Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams often deal with alert fatigue. It's like when you get too alert that it's hard to keep up, making it tougher to respond quickly and adding extra stress to the current responsibilities. According to a study, 62% of participants noted that alert fatigue played a role in employee turnover, while 60% reported that it resulted in internal conflicts within their organization.

One of the most painful parts of incident management is keeping on top of the many things that happen when you’re right in the middle of an incident. From figuring out and communicating what’s happening, to ensuring you learn from previous incidents, and even capturing the right actions – incidents are hard, but they don’t need to be this hard.

We hope this message finds you well in your start to 2024. As pioneers in the field of AIOps, we understand that the landscape is ever-evolving, and staying ahead requires continuous learning. That’s why we’re thrilled to remind you of a particularly invaluable resource at your fingertips—BigPanda University.

Only emerging into the mainstream in the 2010s, SRE is a relatively new discipline in tech. It’s been rapidly adopted by a widening variety of organizations, implementing constantly evolving practices. For the last six years, Catchpoint has been running a survey to take the temperature of the latest developments and trends. Check out the full report here, and read on to see our analysis on five key takeaways.

As our exploration through 2023 continues from the second blog segment, “Mobilise: From Signal to Action”, one undeniable fact persists: Incidents are an unavoidable reality for organisations, irrespective of their industry or size. In the APAC region, a surge in regulatory enforcement has been observed against large corporations failing to meet service standards, resulting in severe penalties.

$575 million was the cost of a huge IT incident that hit Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the U.S. In September 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that impacted approximately 147 million consumers. The breach occurred due to a vulnerability in the Apache Struts web application framework, which Equifax failed to patch in time. This vulnerability allowed hackers to access the company's systems and exfiltrate sensitive data. ‍

As we’ve talked about before, our app is a monolith: all our backend code lives together and gets compiled into a single binary. One of the reasons I prefer monolithic architectures is that they make it much easier to focus on shipping features without having to spend much time thinking about where code should live and how to get all the data you need together quickly. However, I’m not going to claim there aren’t disadvantages too. One of those is compile times.

In recent years, IT departments have faced the challenge of adapting to an evolving landscape of demands. While the primary focus of traditional incident management solutions has been to reduce downtime, it's become clear that just reducing the amount of downtime isn’t sufficient. To truly mitigate the total impact of downtime, there must be a focus on reducing the damage and costs that accumulate while you are down.