As an on-call engineer, you might deal with the day-in, day-out occurrence of alerts. These alerts may come from your alerting provider (PagerDuty, OpsGenie, etc.), Slack notifications telling you the site is down, or the ever concerning text message "Hey, is the site down?". These alerts elicit reactions that range from "shit" to "again?" and in many cases, both.
Starting out with runbooks can be daunting, we've built a way to implement our best practices into a runbook that can be implemented in a single click. On top of this, there's now even more ways to attach runbooks to your incidents and a much easier way to test out the runbook that you're currently working on.
After successfully implementing a conditional evaluation engine into Runbooks, we started looking at other places in FireHydrant that would be improved with this engine. After hearing a lot of feedback from you, we’ve implemented conditions into our Analytics page. Let’s dive in and see what new things are possible with this new filtering.
If you've been familiar with FireHydrant previously, you've probably started to notice some strange things going on with the FireHydrant brand over the past several months. New pages? New content? New messaging? New colors? Yes, your eyes do not deceive you, we've been making some changes!
To put it bluntly, did someone die? In engineering, let’s hope your answer is a resounding no. So why do we continue to use the word ‘postmortem’?
Incidents are inevitable, and the reality is some of them are inevitably going to repeat themselves. FireHydrant has always strived to make the entire incident response lifecycle smooth, but up until today, common incident types were slightly burdensome for our customers. We decided it was time to help people make it easy to declare incidents using easy-to-use templates, which we’re deeming Incident types.
There’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to reliable software. If it wasn’t apparent before, this past year has made it more evident than ever: People expect their software tools to work every time, all the time. The shift in the way end-users think about software was as inevitable as our daily applications entered our lives, almost like water and electricity entered our homes.
2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!
This is the first in a series of interviews with experts about reliability, incident response, and related topics. Jeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 20 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Director of Production Operations for Centro, an advertising software company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Previously he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual (say that five times fast) was held online, November 18th to 20th. It was the second virtual KubeCon, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I had a lot of fun attending and saw a lot of great talks. If you weren’t able to participate in real-time, the CNCF will post the talks soon to its YouTube channel.
