We're a small team of engineers right now, but each engineer has experience working at companies who invested heavily in observability. While we can't afford months of time dedicated to our tooling, we want to come as close as possible to what we know is good, while running as little as we can- ideally buying, not building. Even with these constraints, we've been surprised at just how good we've managed to get our setup.

As the holiday season aggressively approaches I want to perform a public service announcement for everyone toying with the idea of a code freeze for the holidays: please don't. It’s getting cold outside and the season of peppermint mochas is upon us, which might get you thinking about putting a code freeze in place for the holidays. A Word of warning: instituting a code freeze may have unintended consequences.

While service incidents can be wildly dissimilar, they tend to have one thing in common: a need for quick resolution. Response teams need a robust, repeatable process to follow that ensures fast, mistake-free execution, especially for those 4 AM calls. Having a documented checklist saved where the entire team can access and use it at any time could make the difference between quick resolution or compounding the problem.

Curious about microservice architecture? We explain what microservice architecture is, and how it can be used to quickly produce reliable lightweight applications.

The concept and development of DevOps have significantly changed the way IT teams work in the last decade. Small and large teams alike can see the difference when they switch from traditional software development cycles to a DevOps cycle: accelerated innovation, improved collaboration, faster time to market. And the list of benefits continues to grow. To effectively embrace DevOps, however, is not an easy task. Thankfully, there are ways to navigate this challenging journey.

A Recent Dice Article Titled – Data Breach Costs: Calculating the Losses referenced a 2021 IBM and Ponemon Institute study that looked at nearly 525 organizations in 17 countries and regions that sustained a breach last year, and found that the average cost of a data breach in 2020 stood at $3.86 million.

“Thanks to Enterprise Alert and the acknowledgement function, we can track the alerting and response digitally and have the certainty that our employees always take care of incidents in our critical IT infrastructure in a timely manner. IT alerting with Derdack, which has to be documented according to BaFin KRITIS, is highly reliable.”, Markus Reusch, Product Owner Monitoring, Debeka

Improving your influence over the company will help you deliver high quality work as your goals will be closely aligned with those of the company. In this blog piece, Ricardo has explained how to improve your influence as an SRE. Balancing fast-paced business requirements with the demands of keeping production services stable is not an easy task.

A critical part of managing modern software development is setting up and running an on-call rotation. But that often involves significant toil, in part because many of the existing tools are cumbersome and not developer-friendly. That’s why we’re excited to announce Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use on-call management tool that will help reduce toil in on-call management through simpler workflows and interfaces tailored for devs.