With Christmas only a few days away, we’d like to do a round-up of something extra festive that we’ve been sharing on social media: The 12 days of Tip-Mas with xMatters! Each day offers the “gift” of a top tip, a resource, or fun fact about xMatters. So go ahead — sing along to get into the holiday spirit!

Do you find yourself asking, “What should our first service-level objective (SLO)be?” The simplest way to get started if you have a website is to measure uptime SLOs. The SLO will measure your uptime and how your site compares to your reliability goals. By following the steps outlined here, you can get up and running with your first SLO in minutes. To get started, you’ll need to set up an account on SolarWinds® Pingdom®.

Oracle is gearing up to execute the largest deal in its entire history – the company has agreed to buy Cerner, a leading electronic health records vendor, for $28.3 billion. The Cerner acquisition is slated to be an all-cash deal of $95/share and is expected to complete early next year. Cerner is a healthcare technology firm that streamlines health information and facilitates its accessibility for modern clinical teams.

Wondering about Incident Management Software? We explain the best incident management software tools and how they work.

We've found a pattern to mock external client libraries while keeping code simple, reducing the number of injection spots and ensuring all the code down a callstack uses the same mock client. Establishing patterns like these is what makes test suites great, and improves developer productivity when writing tests. Here's how it works.

Many organizations are experiencing the need to modernize their IT systems to keep pace in an increasingly digital world. Adopting DevOps helps companies implement and initialize the modernization processes. At xMatters, our path to IT modernization has included implementing DevOps, but we have done it a little differently to ensure we are using agile processes.

We're very pleased to announce that incident.io is now SOC 2 compliant, having successfully completed our Type I audit. Put simply, this means an external auditor has looked at how the company is operating, and how our software is managed and operated, and confirmed that we meet a set of high security standards.

SREs face special challenges during the holidays. Here’s how to manage them.

Like many SaaS businesses, we have an on-call rota to enable us to provide 24x7 cover if there are problems with incident.io. We have a 'pager' which will alert the relevant person if something unexpected happens in our app, so that they can investigate and fix it if needed. Note: This was adapted from an internal document we wrote about how we think about on-call at incident.io.