In a recent experiment with my colleagues, I polled them about the following: “What would they do if the lights went out as you worked at night?” Besides identifying the funny and who-you-want-in-case-of-an-emergency responses, most of my colleagues checked to see if the problem might be broader than their own home.

In buildings today, there are numerous systems that require regular maintenance or that need attention as quickly as possible if problems are detected. This applies, for example, to heating systems, air conditioning, cooling, ventilation, elevators or fire alarm systems. Modern facility management systems are able to reliably monitor such systems.

One of the key performance indicators for IT Ops is MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Resolution). MTTR essentially measures the length of your incident management lifecycle: from detection; through assignment, triage and investigation; to remediation and resolution. IT Ops teams strive to shorten their incident management lifecycle and lower their MTTR, to meet their SLAs and maintain healthy infrastructures and services. But that’s often easier said than done.

Data helps best-in-class teams make the right decisions. Analyzing your system’s metrics shows you where to invest time and resources. A common type of metric is Mean Time to X, or MTTx. These metrics detail the average time it takes for something to happen. The “x” can represent events or stages in a system’s incident response process. Yet, MTTx metrics rarely tell the whole story of a system’s reliability.

As the adoption of cloud computing continues to encourage innovation across industries, high-performing and resilient systems have become a necessity in order to keep pace with the competition and meet internal/external SLAs (service level agreements). In terms of customer expectations, a minute of downtime can mean thousands of dollars in lost opportunity and a soiled customer relationship. So what exactly is downtime?

We are excited announcing the release of the 9th generation of our alerting signature product Enterprise Alert! Release 9 contains exciting new features and improvements. Read about all the details in this blog article.

You aren't sure how long you've been here, but the view outside the window sure is soothing. Before you can fully take in your surroundings, a siren rips you back into the conscious world. Slowly, you begin to piece together that you exist, and you are on call. The ringing, much louder now, pierces through your skull as you begin to open your bleary eyes. You turn over your pillow, grab your phone, and click through the PagerDuty notification.