Everyone experiences stress at work—thankfully, it’s a topic folks aren’t shying away from anymore. But for on-call engineers, alert fatigue is a phenomenon closer to home. Unfortunately, like stress, it can be just as insidious and drastically impact those it affects. First discussed in the context of hospital settings, this phrase later entered engineering circles.

Today, incident management is a core part of organizations both big and small. But what if you don't have a program in place...where do you start? Or what if incident management is already a key part of your org, but you're looking to optimize it—where do you kick things off in that case? Consider another situation: What if you're an established organization with years of incident management experience—what are some things that you can do to take things to the next level?

On this weeks' episode of The Debrief, we chatted with Jeff Forde, an Architect on the Platform Engineering team at Collectors. With a background spanning finance, healthcare, and various product-led startups, Forde has honed his expertise in DevOps, site reliability, and platform engineering. Beyond his professional life, he's also a dedicated volunteer first responder and certified fire instructor in Connecticut, offering him a unique perspective on managing incidents of all typesz.

It’s 3am. You wake up to a blaring alarm, the sound burned into your soul from countless sleepless nights. You reach for your phone, ‘press 4 to acknowledge’ and bleary eyed, you open your laptop, grab a coffee and get to work. The next hour is a whirlwind—bringing services back online, keeping colleagues in the loop, maintaining a list of action items, updating a status page that will be seen by millions of customers. Potentially for the fifth time this month.

For a lot of teams, incident management can be a bit of a headache. It's stressful. It's not optimized. The whole process can feel like it's being held together with tape. Worst of all? Responders are the ones feeling the brunt of it. But in reality, your customers are, too. Think about it: But honestly, the situation doesn't even have to be so dire. Things can be, generally speaking, totally fine.

See the full report—Incident metrics pulse: How organizations are measuring their incident management What metrics do you look at to measure how efficient your incident response is? This is a question we get asked all the time and one we empathize with deeply. While there are several well-established incident metrics that organizations commonly use, like MTTR and raw counts of incidents, a vast number of them are ineffective, or worse still entirely misleading.

Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Charlie, the project lead for Assistant, to get a peek behind this game-changing product.

Incident summaries are the source of truth for responders joining an incident at any point. But the reality is that with so many things happening at once—like needing to respond to the actual incident—updating these summaries can fall by the wayside. Enter, Suggested Summaries, one of our newest features powered by AI. In this episode, you'll hear from Milly, the project lead for Suggested Summaries, to get a peek behind the curtain of this game-changing feature.

It's fair to say that effectively managing an on-call rota is crucial for ensuring the 'round-the-clock availability of your services. But it's more than that. Spending the time getting your rotas right also empowers and protects the folks who make it all possible: your team. Some best practices for doing this include using software to automate scheduling, setting up teams with clearly defined responsibilities, establishing escalation policies, and defining time limits for issue resolution.

Asking engineers to be on-call is usually a tough sell. Think about it: if someone asked you to add even more to your already packed workload, that would be a difficult proposition to say yes to. And that’s before you mention that this work typically happens late into the day and even (some) sleepless nights. Companies need to have an on-call function to keep their services and products running smoothly—it’s practically a non-negotiable at this point.