I was out there in sunny Austin this February, speaking at Civo Navigate 2024. The event was jam packed with amazing talks, and it was great meeting so many people with long and fascinating careers in engineering and Site Reliability. I had the privilege of meeting Bob Lee, who currently leads DevOps at Twingate — a cloud-based service that provides secured remote access, and poised to replace VPNs.

The term ROI (Return on Investment) often gets thrown around without a thorough understanding of its implications. Many see it merely as a financial metric, but in reality, ROI encompasses much more than monetary gains. In this comprehensive exploration, we delve into the true essence of ROI, its multifaceted nature, and how it impacts every aspect of your business strategy.

In the world of modern businesses, where IT systems play a major role in all types of businesses, the role of the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) has become central to managing the effectiveness and reliability of the entire business. SREs are the bridge between the rapid deployment of software and systems and the stable operation of those systems in a production environment. They ensure that reliability and performance criteria are defined and are met.

The on-call experience is sometimes a dreaded one for software engineers. Those late-night alerts and frantic Slack messages, after all, don’t exactly sound pleasant. But what’s an on-call shift really like? Is that perception of constant fire-fighting and 3 AM wake-up calls actually realistic? Michael Mandrus and Owen Smallwood, both senior software engineers here at Grafana Labs, wanted to set the record straight.

‘Manual deployment is (should be) a sin.’ Well, calling manual deployment a sin may sound strong, but consider this: building the ultimate development pipeline demands a focus on automation. Although the selection of a deployment method depends on the specific needs and requirements of a project or environment, can you really deny the power of automated deployment? There's a better way.

ITOps and DevOps teams face many challenges. Their responsibilities are extensive, from navigating complex IT environments at scale to quickly addressing performance issues and minimizing downtime and outages. Enhancing your organization’s IT service assurance requires you to ensure the reliability, performance, and availability of IT services.

Everyone experiences stress at work—thankfully, it’s a topic folks aren’t shying away from anymore. But for on-call engineers, alert fatigue is a phenomenon closer to home. Unfortunately, like stress, it can be just as insidious and drastically impact those it affects. First discussed in the context of hospital settings, this phrase later entered engineering circles.

Dealing with a flood of incidents, each with varying degrees of urgency, can be a daily struggle for Incident Response teams. Suppose a low-priority alert pings while you're tackling a critical incident. This pulls your focus away from the urgent issue. This constant alert bombardment can: How do engineers ensure that high-severity issues take precedence? Don't they want to avoid being bothered or bombarded with notifications while addressing critical matters? They sure do.