Downtime isn’t just about systems going offline. It’s about how well your business can adapt and keep moving forward. Whether it’s a minor glitch or a large-scale outage, it affects revenue, productivity, and the trust your customers place in your services. For instance, in July 2024, CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform faced an outage that cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion. Businesses that had proactive strategies recovered faster, minimizing the damage.

As an SRE, you constantly juggle proactive tasks to improve reliability and scalability with reactive firefighting when issues arise—often leaving little time to address the root causes. This is not unlike the firefighters of Ancient Rome, the Vigiles, who were tasked with not only responding to fires but also preventing them. Established in 6 AD under Emperor Augustus, the Vigiles patrolled the streets of Rome, looking for potential fire hazards.

Logs play a critical role in monitoring your applications and systems in terms of health, system behavior, and problem diagnosis. However, logs can assuredly bring value only if they are structured and well-formatted. Effective log formatting can help identify an issue to fix on time rather than having to sift through unorganized, hard-to-read logs. In this blog, we delve into 7 super-effective practices for production logging to help you maximize your log analysis capabilities.

In today’s complex environments such as cloud-native technologies, containers, and microservices-based architectures, reliable log monitoring is crucial for keeping your systems secure and resilient. Continuous monitoring enables organizations to stay in-control, providing proactive insights into system health and performance. With platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure churning out massive amounts of logs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

One of the biggest challenges for some of our customers was allowing non-engineering teams, such as Support, Sales, or Sustomer Success teams, to raise incidents for specific Dev/Infra/Security/Ops teams on Zenduty in a structured and efficient manner as soon as a customer reports an issue. In many organizations, we observed that non-technical team members often needed to switch between platforms, fill out complex forms, or reach out to multiple stakeholders manually to ensure that an issue is escalated.

In an increasingly connected world where businesses operate around the clock, the importance of having an effective on-call system cannot be stressed enough. With technological advances and the expectation of immediate attention to business-critical issues, creating a reliable on-call rotation and schedule is essential for ensuring operational continuity. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the various aspects of on-call rotations and schedules that you need to consider for 2024.

If you’ve been wondering about setting up a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) at your company, you’re not alone. Many companies, including our product team here at Zenduty, have found them incredibly valuable for getting direct input from clients, shaping product roadmaps, and building stronger relationships. Let’s dive into what makes a CAB effective, drawing from some real-world experiences shared by some of the best in the business.

Stand-up meetings are a cornerstone for any engineering team. When done right, they can make a huge difference in keeping everyone on the same page, fostering collaboration, and building a strong team culture. However, getting them right can be a bit tricky. Drawing from our own experience of running engineering stand-ups at Zenduty, and insights from some of the best engineering managers in my network, I'd love to share some tips and insights on how to make your stand-ups effective.

We are excited to announce a significant enhancement to our scheduling feature based on your valuable feedback! At Zenduty, we understand the importance of flexibility and efficiency in managing on-call schedules and ensuring seamless incident response. Previously, only team managers had the capability to edit schedules and add overrides. This meant that non-manager team members had to reach out to their managers to request override coverage, potentially delaying critical adjustments.

Shubham Srivastava from our team had the pleasure of meeting Andreas Grabner at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe earlier this year. Andreas wears many hats in his daily work, primarily serving as a DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, where he has dedicated over 16 years to shape the Observability solutions we see today. He is also a Developer Advocate at Keptn – helping teams automate and orchestrate their deployments end-to-end and plays an active role as an Ambassador in the CNCF community.