August 2012 Summaries

Providing effective 24/7 phone support can be challenging but is essential for businesses that offer premium service. This article outlines a strategy using PagerDuty and RingCentral to handle critical calls at all hours, even for companies without a globally distributed team. It emphasizes the importance of setting up processes and guidelines, such as defining how support contacts should be initiated, establishing service level agreements (SLAs) for different subscription plans, and clarifying scenarios warranting a call. PagerDuty coordinates support requests and escalations, while RingCentral provides the telephony infrastructure, including phone numbers and voicemail systems. The setup involves creating services in PagerDuty, assigning escalation policies, and integrating with RingCentral extensions to ensure seamless notifications. The article concludes with testing the system and inviting feedback for potential improvements.

Monitoring infrastructure effectively is crucial, and various tools are employed to ensure systems are operational and issues are promptly addressed. Common solutions include Nagios for overall infrastructure monitoring, Pingdom or Neustar WPM for website performance, and Boundary or New Relic for application monitoring, alongside custom-built solutions. Each organization tailors its monitoring systems to its unique requirements, creating diverse approaches to infrastructure management. Peer organizations, such as dotCloud, Instagram, and Twilio, share insights into their methods, including the use of PagerDuty for real-time alerts and managing on-call rotations to maintain robust IT infrastructure.