Announcing the following integrations: Workato, Jira Ops

“I need to be notified if there’s a significant event ongoing with SignalFx.” This is what I tell my team. However, despite being the CTO of a monitoring company, creating the right set of alerts for me to stay informed of incidents in progress or potential issues was harder than it seemed at first glance. Why?

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 in Columbus, Ohio, registered pressures of 6 pounds per square inch last Thursday in pipelines that are intended to carry just 0.5 PSI.

Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network is a non-profit organ procurement organization that coordinates organ and tissue donation and provides public education on donation in Illinois and northwest Indiana. As one of 58 OPOs that make up the nation’s donation system, Gift of Hope works with 180 hospitals and serves 12 million people in their donation service area.

In my previous post, I talked about the real costs of alert fatigue — the toll it can take on your engineers as well as your business — and some suggestions for rethinking alerting. In part 2 of this series, I’ll share some best practices for fine-tuning Sensu to help reduce alert fatigue.

Have you ever gotten that dreaded text from your boss: “The site is down”? Maybe you were meeting with a customer. Or having dinner with your family. Maybe you were presenting at a conference. Doesn’t matter. Whatever else you were doing, now you’re doing emergency incident communication too. You check in with your team leads and confirm there is a problem. You let your boss know the response is under way.

Another holiday season will soon be upon us, and many retailers and eCommerce businesses are already making plans. As you take inventory of what you learned last holiday season, let’s start with some lessons learned by the entire retail industry this time last year. In addition to stocking up on hot items and planning your promotions, the most competitive sites found that using AI/ML to optimize customer experience not only kept customers happy, it dramatically increased their revenues.

Alert fatigue occurs when one is exposed to a large number of frequent alarms (alerts) and consequently becomes desensitized to them. This problem is not specific to technology fields: most jobs that require on-call, such as doctors, experience it in slightly different manners, but the problem is the same.

We are happy to announce that Roles and Permissions are now available for every user. You can manage your team members and their access and usage of hubs in the Control Panel.

AIOps is the application of analytics and machine learning to automate some aspects of DevOps and IT operations management. Like all new technologies, it may take time to discover the best ways to get practical results. However, AIOps is already showing a lot of promise in three key uses cases.