Often, outages are planned. In fact, in most organizations, outages are typically not caused by something going wrong, but because some kind of IT operation requires your team to take a system temporarily offline. Communicating scheduled maintenance is just as important, if not more important than alerting users to unplanned outages.

This is the first in a three-post series themed around Ops-led DevOps, where I’ll explore the relationship between observability and a set of software delivery lifecycle practices that support the adoption of DevOps practices and the transition from project to product-centric ways of working. I’ll start with Site Reliability Engineering, move onto Value Stream Management and finish with Continuous Delivery.

What tool does your staff use most to communicate? If you’re like a lot of other companies, you may have recently started using Microsoft Teams. In April of 2020, Microsoft reported having 75 million users with a push of 31 million new users due to the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. At Uptrends, we think it is important that our customers can get their monitoring alerts using the communication channels they use most, so we’ve added a new Microsoft Teams integration.

There’s next to nothing in the world that hasn’t been impacted by COVID-19. We’ve now reached the stage of the pandemic where we’re evaluating the effect on every part of our lives. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with IT leaders and reflecting on how the business technology landscape has been shifting.

Aside from ensuring each service is working properly, one of the most challenging parts of managing a cloud-based infrastructure is cost monitoring. There are countless services to keep track of—including storage, databases, and computation—each with their own complex pricing structure. Monitoring cloud costs is quite different from other organizational costs in that it can be difficult to detect anomalies in real-time and accurately forecast monthly costs.