Part of the trepidation of being on-call is encountering unfamiliar emergency scenarios where we are surprised by suddenly not knowing how to do our jobs. We feel lost and alone, complicated by the world around us, powerless to resolve or even mitigate the problem. On-call need not be a solo affair full of fear and anxiety. There are ways we can employ practice and open collaboration outside of incidents to prepare us better.

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.

We talk about reliability a lot from the context of software engineering. We ask questions about service availability, or how important it is for specific users. But when organizations face outages, it becomes immediately obvious that the reliability of an online service or application is something that impacts the entire business with significant costs. A mindset of putting reliability first is a business imperative that all teams should share.

As organizations progress in their reliability journey, they may build a dedicated team of site reliability engineers. This team can be structured in two major ways: a distributed model, where SREs are embedded in each project team, providing guidance and support for that team; and a centralized model, where one team provides infrastructure and processes for the entire organization.

Within DevOps, we talk a lot about the on-call process—but what about the human side of being on-call? For example, what are effective ways of managing stress and anxiety during a shift? How can one manage life situations that make being on-call difficult—such as being responsible for watching the kids during an on-call rotation? And how can an empathic team culture help prevent burnout and turnover?

The overall theme is high-performing engineering teams are generally the ones that humanize the process. Whether you’re trying to increase productivity or release better-quality code, the biggest piece of advice is to lead with empathy.

With the AlertOps ServiceNow integration, you can automatically send updates to stakeholders. Set each update to use the notification channel you choose (email, voice, SMS, mobile app, and chat). Set triggers to send alerts on any condition, such as SLA breaches, status changes or any custom field change. Automatically updates at time points that you set. AlertOps also logs all activities in ServiceNow so you can track everything in one place.

With the AlertOps ServiceNow integration, during a major incident, you can automatically send notifications to targeted groups of users (managers, stakeholders, customer service). Each group can have its own unique status update fields, so you can send contextual information with dynamic updates to each group at regular intervals, and a final message when the incident is resolved. Set each notification to use the notification channel you choose (email, voice, SMS, mobile app, and chat).

Amazon EventBridge is an AWS serverless event bus service making it easier to build event-driven applications. It uses events generated from your applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and other AWS services. It delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources to target services like AWS Lambda. You can also set up routing rules to determine the destination where you wish to send the data and build decoupled application architectures.

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.