December 2015 Summaries

Post mortems are crucial for investigating incidents to determine their causes and learn from them, and they should not be reserved solely for major incidents. Conducting post mortems for every incident, especially those that disrupt team members, can lead to improvements in team efficiency and product quality. To streamline the process, teams like PagerDuty recommend establishing thresholds for which incidents require full team attention and which can be reviewed by individuals, batching minor incidents for weekly reviews, and utilizing tools like analytics to prioritize resolutions without assigning blame. Simple outcomes from these reviews may include adjusting alert thresholds, adding filters, tracking repeat incidents, or updating runbooks. By documenting all supporting materials and outcomes, teams can build a comprehensive library that aids in onboarding, training, and continuous product improvement.

PagerDuty's integration with ServiceNow has been certified for the Fuji release, offering joint customers enhanced incident management capabilities that aim to reduce downtime and improve on-call productivity. By consolidating over 150 monitoring tool partners into a single view, the integration allows for streamlined operations, facilitating faster incident resolution and enabling effective collaboration across teams, particularly those transitioning to a DevOps model. The integration reduces manual tasks, empowering teams to self-manage incident resolutions swiftly and efficiently, while PagerDuty's robust on-call scheduling and notification system ensures timely alerts through preferred channels such as SMS, email, or push notifications. This certified integration, tested for interoperability, security, and performance, signifies that ServiceNow customers can now benefit from PagerDuty's capabilities to manage major incidents, thereby driving down response times and ensuring reliable service delivery.

In the DevOps world, embracing failure is seen as essential for innovation and progress, with many companies encouraging experimentation and blameless post-mortems to foster a culture that accepts risk. This approach involves rationally accepting failure as a part of the process while managing the emotional response it may trigger. Key strategies include removing the stigma from failure, understanding it as a learning opportunity, and avoiding personal blame. It's crucial not to dwell on failures; instead, compartmentalize them and prevent them from affecting overall performance. Companies should budget for errors and integrate failure recovery into feedback loops, ensuring that individuals keep failures in perspective, redirect energy towards productive tasks, and maintain team cohesion. Ultimately, growth in a pro-failure, pro-risk environment involves learning from both mistakes and successful projects that may not be groundbreaking, with the understanding that success often lies beyond failure.

Integrating Application Performance Management (APM) tools with PagerDuty can significantly reduce downtime by ensuring prompt notifications and comprehensive data analysis to prevent future disruptions. New Relic, AppDynamics, SmartBear's AlertSite, Dynatrace, and Rollbar are highlighted as leading APM tools that offer various features, such as real-time analytics, code-level insights, global monitoring, and error tracking across multiple platforms and languages. Each tool provides unique capabilities to improve application performance and user experience, while their integration with PagerDuty enhances incident tracking, on-call management, and alerting. This combination allows businesses to swiftly address issues and maintain trust with their customers by gaining a holistic view of their application's health across diverse systems.

Moxtra and PagerDuty together offer a comprehensive solution for rapid team communication and issue resolution, regardless of team members' locations or devices. Moxtra, a robust messaging app, integrates with PagerDuty to provide a collaborative workspace where alerts can be automatically shared with the entire team, facilitating immediate action. This integration enables seamless communication through features such as group chat, file sharing, document annotation, voice conferencing, screen sharing, and video chat, ensuring all team members stay informed and can contribute to resolving incidents swiftly. The combination of these tools ensures that critical incidents are addressed efficiently, keeping everyone in the loop and minimizing response time.