In the past five years, DevOps adoption has almost doubled. In fact, 74 percent of companies now use DevOps in some form. As a growing number of organizations seek to implement DevOps practices, the need for qualified DevOps engineers is soaring. But what exactly does a DevOps engineer do, and what skills are required to succeed in this in-demand role?

What makes an engineering team? Communication, collaboration, process, order, and common goals. Otherwise, they would just be a bunch of engineers. The same is true of their tools. Connectivity and process turn a bunch of tools into a DevOps toolchain. If you need a DevOp toolchain, you can use it to easily build an incident response process.

System outages happen to the best of us. Communicating with your customers and other stakeholders effectively during downtimes is vital to maintaining a solid relationship with them. When a system outage occurs, technical teams are tasked with swiftly locating the cause and resolving the issue, while communications teams are tasked with notifying stakeholders and customers about the outage to maintain transparency.

Workflows are no stranger in the DevOps world. But where did this term come from, and what does it really mean? Perhaps it’s no surprise that workflows originated from the industrial revolution, which brought powerful machinery for mobilizing huge workforces unlike ever before. To maximize the potential of these new industrial tools, people had to first figure out the best way to use them to get work done as efficiently as possible.

Today’s organizations are managing increasingly complex IT ecosystems and pressured to deliver on innovation—all while trying to maintain service performance and reliability to keep up with the always-on digital economy. With IT complexity growing exponentially, incidents have become a common, if not day-to-day struggle for many businesses. Incident management is the process or method that modern organizations use to prepare for and respond to service disruptions.

Incidents can have a massive impact on your operations, negatively affecting customers, employees, and stakeholders. Preparing in advance is the best way to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible.

With only a few days left of 2021, we all know what that means: making New Year’s resolutions. While some love the tradition of laying out their goals for the coming 12 months, others loathe it with a passion. And with approximately 80% of people failing to achieve their resolutions, it’s easy to see why there’s so much resentment towards this common habit. At xMatters, we plan to—and often do—beat those odds.

With Christmas only a few days away, we’d like to do a round-up of something extra festive that we’ve been sharing on social media: The 12 days of Tip-Mas with xMatters! Each day offers the “gift” of a top tip, a resource, or fun fact about xMatters. So go ahead — sing along to get into the holiday spirit!