Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

The financial services industry is experiencing a profound shift. Customers now demand a flawless experience across all touchpoints, including online platforms, mobile devices, ATMs, and physical branches. Any lapse in performance or reliability in these channels can lead to dissatisfaction. Moreover, the competition is intensifying as technology-focused companies, more nimble and innovative than traditional counterparts, are continuously disrupting the market.

There was recently some confusion in the office that I thought was worth researching and addressing. Depending on who you are talking to, you may hear the acronym DORA in one of two contexts. (OK, three if you’re talking to a preschooler!) It might be in relation to DORA metrics–that is, a set of metrics associated with DevOps Research and Assessment.