For most businesses, managing major incidents can be intimidating. With a swarm of information coming from different directions, keeping things organized and maintaining clear, effective communication is tough. It only gets worse when there's no defined process to follow. This disorganization confuses everyone, delays responses, and increases the incident escalation rate. Enter the incident commander (IC).

I was visiting Queenstown, New Zealand last week amidst the horrible floods which quickly escalated. As an incident responder myself, I was amazed at the operations and how fast responders on the ground acted in evacuating and clearing the grounds. Over 100 people were evacuated in the middle of the night with zero casualties. A commendable job. Here are some observations I made and what we can learn as incident responders ourselves..

From the very beginning of Blameless, we had two vital missions. First, to offer a solution to what we saw as a mounting crisis of reliability by offering a comprehensive, easy-to-use, reliability platform. Second, to educate the companies facing this crisis on the fundamentals of incident management, cutting-edge best practices, and the cultural values that sustain learning and growth.

You’re in the incident channel rocking yet another incident. Comms are flowing, resolution is in sight, the team is grinding, and you’re feeling good. Then…

In the ever-evolving world of software engineering, the landscape is constantly shifting. New technologies emerge, best practices evolve, and how we build and run software continues to change. However, when it comes to incident alerting, it often feels like we're stuck in the past.

IT leaders are thrilled about the potential of Generative AI for IT Operations. But they also want to know how it works, why it works, and what it will do for them before taking the leap and adopting this new technology. Allow me to share my perspective on the hype and the truth behind Generative AI. I’m the Field CTO for BigPanda, Operational Intelligence and Automation driven by AIOps.

The ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs is called Observability. A system becomes 'observable' when it is possible to estimate the current state using only information from outputs, namely sensor data. You can use the data from Observability to identify and troubleshoot problems, optimize performance, and improve security. In the next few sections, we'll take a closer look at the three pillars of Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces.

While SMS alerts are handy, they also tend to be tricky. Across 120+ countries, we continuously deal with compliances & regulations from Vendors, Government, and Phone carrier companies. Other alert channels similar to SMS are a lot less cumbersome with higher delivery rates. Let’s take a look at the available options to switch from SMS.

Having the context of how similar issues were handled in the past can be invaluable. It can help incident responders grasp the nature of recurring problems, their causes, and effective solutions that have worked in the past. Introducing Squadcast’s Past Incidents feature that assists incident responders by presenting them with a list of similar past incidents related to the same service they are currently investigating.