May 2018 Summaries

Downtime poses significant financial challenges for businesses, with a 2016 IHS Markit survey revealing a collective annual cost of $700 billion among 400 companies. Individual company losses can be staggering, with estimates like Gartner's $5,600 per minute, translating to $300,000 per hour. The cost of downtime is categorized into three main areas: revenue loss (R), employee productivity loss (E), and customer-related costs (C), which can include penalties for service-level agreement breaches or compensations. Moreover, the aftermath of downtime can lead to additional expenses, including root cause analysis and system improvements. The hidden costs, such as customer churn and decreased employee morale, also contribute to the overall impact. Despite the challenges in eradicating downtime, practices like Chaos Engineering are advocated to minimize it by proactively identifying and addressing system weaknesses. Gremlin's automated reliability platform offers tools to uncover and mitigate availability risks, emphasizing the importance of thorough testing and strategic planning in maintaining system reliability.

Gremlin has announced its new Slack integration, enhancing real-time collaboration for chaos engineering by providing automatic notifications to Slack channels about the status of Gremlin attacks, including manual, scheduled, and API-triggered attacks. This integration facilitates quick response actions through ChatOps options, allowing teams to halt, view logs, and re-run attacks directly from Slack. Furthermore, Slack's robust search functionality aids in tracking past issues and incidents, fostering better prevention strategies. Gremlin continues to focus on enabling safe chaos engineering practices with features like a free trial of their automated reliability platform, which identifies and mitigates availability risks. The company also offers tools like custom reliability test suites and scoring systems to help organizations consistently measure and achieve reliability standards.