Maintaining the reliability of complex services just got easier with Operational Readiness Checklists. Service owners and engineering leaders can now evaluate and maintain the production readiness of the services their users rely on every day: spot risks in your service dependencies before they cause incidents, and respond quickly if they do. Before you put a new service into production, readiness checklists help you dot-your-is and cross-your-ts.

Using FireHydrant’s Runbooks, incident and retro data can be automatically sent to Confluence at any point in the incident lifecycle. For example, the moment you’ve resolved an incident FireHydrant can create a fresh Confluence page with all of the critical incident information stored in FireHydrant. When utilizing Runbook conditions, you can choose the perfect moment to send your FireHydrant retro to a Confluence workspace.

We’re excited to announce that private incidents are now available on FireHydrant. For the first time, incidents can have visibility limited to only permissioned users are able to see. This is a great solution for security and compliance teams who need to collaborate with their engineering counterparts to resolve incidents. The nature of these incidents that these teams work on dramatically differs from operational incidents.

As the holiday season aggressively approaches I want to perform a public service announcement for everyone toying with the idea of a code freeze for the holidays: please don't. It’s getting cold outside and the season of peppermint mochas is upon us, which might get you thinking about putting a code freeze in place for the holidays. A Word of warning: instituting a code freeze may have unintended consequences.

Ever heard the saying “Too many cooks”? If you’ve responded to incidents, you’ll likely understand the parallels. There are cases when incident command on a public channel isn’t the best option: Whatever your reason, we’ve got you covered. Now available, users can spin up a private slack channel for an incident. Read more how to do this here.

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of Service Catalog to help you better manage, query, and learn about the services that exist in your infrastructure. At FireHydrant, we envision a world where all software is reliable, and we’re on a mission to help every company that builds or operates software get closer to 100% reliability. Service Catalog helps you get closer to 100% reliability.

Productivity is defined by measuring the amount of output over a given time frame. However, this discounts the quality of output, which is crucial in moving toward a more complete definition of productivity. Relating to services, increases in productivity generally highlight the amount of feature releases over time. This leaves out the critical measurement of quality compared to quantity. This is where a Service Catalog can greatly enhance true productivity within an engineering organization.

If you're an engineer reading this, you might be wondering what I mean by the title. You might be a Site Reliability Engineer whose primary responsibility is to maintain the reliability of your company’s product/solution. You might be a software builder, a programmer responsible for building new capabilities and shipping them to production. All of these are important for any business to remain competitive.