Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2022

incident.fm, post-incident processes, and Crocs

As usual, it’s been all systems go at incident.io this month. New joiners, new features and new swag (yes, you heard right!). But most excitingly, we launched our new podcast this week. We had a blast recording it - we hope you enjoy listening to it just as much. Here’s a round-up of some of this month's highlights…

How to build a successful on-call team - incident.fm

In this podcast, our panellists discuss what it means to build a successful on-call team. Drawing on their experiences at fast growing start-ups and scale-ups, incident.io co-founders Pete and Chris cover everything from who should be on the rota and how to build a compassionate on-call culture, to compensation structures and tips for operationalising on-call.

7 ways teams are using incident.io's Decision Flows

One of my favourite features in incident.io is Decision Flows. With it, you can create a series of questions which eventually lead to a decision based on what you’ve answered. You can pull up this flow during an incident and it’ll guide you through the questions. It’s like having an experienced on-caller calmly guide you through what to do when a crisis hits. This is complementary to incident.io’s Workflows feature.

ITIL, ITSM and incident management. What are they and how do they fit together?

You’ve probably heard the terms ITIL and ITSM, but the distinction between the two can be a little unclear. Throw incident management into the mix, and the whole thing can feel pretty confusing. This article aims to explain what they are, the differences between the three, and importantly how they fit together. First, let’s establish what each of the terms actually mean.

The modern incident management software stack

We’re fortunate enough to speak to a huge number of companies about their incident management processes. In doing so, we’ve noticed an emergent trend in how modern companies are using software to support their incident management processes, and a common set of challenges faced by them too.

How we do realtime response with incident.io, Sentry & PagerDuty

Like most tech companies, we use an on-call rota and various alerting tools. We do this to respond to incidents before they’re reported. Proactively identifying issues and communicating to customers helps us provide great experiences and fosters trust. Internally, we’ve been using these alerting tools in tandem with our auto-create incidents feature. We’ve found that it’s made responding to the pager much smoother - it’s one less thing to do when you get paged at 2am.

Why you should ditch your overly detailed incident response plan

When critical incidents happen — which they inevitably do 😅 — and you’re in the middle of trying to figure out what the best thing to do is, it can feel comforting to know that you’ve got a pre-prepared list of instructions to follow, commonly known as an “incident response plan”: In theory this sounds quite simple, and a typical flow you might envision is: It might be tempting to think that the hardest part of running incidents is finding or writing a checkl

Building great developer experience at a startup

At incident.io, our number one priority in engineering is pace. The faster we can build great product, the more feedback we can get and the more value we can deliver for our customers. But pace is a funny thing. If you optimise for pace over a single month, you’ll quickly find yourself slowed down by the weight of your past mistakes.