On-call scheduling is tricky. Like, really tricky. It was one of the scariest parts when we decided to build a modern alerting system earlier this year. We knew we couldn't cut any corners on Day One of our release because it needed to be a fully loaded feature for someone to realistically use our product (and replace an incumbent). This meant including windowed restrictions, coverage requests, and simple to complex rotations.
Your status page (or lack thereof) has the opportunity to signal a lot about your brand — how transparent you are, how quickly you respond to incidents, how you communicate with your customers — and ultimately, this all seriously impacts your reliability. After all, as our CEO Robert put it in a recent interview on the SRE Path podcast, you don’t get to decide your reliability; your customers do.
As engineers, we didn't want to make Signals only a replacement for what the existing incumbents do today. We've had our own gripes for years about the information architecture many old companies still force you to implement today. You should be able to send us any signal from any data source and create an alert based on some conditions. We're no strangers to building features that include conditional logic, but we upped the ante when it came to Signals.
Welcome to the first Signals Captain’s Log! My name is Robert, and I’m a recovering on-call engineer and the CEO of FireHydrant. When we started our journey of building Signals, a viable replacement for PagerDuty, OpsGenie, etc, we decided very early that we would tell everyone what makes Signals unique, and what better way than to tell you how we’re building it (without revealing too much 😉). Let’s jump in.
October might be a spooky month, but we’re doing our best to make incidents less scary. We released a number of updates this month that focus on two main areas: Let’s jump in.
In the ever-evolving world of software engineering, the landscape is constantly shifting. New technologies emerge, best practices evolve, and how we build and run software continues to change. However, when it comes to incident alerting, it often feels like we're stuck in the past.
