Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today I’m really excited to share the new look of our blog. Spike has had this blog for a while. Early on, it was just me and I wrote about the decisions I was making as we built Spike. Then we slowly started growing and wrote about incidents, response, escalations, on-calls and even many guides. It’s safe to say now that we are doubling down on this space! With the new design, we have intentionally kept it minimal and put the content first.

Good monitoring shouldn't be a luxury for well-funded teams. Early-stage startups run the same production systems as everyone else, on a tighter budget. That's when clear observability earns its keep. Today we're launching AppSignal for Startups: an ongoing discount on the full AppSignal platform for early-stage teams, with a better deal for Y Combinator companies.

Many teams start with a simple approach to on-call coverage. One person carries the phone this week. Someone else covers next week. Vacation requests are handled through emails, chat messages, or spreadsheets. When someone is unavailable, everyone is expected to remember who is covering. This works for a small team until the first missed alert. Duty scheduling is the foundation of reliable alerting.

Modernization assessments move faster when the structure is already in place. Instead of recreating custom fields, interview questions, and assessment workflows for every customer, you can use a custom field template to standardize how data is collected from the start. This guide shows you how to create a reusable Tidal Accelerator custom field template using Node.js and the Tidal API, so your assessments are easier to repeat, compare, and scale. So you’re starting a modernization practice.