What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive Site Reliability Engineering turn out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question that teams at about 400 businesses have presumably had to ask themselves this month in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud.

Whiskey and Wisdom is a monthly executive-only forum where IT Operations leaders can network independently and discuss high-level AI operations and IT Ops strategies with their industry peers. In our most recent session, the discussion was around justifying AIOps—proving the value the technology brings to the table.

BigPanda gives the Incident Commander award to IT Ops superstars—people who go above and beyond in this high-pressure, critical line of work. In 2021, Ben Narramore, Director of Operations/Service Management at PlayStation was a recipient for his ability to handle high-impact global incidents with exemplary professionalism and skill. Let’s find out what he’s been up to…

For teams who deploy software to users around the world, every second counts when responding to outages and other incidents. It’s important that you have tools in your arsenal that are up to the challenge. Service monitoring, alerting, collaboration, and visibility are all essential components of a well-implemented incident response plan.

In the IT world, outages and service disruption are a fact of life. Stuff hits the fan… Stuff happens! And it can happen to any service provider – even the most well designed and managed SaaS applications and platforms. One of the reasons why stuff happens is failing to adhere to best practices. To minimize the potential for problems, here we run over some of the key points from the cloud platform management best practice playbook.

SIGNL4 offers powerful duty scheduling and time-based overrides for routing alerts to the right people at the right time. With time-based overrides for example, you can apply different alerting workflows during business hours, weekends, holidays, etc. Holidays in general can bring other requirements for signaling and must also be considered separately when planning shifts. You can add and edit holidays manually in SIGNL4 or you can import them from iCal files.