Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Deck the halls! It's time for the annual holiday Code Freeze, that festive time of year when businesses impose a precautionary halt to code changes and Operations should be quiet. But before you kick up your feet, make sure that demand doesn’t lead to availability embarrassments. After all, retail experts suggest that we’re in for another online-heavy holiday shopping season, so businesses need to brace for increased digital traffic...with little tolerance for failure.

Incidents are a great opportunity to gather both context and skill. They take people out of their day-to-day roles, and force ephemeral teams to solve unexpected and challenging problems. In my career, I've found incidents can be a great accelerator - for both myself and others around me. It was after leading my first incident at GoCardless that I started to feel really comfortable in the codebase and the team.

Modern businesses are digital businesses—so managing your business means mastering your critical services and operations for your employees and customers. Today, you need to be able to understand every aspect of your company—as it unfolds—because in this world, seconds matter to your productivity, your revenue, and most importantly, your customers.

As infrastructure stacks grow increasingly complex and involve an ever-growing number of services, system failures are becoming more and more common. There can be a variety of reasons why systems fail: software bugs, misconfiguration or interactions between services that cause unexpected behavior, the network is down, and of course, those rare occasions where natural events can render data centers inoperative.

BASF is the largest chemical producer in the world with a revenue of EUR 59bn, 247 manufacturing sites and 110,000 employees. BASF’s Coatings division employs 11,000 people and develops, produces and markets innovative solutions for automotive OEM and automotive refinish coatings and industrial coatings as well as architectural coatings and related coating processes.