As a Solution Architect here at xMatters, an Everbridge Company, and through my 30-year career in the IT industry, I’ve seen many frameworks offering bold new ideas. CMMI, ITIL, Prince 2, Agile, Scrum, and most recently, DevOps. These frameworks come and go, offering huge improvements in the way we deliver and manage our IT capabilities, but never lasting long enough to act on those promises. That’s not to say they haven’t made a marked difference in the IT space, or that they haven’t been hugely impactful for organizations around the globe. They become launching off points for a new framework ..read more

Regardless of your organization’s size, industry, or security measures, you will inevitably face IT incidents. But what do you do if an incident affects a critical system and your on-call responders can’t resolve it? Does your team have a set of clearly outlined next steps they should take to handle the issue? Answering these questions can be complicated, even more so for large organizations that rely on cloud-based services to fuel their IT environment. Organizations of every size should be ready to handle incidents systematically and reduce their impacts on operations by specifying clear, au ..read more

Most commonly, businesses take a reactive approach to incident management. After all, the concept of incident response seems inherently reactive. However, it is possible—and often necessary—to take more proactive measures. This entails identifying potential problems and taking steps to remediate them before they become incidents. Let’s explore both proactive and reactive incident response methods, the strategies that differentiate the two approaches, and how you can use them concurrently to prevent system outages and performance lapses. Reactive incident response To mitigate risks to business ..read more

As the demand for instant innovation and real-time delivery of mission-critical processes continues to grow, your organization risks falling behind if it can’t adapt to an automation-centric strategy. To be successful, managers have to loosen the reigns and enable teams to automate their DevOps processes. Automating DevOps processes isn’t an all-or-nothing decision, and implementing automation processes slowly can let teams adapt to the changing environment and let go, little by little. Putting routine processes on autopilot allows DevOps teams to focus on innovation and take some chances, and ..read more

With the complex and steadfast growth of IT service delivery processes, organizations and their internal teams have come to rely on several tools in their toolbox to deliver best-in-class products and services. The use of AIOps, AI/ML, and overall automation has shaped modern delivery methods, but what we call this process, and how we grow to advance it, has yet to find a definition that’s universally recognized. Research conducted by EMA of a global panel of over 400 IT leaders found that “ServiceOps greatly shortens the time to find and fix problems, cuts waste and cost, increases IT personn ..read more

Digital transformation is accelerating rapidly to include virtually all enterprise functions. Organizations of all size, across all industries, are leveraging digital technology to enhance customer service and improve work efficiency. Integrating automation into core business functions has become a must to stay aligned with the ongoing digital revolution. The growing migration to the cloud has resulted in the distribution of company data and applications across multiple locations. This means that many complex business processes must leverage IT resources from the cloud and on-premises. This is ..read more

Automating processes and the tools that enable them is vital for empowering highly productive teams. The right automation tools and workflows help DevOps and SRE teams minimize repetitive tasks, improve monitoring capabilities, enable continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and work with massive volumes of data. Monitoring, logging, and alerting are all vital systems that benefit from automation. Automated systems can keep track of logs and signals throughout the engineering stack. They can also track essential metrics like performance and resource use, detect anomalies, and moni ..read more

An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules and protocols that enables different software applications to communicate and share data and functionality. The concept of an API has been around for a long time. However, APIs as you know them emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of the internet and web-based services. As more businesses began to offer online services, the need for a standardized way for these services to interact and share data became apparent. This led to the development of APIs that allowed different web-based services to communicate and share ..read more

Visit the xMatters Trust site What are the keys to building software development security into the early stages of product development? And what are the costs of ignoring security? In this article, xMatters Product Manager Kit Brown-Watts provides his insights on the matter. Every investment decision comes with trade-offs, usually in the form of cost, quality, or speed. The CQS Matrix, as I like to call it, captures the dilemma most product people face. If you’re a perfectionist, you may find the temptation to build 100% of a feature set irresistible. On the other side of the perfection spec ..read more

Companies moving their applications and services to the cloud is nothing new, but doing business there requires a solid cloud migration strategy. The list of things to consider is longer than you might think. Fortunately, xMatters has done it successfully and has helped its own customers move to the cloud too. In this article, Product Marketing Manager Erin Jones gives a checklist you can use to get your cloud migration right. In the not-so-distant future, we could have people living on Mars. This is not something one decides overnight. Rather, it’s taken decades already to do the research and ..read more