With every job I have, I come across a new observability tool that I can’t live without. It’s also something that’s a superpower for us at incident.io: we often detect bugs faster than our customers can report them to us. A couple of jobs ago, that was Prometheus. In my previous job, it was the fact that we retained all of our logs for 30 days, and had them available to search using the Elastic stack (back then, the ELK stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana).

Indexes can make a world of difference to performance in Postgres, but it’s not always obvious when you’ve written a query that could do with an index. Here we’ll cover.

The Digital Finance Strategy is a European directive that aims to support and develop digital finance in Europe while maintaining financial stability and consumer protection. There are three main components to the package: In this blog post, we’ll attempt to summarize the 113-page DORA proposal, highlighting how it will apply to incident management at financial entities. Side note: we also wrote a blog post about the other DORA, also known as the DevOps Research and Assessments.

The origin of incident.io goes back to our days building Monzo, a UK-based bank, where Stephen, Pete, and I first crossed paths. As a bank, compliance with numerous regulations was, unsurprisingly, a top priority. When it came to incident management—something we were very involved in—this meant that every aspect of reporting, policy adherence, and root cause analysis (or "contributing factors," as we called it) had to be managed consistently and meticulously.

In the world of incident management, a SEV1 incident is something of lore: you’ve either heard the tales of the critical outages that result in widespread disruption and chaos, or you’ve lived through one (and lived to tell the tale). SEV1 incidents are a game-changer. When one hits—think major outages or critical failures—it can seriously impact a business, leading to lost revenue, unhappy customers, and a whole lot of chaos.

Are incident reviews about learning or tracking actions? This question has sparked recent debate in incident management circles, including in my recent panel at SEV0 and in Lorin Hochstein’s post. Should the goal of an incident review be learning, or should it focus on tracking actionable improvements? When is the right time to discuss actions, and are they picked up just to make us feel better? From my experience, learning from incidents and identifying actions are inseparable.

Trust doesn’t just happen overnight. For us at incident.io, it’s been a journey—one that’s focused on people just as much as the product. From the start, we knew that building great incident management software wasn’t just about creating features and functionality. It was about building relationships, understanding our users, and truly being there for them when it matters most. Our focus has always been to help teams manage incidents better.

The world of tech is full of acronyms. SLOs are one of those that everyone talks about, but maybe not everyone fully gets. Whether you're nodding along in meetings or just hearing “SLO” for the first time, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we’ll break down what Service Level Objectives (SLOs) actually are, why they matter, and how they can help keep your systems (and your sanity) in check.

An Ultimate Guide to on-call schedules? You might think this sounds overly grandiose for what’s essentially putting people into a list and rotating through them. But you’d be flat-out wrong. Getting your on-call setup correct is as real and as important as it gets, and getting things wrong can lead to prolonged incidents, burnt out employees, and damaged company reputation.

Data quality testing is a subset of data observability. It is the process of evaluating data to ensure it meets the necessary standards of accuracy, consistency, completeness, and reliability before it is used in business operations or analytics. This involves validating data against predefined rules and criteria, such as checking for duplicates, verifying data formats, ensuring data integrity across systems, and confirming that all required fields are populated.