If you’re investigating an incident, every minute means degraded performance or even downtime for customers. The causes of an issue often come from parts of your systems and applications that you would not think to check, and the sooner you can bring these to light, the better.

In the beginning, there were flight controllers. These were a strange breed. In the early days of the US Manned Space Program, most american households, regardless of class or race, knew the names of the astronauts. John Glen, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong. The manned space program was a unifying force of national pride. But no-one knew the names of the anonymous men and later, women, who got the astronauts to orbit, to the moon, and most importantly, got them back to earth.

As noted in this blog a couple of weeks ago, we recently commissioned IDC to interview PagerDuty customers to quantify the business value they gain from our platform. It found that, on average, the 14 PagerDuty customers interviewed gained annual benefits of $3.48 million, a three-year ROI of 795%, and a payback period of just over two months.

The principle of fail fast is either the best thing since the transistor or nothing but hot air. It depends on the size of your organization and the cohesiveness of your teams. If your team members have a strong working relationship, and dev is well integrated with everyday work company-wide, you already have a good foundation for this particular agile thinking. Most companies that have grown beyond startup-size, and even some startups, may find this idea a bit jarring.

After successfully implementing a conditional evaluation engine into Runbooks, we started looking at other places in FireHydrant that would be improved with this engine. After hearing a lot of feedback from you, we’ve implemented conditions into our Analytics page. Let’s dive in and see what new things are possible with this new filtering.

Starting out with runbooks can be daunting, we've built a way to implement our best practices into a runbook that can be implemented in a single click. On top of this, there's now even more ways to attach runbooks to your incidents and a much easier way to test out the runbook that you're currently working on.

Integrations of third-party systems with Enterprise Alert, what is possible? In my work with new and existing customers, I keep coming across the assumption that Enterprise Alert is not able to be integrated with certain third-party systems in order to receive and process events and fault messages from this system. Basically, first of all, we have to say: We can integrate everything that communicates digitally in any way.

“Engineering” and “creativity” aren’t often considered synonymous. However, in today’s world, where the online experience is at the forefront of virtually all business transactions and experiences, the creative engineer is finally getting the recognition they deserve. These individuals are quite literally building the virtual world we live in.

In one of our recent webinars we discussed a challenge in digital transformation that is top of mind for many IT Ops leaders: how to actually transform with the least amount of pain… No matter how tired people are of the term “digital transformation”, it still represents an imperative strategy for enterprises wishing to survive in today’s dynamic business environment, let alone see growth and increased market value.

Is love in the air? We think so. While we don’t have chocolate or flowers for you, we have something just as sweet. Here are some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this February.