What you absolutely must know when responding to an incident is what kind of impact it has on customers and how negatively it can affect your team. This is typically addressed by following some kind of incident classification, usually “incident severity levels”, to indicate the importance of every incident - that is, to understand how seriously various stakeholders are affected and to route the incident differently if necessary.

It shouldn’t take you more time than a few seconds to understand your on-call schedule and rotations and how you could make changes to it. It is important for on-call scheduling and alerting tools to make this as simple as possible. If you’re spending more than a few seconds to understand what your on-call rotations are going to be like for the next day or week or month, then you need to start looking for a better on-call management tool.

Doing on-call management in a way that’s better, less stressful and actually works to improve your incident response processes, uptime & reliability.

Hiteshwar is an SRE based out of Mumbai, India. His area of specialization is in distributed systems. He works on Kubernetes, running his own custom clusters, maintaining them and creating tools to manage and monitor them. He likes to share his learnings by writing articles and blogs on Medium and Linkedin. He is an active speaker in meetups and developer groups and also teaches DevOps and SRE practices at learning centers.

Arild Jensen, SRE Manager at Upwork, talks about his journey into SRE and some best practices he picked up along the way including implementing a blameless culture, code review and making decisions based on hard data.

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.

A status page is a communication tool that allows you to display the current working status of your various services - whether fully functional, partially degraded, severely affected, etc. The nomenclature of the service status can be defined by you. On the status page, you can also access & update the uptime and incident history data for all your internal facing or customer impacting components.

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.

We’re heading into 2020 with a platform full of features and a heart full of happiness! It’s the end of a decade and this year has been nothing short of great for us! 2019 gave us an accelerated product growth and our team grew by 2x in size. We kick-started this year with a complete UI refresh and a whole bunch of new features. We also sponsored some of the major tech events and conducted our first ever community driven meetup!

It sucks to be on-call when processes are not well defined and streamlined. Especially around the holidays. You really don't want to hear your phone repeatedly going off right when you're sitting for Christmas dinner with your loved ones or getting to unwrapping the good presents (the ones with the sparkly wrapping paper :P). Your on-call team’s stress levels reflects the health of your system, the cleanliness of your code and the culture of your organization.