Have you ever quickly worked through an issue with your team and later thought, “Huh. That probably should have been an incident.” It happened to us just a few weeks back. After one of our engineers surfaced a failed build, a few folks chimed in to problem solve and within 30 minutes things were up and running like normal. But we probably should have declared an incident.

This post highlights some of the features and improvements that we have released in the last two months. If you want to submit your own ideas or vote on existing feature requests, you can now use our public roadmap at roadmap.ilert.com.

If you’re in IT operations or manage NOC, SRE, and DevOps teams, chances are your IT environment is growing complex for you and your teams to manage. Any enterprise, large or small, around the globe, is continuously changing its IT stack due to evolving business requirements and significant industry trends. But digital transformation, hybrid infrastructure, DevOps adoption, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are all causing major headaches.

Alert fatigue is a serious issue that affects numerous professions, especially in the IT industry. It can lead to neglecting critical events and delaying response times. IT teams need to continuously monitor their systems and applications to avert possible downtime and keep operations running smoothly. However a high number of incoming alerts inundating these teams can make them less responsive. The ramifications of such disregard can severely affect the efficiency and dependability of IT teams.

Catastrophic failures — such as a security breach or a complete outage leading to an unavailable product or service — are classified as Sev0 incidents. On a severity scale of 1–3, Sev0 is dire. It brings business to a complete standstill and may lead to loss of revenue and a damaged reputation. A Sev0 incident usually has no quick workaround; it requires a coordinated effort beyond the engineering team to diagnose, correct, and manage.

In the world of agile development, tracking the progress of work is a critical aspect of the development process. Velocity is a metric that is often used to measure how much work a team can complete in a given period. Velocity is a measurement of the average number of story points (or another unit of work) completed by the team in a sprint. The idea is to track the velocity over time to help the team plan how much work they can realistically complete in a sprint.

At a recent training session, Jeli spent a great deal of time covering incident retrospectives and what makes an incident worthy of studying. My colleague Ben Hartshorne asked a fascinating question, which I’ll paraphrase here: That caught me by surprise. We had a great discussion, and it made me consider approaches I hadn’t before.

Incident management is a team effort. While it's true that incident management should be seen as a company-wide effort, and you should empower all teams to declare incidents, this differs from the team effort I'm referring to here. No, incident management is a team effort in the sense that no one tool can do it all, not even incident.io. We covered as much when we discussed why we integrate with tools that can be seen as our competitors – and that’s OK!