The typical DevOps on-call engineer is responding to alerts, triaging based on service impact, troubleshooting high priority incidents, and taking action to remediate issues. Automation tools like AWS Systems Manager can be a big help in reducing some of the more repetitive work and allowing engineers to focus on the most important tasks.

In the IT world, if a server can fail or traffic can overload the network – it will. And the consequences of downtime are significant. Many IT organizations face database, hardware, and software downtime that last short periods or can shut down the business for days. According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime alone is $5,600 per minute. What measures can organizations take to reduce IT downtime?

Major incidents are inevitable, and fixing them is the top priority for any ops or DevOps team. But what happens after service is restored? Do teams take the time to fully understand what went wrong, then follow up to prevent it happening again?

Downtime happens. That’s a fact, and it’s nearly impossible to predict. But there are some days when the chances of downtime are higher. Maybe it’s higher-than-normal website traffic, or increased app sign-ups. When planned high-traffic days are on the horizon, it’s a good idea to spend some extra time preparing for the worst.