For DevOps and IT teams, incident resolution is an important aspect of predicting, resolving, and documenting service disruptions. It refers to the part of the incident management process where responders restore the service to functioning. Modern technology has come a long way, but it’s not without flaws. When businesses suffer from cyber-attacks, system crashes, and network outages, it impacts the organization on many levels.

Blameless Chief Operating Officer Ken Gavranovic recently sat down with Lee Atchison, a renowned expert in system reliability, to discuss the topic of conducting effective incident retrospectives. You can watch their engaging, informative discussion below, or read on for our overview of the greatest hits from their talk. ‍ Agile development and incident management are the backbones of any tech-driven development cycle. At the heart of these practices lies the art of retrospectives.

Blameless was founded over 5 years ago, in a world that looked very different than the world today. We were the first mover in the incident management space, setting the standards for what these tools should achieve. These days, concerns about reliability, incidents, and toil have hit the mainstream. Why have we seen the tech world enter an era where reliability is priority #1? Why do we believe that the Blameless mission matters more today than ever before?

Even the best software fails sometimes. How quickly those failures get addressed, and how your teammates and customers feel about you after the fact, comes down to how well you communicate with them. Users, customer success managers, Ops team members, IT, security, engineering leadership, even the executive team. Each has a vested interest in resolving engineering incidents quickly. All need to be updated with the right information at the right time.

Curious about continuous deployment vs delivery? We explain what each is, what happens in each step, and their importance in the DevOps lifecycle.

Curious about MTTR? We explain what the mean time to recovery is, why it matters to your development team, and how to reduce it.

Wondering about incident management KPIs? We explain what incident management metrics are, how to track them, and what to do with the information.

I've long been fascinated with the metaphor of an iceberg to describe a problem who’s true magnitude is obscured beneath the surface. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, when ice freezes it decreases in density. This allows the solid ice to float, partially, atop the water with only a small fraction of it exposed. In fact, icebergs hold nearly 90% of their mass hidden below the water.