Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Imagine this: An airline encounters a major IT incident in a data center that affects their ticketing system. Behind the scenes, technical responders are scrambling to diagnose and fix the issue. However, because today’s systems are so complex, this issue is taking longer than expected to resolve, and hours have passed since the system went down. Meanwhile, passengers are stranded and taking their anger out on customer service agents and sharing their frustrations on social media.

Intent-based Capacity Planning is Google's approach to declare reliability intent for a service and then solve for the most efficient resource allocation plan dynamically. Learn how you can start using this approach to effectively manage the reliability of your services running on your Kubernetes cluster.

The last decade has ushered in a golden era of software engineering. The rise of cloud computing freed companies from managing their own data centers and provided on-demand scaling. These services allow for provisioning servers on the fly using configuration and code. Treating that task as just another type of software development led to the advent of DevOps.

"Businesses need to face the inevitability of being hacked at some point. It's not a question of if, but when — and that's why being proactive to minimize the risk is essential." Robert Egan. When a critical incident hits, what happens to an organization without an efficient incident management plan? Essentially, all stakeholders are left "fighting fires," trying to recover their systems, and get their business back up and running.

Healthcare organizations strive to enhance patient experience, ensuring that patients receive proper treatment at the right time, every time. However, due to antiquated communication tools, such as the pager, this goal is often difficult to achieve for some healthcare providers. Today’s healthcare facilities require an advanced pager replacement solution, integrating with intelligent scheduling systems and EMR solutions for better patient outcomes.

The shift to cloud computing and the DevOps revolution have fueled some important changes in the way we think about software development and monitoring. It has delivered huge benefits to the companies that have fully embraced the approach. In fact, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) 2018 industry survey found a new small group of “elite” performers that are deploying code far more often and having a far better mean time to resolution (MTTR) than the next closest group.

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) is defined as the sum of the total amount of time that service was interrupted divided by the number of individual incidents. The unit of measurement is some quantity of time. Ideally, you can use minutes as the unit. That is, unless you blacked out the eastern seaboard for weeks!

I’m a big fan of historical TV dramas and last week I finished watching the stunning and shattering HBO TV miniseries about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. As a monitoring expert and a product manager, I have visited dozens of IT operations centers, control rooms and NOCs, so I couldn’t help but compare them to the Chernobyl control room scenes in the show.