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.

The costs of lackluster incident management are truly far-reaching. We’ve learned they go beyond explicit costs, like lost revenue and labor expenses. And that they go beyond the opportunity cost of engineers being diverted from building revenue-building features. The final area of incident cost that’s often overlooked is cultural drain.

Too often, complexity means confusion — and confusion is your worst enemy when it comes to efficient incident response. We recently found that poor incident management practices (like confusion about what to do or how to escalate an incident) can cost companies as much as $18 million a year.

Gimme 5 by FireHydrant is a look inside incident management at some of the world's most forward-thinking DevOps teams. In this episode, we talk with Alexia Loizides, Senior Manager of IT Service Management for payments platform Checkout.

In the ever-evolving world of software development, incidents are bound to happen. Whether it's an unexpected server crash, a critical bug impacting user experience, or a security breach, handling incidents swiftly and effectively is crucial for maintaining a seamless user experience and preserving business reputation. That's where incident response tools come in — to help you automate, document, communicate, and mitigate.