Welcome back! In the last blog we set up bidirectional communication between ServiceNow and Elasticsearch. We spent most of our time in ServiceNow, but from here on, we will be working in Elasticsearch and Kibana. By the end of this post, you'll have these two powerful applications working together to make incident management a breeze. Or at least a lot easier than you may be used to!

Onboarding is an essential yet challenging part of the hiring process. As your organization matures, more of its processes become unique. This makes it harder for new employees to get up to speed. Investing in custom processes and tooling to achieve your specific goals is a valuable practice. But, you must balance this with an investment in onboarding.

Atlassian JIRA, one of the most popular ticketing systems, allows teams to catalogue incidents, follow-up actions, bugs, stories, and more. As a common tool in any DevOps/SRE operation’s toolchain, JIRA is a key integration at Blameless. Blameless’ integration with JIRA allows teams to automatically generate a ticket within both Blameless and JIRA. This integration also allows teams to track follow-up actions via Blameless’ postmortem tool.

Our reliance on digital services continues to be heightened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For work, school, and play, digital remains the primary channel. This puts huge pressure on ITOps and DevOps teams, making it critical that they can collaborate easily to resolve incidents rapidly. Many modern ITOps and DevOps teams rely on one of PagerDuty’s key integration partners, Slack, to meet this need.

Black Friday is one of the biggest days of the year for online consumers and retailers alike. This year, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is reshaping Black Friday shopping — and digital consumers and retailers must plan accordingly. The coronavirus pandemic will likely cause Black Friday shopping to decline this year. As such, many digital retailers are launching early Black Friday sales, so they can capture consumers’ interest ahead of the competition.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. With the rising concern over cyberattacks in the distributed workforce, this week we explore the concept of cybersecurity incident response during a pandemic.

How is it already near the end of October? We know our retailer customers have been heads-down thinking about code freezes and hypercare during the high season as we approach the holidays. Disruption and pivoting quickly to meet changing customer expectations is nothing new to the retail industry.

Leading analysts continue to acknowledge BigPanda’s leading role in the AIOps ecosystem. Earlier this year the GigaOm AIOps Radar report placed BigPanda in the leader section for the company’s strong market impact as a platform that delivers event correlation at scale.

The Elastic Stack (ELK) has been used for observability and security for many years now, so much so that we now offer the two as out-of-the-box solutions. However, identifying issues and finding the root cause is only part of the process. Often, organizations want to integrate the Elastic Stack into their everyday workflows so they can resolve those issues quickly. This typically involves integrating with some form of ticketing/incident tracking framework.

Adopting SRE principles into your organization can be a big undertaking. You’ll need to develop new practices and procedures to minimize the costs of incident coordination. You’ll need to create a retrospective process that encourages continuous learning. You’ll need to shift culture to begin appreciating failure as an opportunity to grow. Your transition to the world of SRE will also require buy-in from all levels of your organization.