The DevOps market surpassed $8 billion in 2022 and isn't expected to drop anytime soon. However, 64% of companies struggle to fill DevOps roles. The reason for this shortage is that DevOps professionals are a rare breed, as their role requires both hypertechnical and broad skills.

We’ve all been guilty of it. Creating rules and filters to hide those alerts that, for the most part, are just noise. Only then to have notifications about a legitimate issue also get swept up by those same filters. There’s only so many times we can break concentration and disrupt productivity before getting fed up with false positives and ignoring everything completely.

Good alerting hygiene consists of a few components: chasing down alert conditions, reflecting on incidents, and thinking of what makes a signal good or bad. The hope is that we can get our alerts to the stage where they will page us when they should, and they won’t when they shouldn’t. However, the reality of alerting in a socio-technical system must cater not only to the mess around the signal, but also to the longer term interpretation of alerts by people and automation acting on them.

Once the unsung heroes of the digital realm, engineers are now caught in a cycle of perpetual interruptions thanks to alerting systems that haven't kept pace with evolving needs. A constant stream of notifications has turned on-call duty into a source of frustration, stress, and poor work-life balance. In 2021, 83% percent of software engineers surveyed reported feelings of burnout from high workloads, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets.

Downtime costs money. That's why an effective incident management system is crucial. We're excited to announce our new partnership with Tulip to help manufacturers manage incidents better. This integration is an important advancement for complex production processes that require an in-depth operational strategy.

Regardless of the attention given to configuring monitoring solutions, the dynamic nature of today’s modern infrastructures can impact alert functionality. Optimizing network performance in complex, hybrid infrastructures leveraging SD-WANs, real-time provisioning and other advanced features is really tough. So what should IT teams do when receiving false alerts or notifications that appear inaccurate?

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams often deal with alert fatigue. It's like when you get too alert that it's hard to keep up, making it tougher to respond quickly and adding extra stress to the current responsibilities. According to a study, 62% of participants noted that alert fatigue played a role in employee turnover, while 60% reported that it resulted in internal conflicts within their organization.

$575 million was the cost of a huge IT incident that hit Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the U.S. In September 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that impacted approximately 147 million consumers. The breach occurred due to a vulnerability in the Apache Struts web application framework, which Equifax failed to patch in time. This vulnerability allowed hackers to access the company's systems and exfiltrate sensitive data. ‍