VictorOps is an incident response tool whose mission is straightforward: “To make being on call suck less.” It enables teams to quickly detect and respond to problems like a service degredation or outage. VictorOps supports a wide range of external integrations to extend its capabilities by connecting different parts of your DevOps toolchain.

BOO! Did we scare you? We couldn’t help it, we’re just so happy it’s spooky season. Here’s the October issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

We’re pretty sure using a real incident to test a new response process is not the best idea. So, how do you test your process ahead of time? In this video, FireHydrant CEO, Robert Ross, shared how our customers leverage best practices to break, mitigate, resolve, and fireproof incident processes.

Just in case you haven’t heard, last week Microsoft experienced a huge outage that prevented users from accessing its Office 365 cloud-based subscription service which serves 200 million active monthly users. This latest outage was the third in ten days, causing the company to receive a deluge of customer complaints about a 'something went wrong' message that popped up when they tried to access their accounts.

Our October update brings the long-awaited mute-overwrite on iPhone (‘critical alerts’). We also introduce an undo action for Signl acknowledgements or closures. And in the web app you can now batch-ack and close to multiple Signls at once. All new features are introduced below – enjoy.

When we talk about the reliability of services, SRE encourages us to take a holistic view. Unreliability in service delivery can be due to anything, from hardware malfunctions to errors in code. One source of unreliability that is often overlooked is security. A security breach can damage customer trust far beyond the impact of the breach itself. Even smaller infractions, like failing a service audit, can make users wary.

Cloud security has become increasingly complex of late. Cloud providers use tens of thousands of APIs, container orchestration systems are growing in number and complexity, and more platforms and services are entering the cloud-native ring. What’s more, each of these components pose a potential security risk to organizations. And it’s you as the customer that’s responsible for the configuration and security of those components.

As companies today are racing to build site reliability engineering(SRE) practices within their engineering teams, site reliability engineering has become one of the hottest and highest paying jobs in tech. Site reliability engineering was a term coined by Google engineer Benjamin Treynor in 2003 when he was tasked with making sure that Google services were reliable, secure and functional.

Handover procedures in operations and maintenance are a key element of business continuity. As work in this field is usually organized in shifts, it is essential to keep track of any critical incidents, machine breakdowns, job ownership, completion, issues that are still open or unresolved and other related items. Such knowledge has a significant impact on a timely or even proactive response, for instance if issues re-surface.

On October 7th we released a new Enterprise Alert version, version 8.5.1. Included in this release are the following enhancements.