The outages span the giants of the Internet and some of the biggest failures of IT resilience we were subject to – from AWS’s trifecta of outages in December 2021 to the October ‘21 outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and interrelated services. We also look at some more intermittent outages that you may have missed.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “transparency is key” more than you can bear at this point—so let’s get this out of the way. Transparency is key. The phrase suddenly became that much more unbearable. But before you drop off, let me also communicate something else: transparency is often not enough. Often, companies make the mistake of leaning on transparency as a catchall solution to many of their internal comms issues.

Wondering about SLAs and SLOs, and SLIs? We explain service level agreements, and service level objectives, service level indicators, their differences, and the importance of each.

Budgets are a touchy subject for anyone, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. However, the work ITOps does is integral to the success of your organization, so being confident in building and defending your budget is crucial to getting the resources you need. So what does success look like when it comes to ITOps budgets? In our recent podcast episode from our series, That’s great IT, I sat down with global IT leader Nigel Peacock to discuss the best ways to justify your ITOps budget.

Users have been generating increasing amounts of data in the past few years, partly due to rapid digitalization since the pandemic. As a result, increasing numbers of analytics applications are capitalizing on these data assets. However, building scalable systems is no trivial task and incidents are inevitable. Complex systems generate data in the form of logs, traces, metrics, and more, which organizations often find themselves sprinting through. Such logs are a powerhouse of valuable information.

We are pleased to announce that Interlink Software’s AIOps and Observability platform is now a fully validated third-party solution on VMware Marketplace residing in the Management and Monitoring category.

We’re all looking to maximize every dollar spent, every hire made, every hour logged. But there’s one cost center you might not be thinking about — incident management. This post explores the explicit and implicit costs associated with incidents.

Effective communication is critical during incidents. In order to minimize the impact of an incident and resolve it quickly, it's important that all stakeholders are kept informed and updated throughout the incident response process. However, communicating during an incident can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and a high level of stress. On-call engineers can have their focus disrupted by switching out of their diagnostic tools to issue communications.

When an incident occurs, it's important to take the time to review what happened, understand all the contributing factors, and identify systemic changes to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. This process is known as an incident retrospective. However, conducting incident retrospectives can be time-consuming and difficult, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and a large amount of data.

Tech saw a lot of challenges in 2022. ITOps, NOC, and SRE teams grappled with shifts in staffing, a disappearance of those with tribal knowledge, a continuing transformation of consumer spending habits, and a general disruption of workplace culture. So what will 2023 look like for the industry? Likely, more volatility—but our panel of industry experts are here to help you navigate the choppy waters while also making some bold predictions. Change is the only constant in the tech sector.