. We loved the idea of safety/accident timers in factories which kept track of major accidents. It's a simple and elegant way to keep safety on everybody’s minds.
