Today, incident management is a core part of organizations both big and small. But what if you don't have a program in place...where do you start? Or what if incident management is already a key part of your org, but you're looking to optimize it—where do you kick things off in that case? Consider another situation: What if you're an established organization with years of incident management experience—what are some things that you can do to take things to the next level?

Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers/stakeholders want to know what's going on. The last thing you want to do is let your team improvise everything when it comes to responding to incidents. Google's own SRE book has great overall tips for incident management, part of which involves "develop(ing) and document(ing) your incident management procedures in advance", which this article dives into.

On this weeks' episode of The Debrief, we chatted with Jeff Forde, an Architect on the Platform Engineering team at Collectors. With a background spanning finance, healthcare, and various product-led startups, Forde has honed his expertise in DevOps, site reliability, and platform engineering. Beyond his professional life, he's also a dedicated volunteer first responder and certified fire instructor in Connecticut, offering him a unique perspective on managing incidents of all typesz.

Say hello to smarter incident management with smart summaries, mitigation message suggestions, and our new conversational assistant! 🚀✨

Embracing digital transformation means increasing your reliance on a variety of IT systems, applications, and networks. Organizations are adopting advanced solutions like IT monitoring software and Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) to manage this complexity. These tools provide real-time insights into IT ecosystem health and performance, using AI and machine learning to support proactive decision-making and automation.

The digital world comes with advantages and inherent risks. These IT incidents, which can encompass cyberattacks, system outages, and data breaches, can have a devastating impact. Beyond financial losses, IT incidents disrupt business operations, damage reputations, and erode customer trust. During an outage, having a well-prepared Incident Response Team (IRT) is essential to reduce downtime and improve response times.

At any moment, a small failure at any point in your complex web of IT systems can trigger an outage. As such, proactively establishing a method of clear and timely end user communication is the crux of effective incident response. For large organizations, these moments of downtime not only carry a massive opportunity cost, but also test the resilience of their operations.

FireHydrant is mission-critical infrastructure for thousands of engineers. It’s our job to be up – even when everything else is down. Here's a technical look at how we tested Signals alerting and on-call to ensure high availability and speed.