The CrowdStrike outage was a reminder of how quickly the dominoes can fall—especially when the foundation is shaky. Delta Airlines was hit harder than its competitors. While United and American Airlines were able to recover within days, Delta faced ongoing struggles, leading to the cancellation of 7,000 flights over five days.

Uptime is a metric often used by organizations to measure website or application availability to their end users. Or as defined by Techopedia, uptime is a metric representing the percentage of time hardware, an IT system, or a device is operational. It indicates when a system is working, while downtime refers to when it is not. In today's fast-paced digital world, a website or application's availability is of utmost importance.

With every job I have, I come across a new observability tool that I can’t live without. It’s also something that’s a superpower for us at incident.io: we often detect bugs faster than our customers can report them to us. A couple of jobs ago, that was Prometheus. In my previous job, it was the fact that we retained all of our logs for 30 days, and had them available to search using the Elastic stack (back then, the ELK stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana).

About a year ago, Honeycomb kicked off an internal experiment to structure how we do incident response. We looked at the usual severity-based approach (usually using a SEV scale), but decided to adopt an approach based on types, aiming to better play the role of quick definitions for multiple departments put together. This post is a short report on our experience doing it.

Runbooks are a key part of incident management and preserve institutional knowledge. They can be used for both incident response as well as routine tasks like db maintenance and generating a complex report. We are mostly focused on incident response runbooks here.

The higher education industry is experiencing significant transformation. Colleges and universities have embedded digital tools across their academic environments to provide exceptional experiences for students, faculty, and staff. As technology becomes more integral to education, maintaining efficient, secure IT operations while ensuring 24/7 availability presents new challenges for institutions to manage.

Handling IT alert data can feel like you’re drowning in information. The average BigPanda customer uses more than 20 observability and monitoring tools. Between system logs and user reports, an overwhelming amount of information is coming from all directions. That’s why normalizing data is such a critical part of IT operations. Data normalization in IT incident management involves putting data from various tools into a standard format.

SLA vs SLO vs SLI, what’s the difference anyway? Workplace success relies on clear expectations to help leaders and employees thrive together. As such, the partnership between customer and provider requires the same clarity to maintain service satisfaction. This is why Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) exist in the first place.