Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On Monday morning, June 5th there was a wide scale outage for Microsoft 365. Interestingly, for this one, they first reported it with a barrage of duplicate health status emails (why, we have no idea) but the issue was much more widespread than that – it was affecting most Microsoft Office 365 services: The first incident was Incident EX571516: Some users are unable to access Outlook on the web, and may experience issues with other Exchange Online services.

SAPPHIRE 2023 marked another significant milestone, leaving a lasting impression in the books. Returning to the Orlando Convention Center, the event had that ‘SAP energy’ we’re used to as thousands of like minded individuals congregated to exchange experiences, delve into SAP's upcoming plans, and foster valuable connections. Going beyond the walls of the convention center, SAPPHIRE extended its reach into the surrounding areas of Orlando.

With the 34°C / 104°F heat and a far cry from the 18°C / 64°F I returned home to, it was time to reflect on SAP Sapphire Orlando 2023, the trade show that was the first, in my opinion, post pandemic Sapphire since 2019. Over 13 thousand business leaders, partners and SAP staff descended on the Orange County Convention center in Orlando, Florida to discuss and debate all things SAP. So what were the key takeaways from my side?

Developer, SRE, IT, and security teams often perform complex and error-prone processes in response to disruptions and changes in their systems. Relying on these processes requires a significant amount of time switching between tools to gather the relevant context needed for remediation, domain expertise, and the manual execution of tasks for incident management—which can significantly prolong disruptions and downtime.

Businesses rely on software solutions increasingly in our modern age, and it’s constantly evolving. Compared to some of the software being used in the early 2000s, we’ve seen large changes, resulting in more complex frameworks, which come with their own unique changes. As software and systems become more complex, so increases the probability of errors occurring and the level of jeopardy those errors might present.

The concept of observability centers around collecting data from all parts of the system to provide a unified view of the software at large. Fault tolerance, no single point of failure and redundancy are prominent design principles in modern software systems. But that doesn’t mean errors, degradation, bugs or even the occasional catastrophe don’t happen.

Martin and Jess recently conversed with Todd Gardner of RequestMetrics as part of the O11ycast podcast. We don’t normally write blogs based on these conversations, but there were impactful comments in that episode that bear repeating. You can listen to the full conversation if you wish. Let’s get into it!