Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For better or worse, most companies—including their execs and developers—see SREs as superheroes who’ll save them from the evils of downtime and service degradation with their boundless superpowers. SREs are expected to constantly perform dangerous stunts like production debugging or communicating highly technical issues to angry VPs. They must also be able to manage infrastructure, networks, databases, pipelines, operating systems and much more.

When a critical system goes down, every minute counts. Amid the chaos, it's easy to overlook a crucial aspect of Incident Management: keeping stakeholders informed. However, neglecting stakeholder communication can have disastrous consequences, including misinformation, delayed decisions, and frustration. Effective stakeholder communication is essential for ensuring a coordinated, efficient, and transparent response to incidents.

Pets.com was an online pet supply retailer founded in 1998, during the dot-com craze. In February 2000, it raised $83 million to go public based mainly on metrics like user acquisition, website traffic, and brand recognition. However, the profit margins were minimal and the marketing costs exorbitant, which led Pets.com to file for bankruptcy nine months after its IPO. The industry now recognizes these metrics as vanity metrics.

We're excited to share a significant improvement to our Jira integration aimed at enhancing your incident management workflow. With our latest update, you can now seamlessly sync notes between Jira tickets and Squadcast incidents. This bidirectional sync ensures that any comment added in one platform automatically appears in the other.

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops? As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

What if your have already implemented tracing but lacks robust metrics capabilities? Enter SpanConnector: a tool that bridges this gap by converting trace data into actionable metrics. This post details the workings of SpanConnector, providing a guide on its configuration and implementation.

The software monitoring world is broken because of a TSDB. We deserve a TSDW.