Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As Engineering teams start spending more time and effort on incident response, they are usually focused on improving process with their specific team. We think there are additional benefits that can come from a holistic approach to improving incident response across your organization. In this post, we will explore how you can enable Engineering and Customer Success teams to work more effectively when an incident occurs.

When something goes down, the first thing a customer does is check if there is something wrong with their systems or if it is an issue with one of their service providers. So it’s important to make sure that your status page has all the information that is needed where they don’t feel the need to raise an issue or create a ticket, adding to your support costs.

Crisis situations in the healthcare industry have a greater magnitude than crisis in other industries, owing to the nature of the customers and the stakeholders that get churned up in the middle of it. For hospitals and medical practices, the pressure can be overwhelming, especially because their clients – the patients – trust them to provide high-quality care.

You probably know this situation all too (painfully) well . . . A critical incident has hit. You get the alert and the race is on! First headache up on deck – coordinating all the stakeholders. You call, you email, you text – some people are available, some are not. Some might be sleeping, or just getting up in a completely different time zone.

In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos set a rule: teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed, no matter how large a company gets. Setting this rule of small teams meant individuals spent less time providing status updates to each other and more time actually getting stuff done. It also allowed team members more time to focus on continuous improvement. PagerDuty, like Amazon, has a strong culture of continuous improvement.

Alert noise is a very common on-call complaint leading to fatigue and on-call burnout. This article is an attempt at helping folks address this problem.