On Thursday, March 9, 2023, something was afoot at our primary bank, SVB. By Friday, March 10, 2023, messages from our investors helped us quickly understand that FireHydrant needed to maneuver through a complex incident that was unfolding. Operational incidents are incidents like every other.

In recent years, the adoption of cloud computing has skyrocketed as more and more businesses realize the benefits of this modern IT solution. With its unparalleled reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, cloud computing has become the go-to choice for many organizations. According to recent estimates, around 90% of businesses are already using some form of cloud computing, and this number is only set to rise in the coming years.

Blameless’s comprehensive incident management platform is built to ease the burden of keeping your services up and running. Whether you are in the middle of an incident or trying to better track your response performance, you need access to your incident data on demand. Blameless’s Reliability Insights unifies your Incident, Resource, Task, and IAM data in a single customizable and queryable analytics tool.

Shouldn’t your alerts be doing more of the work for you? A noisy channel with every alert from hundreds of monitors and microservices is a chaotic place to actually find the incidents that are impacting your customers. And it still requires a heck of a lot of human intervention. We think it’s time for something better. Today we’re releasing Alert Routing: the next phase of worry-free automation from FireHydrant.

Agility matters in incident response, and the easiest way to spring into action is by having a well-defined team in place ahead of time. The right people in the right roles will help you respond to and resolve incidents more quickly and efficiently. In fact, we found in the Incident Benchmark Report that incidents with roles assigned had a 42% lower mean time to resolution than those that didn’t. But what roles do you need to fill?

PagerDuty provides a SaaS-based platform that enables developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve incidents that could potentially impact customer experience. This platform allows organizations to proactively manage events that may affect customers across their IT environment, which is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction, revenue, and brand reputation.

Question—when was the last time you purchased a new product and sat down to read the manual end-to-end before getting started? Ask this question to a room of 10 people and you’d likely get one or two hand raises, even though reading first could save you time and preempt many of the questions you’re likely to ask. Herein lies the problem when it comes to creating a SaaS product.

On-call management is a process for managing after-hours support. Cloud on-call scheduling tools allow self-service and mobile access. Multi-channel communications (email, SMS, phone, mobile push notifications and chat) ensure that the alert gets through. AlertOps sends rich alerts, so the on- Call support engineer has all the information they need to know.

An alert escalation can be triggered when the primary support engineer does not respond to or acknowledge an alert within the escalation policy time limit. Keeping managers and stakeholders informed during an incident can help improve confidence in the support team. Once an escalation policy has been established, alert escalations can be automated to ensure consistency.

It may be counterintuitive to tackle a problem without knowing exactly what the problem is, but an incident commander often does just that. In fact Rob Schnepp—founding partner at Blackrock 3, an Alameda, California-based incident management consulting group—says identifying the root cause of an incident is typically secondary to addressing the symptoms.