The pressure in the natural gas pipelines under three Massachusetts communities spiked to 12 times their normal level last week, just before the explosions and fires that destroyed dozens of homes and killed an 18-year-old man. Columbia Gas went under fire for their mismanagement of the incident. The NTSB says a Columbia Gas control room … Continued
read more
Businesses and organizations shouldn’t simply rely on monitoring tools for security management. Such tools don’t provide redundancies, time-stamped audit trails and other elements needed for incident resolution. Also, security threats are rampant and tend to go unchecked even with the most reliable monitoring service. That’s why companies require critical alerting to become aware of security … Continued
read more
Managing alert noise from monitoring systems like SolarWinds can be tricky and failing to order the noise can cause: Alert fatigue: too many alerts waking engineers up at night will not only cause tired engineers, but also hurt your team’s effectiveness at maintaining effectiveness. Decreased MTTR: Because there are too many alerts, it will take extra … Continued
read moreYour incident management process is greatly impacted by the tools you have available. And technology is key when it comes to gaining visibility and obtaining contextual data. You need tools to send alerts when incidents arise, as well as track activity for compliance reporting purposes. Whether you’re in healthcare, information technology or work at a … Continued
read more
NoOps eschews critical alerting at its own peril Many start-ups’ embrace serverless architectures such as AWS, believing they will be able to adopt NoOps and avoid the need for critical alerting and ITOps. NoOps means no worries about servers as everything is on the cloud and if there are no worries about servers then there is … Continued
read more
IT professionals rely on monitoring tools to let them know about events such as serious outages, downed servers or viruses. Monitoring tools are designed to send emails through standard protocols when any of these serious events occur in the infrastructure. However, when you can learn about incidents through monitoring tools, there is very little … Continued
read more
Not all alerts are created equal Even though most IT teams have adopted IT alerting practices, they are often far from monitoring and alerting best practices. It’s not enough to just have an alerting tool. Like a monitoring tool, if left uncalibrated, alerts will simply produce a sea of noisy data. Instead, teams should calibrate … Continued
read more
How to Win the Alert Fatigue Battle IT engineers and DevOps teams cannot help but experience alert fatigue when they receive after-hour alerts lacking context or relevance. Messages come in, for example, telling the engineer on-call that disk space is used up. Does this mean 60% used up or 100% used up? Or an after-hours … Continued
read more
Advanced Network Products (ANP) is a Philadelphia-based MSP specializing in services such as WAN, LAN, desktop and server management and support. ANP uses OnPage to manage issues such as downed services, security or connectivity. Business Situation ANP needed to implement a better incident management solution to handle critical incidents. Tickets created in IT monitoring tools … Continued
read more
How to make sure IT on-call works for you I spent a bit of time on Reddit the other day and thought it interesting just how many posts were focused on IT on-call and on-call scheduling. Some posts were rants on horrible customers – who hasn’t had some of those? Some actually wrote about positive … Continued
read more