Our interim update from March 15 adds important security features to call forwarding to on-callers. Three new settings have been added for call routing numbers.

Wondering about severity levels? We explain what incident severity levels are, how to classify them, and how they will affect your incident management process. What are severity levels? Incident severity levels are the measure of the impact an incident will have on a system. In general, a lower number severity level, such as SEV-1, denotes a higher impact on the system.

Downtime—especially in customer-facing services—can cost businesses thousands of dollars an hour and incalculable customer trust. No company can afford to pay this price. To reduce downtime, software engineering teams must act quickly and decisively. But that’s easier said than done. With Lightstep® Incident Response, generally available from ServiceNow today, we're unlocking speed, agility, and productivity for your engineers and your software-powered business.

We envision a world where all software is reliable, and today we’re making that vision more of a reality for small teams. Available today, our new Free Tier helps smaller teams wrangle their reliability challenges with our enterprise-grade Incident Management, Service Catalog, and communications products. Our new package also has every feature that makes FireHydrant great with generous limitations.

Every IT Ops team uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to track metrics that keep them accountable, improving, and contributing to long-term success. But it’s easy for teams to lose sight of what KPIs to use, how many they should use, and how to derive meaning from them. To shed light on what constitutes a meaningful KPI, Sterling Nostedt, BigPanda’s Value and Adoption advisor, hosted a community conversation which spanned across multiple industries.

Whiskey and Wisdom is a monthly executive-only forum where ITOps leaders can network independently and discuss high-level AIOps and ITOps strategies with their industry peers. In our most recent session, the discussion was geared specifically towards AIOps—its hype and its reality. Here are some quick value takeaways from the conversation.

We’ve been pretty lucky at incident.io to be able to avoid dealing with more complex authentication issues for quite a while, because we piggy-back on Slack to know who you are and which organisation you work in. Whole companies have been built around doing authentication and user profiles really well, so it was pretty neat to be able to avoid doing most of that work for so long!

What comes to mind when you hear the term 'incident commander'? You are not alone if you think about fancy, tri-cornered hats, well-polished shoes, and a uniform weighed down by medals. The roles of incident commander, incident manager, or technical escalation manager have been typical in large organizations but are gaining popularity in smaller companies. For the purposes of this article, we will use the term 'incident commander,' but any of the above titles could work.

If you’re an SRE, you might view AIOps with great excitement. By automating complex workflows and troubleshooting processes, AIOps could make your life as an SRE much easier. Alternatively, SREs may choose to view AIOps with disdain. They might think of AIOps as just a fancy buzzword that doesn’t live up to its promises, and that can become a distraction from the SRE tools that really matter. Which perspective is right?