There is a famous quote that goes like this…‘For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.’ At least in the world of incident response, nothing is more apt than this. Digital infrastructure these days is made up of multiple services, an outage could result from either one impacted service or multiple impacted services. So it's essential to have a catalog of all the services along with the point of contact (service owner) responsible for maintaining it.

As usual, it’s been all systems go at incident.io this month. New joiners, new features and new swag (yes, you heard right!). But most excitingly, we launched our new podcast this week. We had a blast recording it - we hope you enjoy listening to it just as much. Here’s a round-up of some of this month's highlights…

On-call is a special working hour arrangement under employment law. It comes into effect when the employee is obliged to be contactable at least by phone, so they can start work in an emergency. On-call duty is generally counted as time specifically meant for work purposes. In practice, this means that employees are normally not allowed to work while on-call. However, there may be exceptions. For example, on-call employees may also work from home if they can be reached through their work device.

Not long ago, monitoring tools were just nice additions to have and did not have a lot of purposes. However, as technologies scaled up and became more complex, keeping track of all the systems and their health became a huge challenge. As more and more brands started offering new digital services and moved the existing platform, the competition skyrocketed and being on top of system health and proactively resolving potential incidents became crucial.

DevOps and IT Operation teams employ the incident management process to respond to an unanticipated event or service outage and return the service to operational status. In the ITIL framework, it is a mechanism that links end-users and the IT department for more effective incident response. A robust incident management system in any company will allow the employee to raise a ticket detailing the issue he/she is facing.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers 100+ services, each focusing on a specific area of functionality. However, it can be challenging to pick the right services for the task and also to provision them. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, lets you easily deploy and manage applications without the need to learn about the underlying infrastructure that runs these applications.

We’re excited to announce a new set of updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Recent development and app updates from the product team include Incident Response, PagerDuty® Process Automation, as well as Community & Advocacy Events updates. We continue to help customers further automate to optimize cloud operations and reduce the amount of issues escalated to other teams.

With BigPanda’s self-service Email Parser, extracting alert data from emails has never been more simple. In our latest video in the Fast track series, we explore the benefits of this tool. This parser is ideal for monitoring tools and systems that do not support REST API and or rely solely on email to generate and send alerts. So no matter what tools your organization utilizes, this feature can help you turn all of those alert emails into actionable incidents within BigPanda’s platform.