MSPs have the challenging job of handling difficult customers and alerts with insufficient information. However their performance is measured by how effectively they manage tickets, customers and meet SLAs. Clearly, ticketing plays an important role in the day to day activities of MSPs and IT Professionals. However, despite this importance, IT teams are often unable … Continued
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Crises communications for the cybersecurity age Preparing for a cyberattack has unfortunately become the sort of eventuality every CISO and IT need to recognize. While it is not something anyone wants to do, it is becoming necessary because it is no longer “if” your system will suffer an attack, but “when.” But imagine if IT … Continued
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WHAT IS CHATOPS Chat is a method of communication that has become tremendously popular over the past several years alongside the growth of DevOps. ChatOps – chat plus ops – is meant to provide better communication among IT professionals, and the systems they use. One source referred to it as ‘conversation-driven development’ because it begins … Continued
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Almost half of all technology professionals experience on-call as an integral part of their job. The typical IT on-call schedule often spells a 2 am wake up call that ends in a false alarms or for an issue the engineer can do little about. The results of these sorts of sleep interruptions and tensions inevitably lead … Continued
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The IT Incident Management Manifesto Effective IT incident management is concerned with deviations from, and threats to, the standard operation of services. During the course of time, even the best IT of department will experience incidents. How IT reacts to incidents is a key driver of  MTTR (mean time to repair) as well as customer … Continued
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A cautionary tale Faced with limited financing and a high burn rate, many startups focus on product development and application coding at the expense of back of operations engineering. The reasons for this focus are understandable to some extent. Companies need to develop product and unseasoned CEOs don’t always see the value in investing in … Continued
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The Great Wall of China began construction in 7 B.C. to protect the Chinese kingdom from Eurasian warriors. Chinese soldiers would marshal forces to protect the Great Wall from enemy attack by using smoke signals to send alerts from tower to tower. This method of alerting enabled messages to be sent to garrisons hundreds of miles … Continued
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On Beyond Tools A conversation I recently had with the DevOps manager of a major online retailer really made me think about DevOps monitoring tools. The manager and I discussed how several DevOps shops seem to define themselves based on the number of tools they have monitoring their build and IT stack. The point he … Continued
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Alert fatigue, or alarm fatigue is one of the most common challenges facing IT teams, DevOps engineers, and managed service providers (MSPs) today. When dozens (or even hundreds) of alerts arrive everyday, it becomes harder to separate the critical issues from the noise. Engineers miss sleep, teams lose focus, and sometimes the most urgent problems … Continued
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Seven steps to failure and greatness The more I read and learn about how to succeed in DevOps the more I realize how important failure is to the process. You need to fail to be great at DevOps. Netflix, for example, even takes it a step further by introducing failure into their testing process. In … Continued
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