In the world of enterprise major incident management, integrating partial or full automation across each stage of the incident response and management lifecycle makes a big difference to the speed incidents are addressed and the data you have to understand them afterward.  Gartner coined the term “Incident Response Automation” in its 2020 report Automate Incident Response to Enhance Incident Management. “As organizations increase in reliance on DevOps toolchains like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), solutions demand automated integration with incident management process ..read more

Business continuity is a crucial part of any scalable operations plan, but many businesses fail to realize how important it is until their first critical emergency. Only then does business continuity management come to the forefront of planning exercises, and stakeholders are forced to reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and determine if they can avoid it happening again, or be better prepared if it does. The true business continuity management lifecycle begins long before an incident. Whether you’re looking to start planning now, or refreshing your current processes to ensure they ..read more

In today’s fast-paced digital world, your customers expect your services to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If your services are unreliable, these customers will likely take their business elsewhere — and spread the word. To retain their business, you must understand and optimize your service and system health to ensure your services are reliable. Gauging your service and system health requires much more than knowing whether they’re on or off. You need to know about MTBF, MTTR, and  MTTF. But, how do you make sense of these many metrics and acronyms that are supposed to he ..read more

An update on how xMatters service reliability platform is improving animal rescue response times through WIRES in Australia. We are extremely grateful for xMatters support and are excited to share this update with the xMatters community. We have made so much progress with our wildlife rescue response systems since the devastating bushfires of 2019 and 2020, despite the continuing challenges of COVID-19. Increased awareness WIRES (NSW Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service Inc.) is the largest wildlife rescue organisation in Australia and has been rescuing and caring for wildlife ev ..read more

How to have reliable systems at scale is a complex problem to solve. To keep customers happy, building and operating digital services is now a priority for businesses in just about every industry. When an outage does occur, organizations rely on their DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to navigate and solve the problem. These teams are responsible for ensuring that the organization’s applications are quickly restored and running again, and for finding ways to keep apps operating despite the outage. One important metric these teams monitor is mean time to failure (MTTF). This m ..read more

Mean time to repair (MTTR), sometimes referred to as mean time to resolution, is a popular DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) team metric. MTTR identifies the overall availability and disaster recovery aspects of your IT assets or application workloads. As modern organizations increasingly rely on software to run their businesses, having a clear understanding of this metric helps DevOps and SRE teams meet their service-level agreements (SLA) and maintain healthy infrastructure and services. Ideally, teams should aim to keep their MTTR low, so they spend less time fixing problems and ..read more

Financial services processes are an incredibly sensitive and vital part of modern society, and maintaining their reliability and protection is crucial. But with so many interconnected parts, from APIs to partners, and even international law and security regulations specifying how processes can operate, ensuring security in this industry can be daunting. There are numerous ways that xMatters can be integrated into your financial service processes to streamline operations, decrease routine and forthcoming incidents, and ensure that your customers are receiving the best services. And, don’t just ..read more

Why automation is a key initiative in 2021 I was speaking to a friend who teaches at a high school and she complained about the way her school requires teachers to manually update grades, take attendance, and do other tasks that slow down the day and keep teachers from doing what they love most: educating their students. As someone who enjoys efficiency, she was disappointed in the lack of tools and systems in place to automate manual processes—preventing staff from doing their core teaching job and students from getting a comprehensive lesson.  Every kind of team wants to focus on the th ..read more

Read the white paper: 5 Steps to Build a Process-Centric IT Organization Before you can choose the proper tools for your organization, you have to understand its essential business processes. Once you know an essential business process, you can review software applications that will help make your organization more efficient and accurate. Unfortunately, many organizations do not understand their essential business processes. This makes it nearly impossible for them to streamline their organizations, which puts them at a disadvantage in the marketplace. This article will help you identify the ..read more

Business continuity is a crucial part of any scalable operations plan, but many businesses fail to realize how important it is until their first critical emergency. Only then does business continuity management come to the forefront of planning exercises, and stakeholders are forced to reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and determine if they can avoid it happening again, or be better prepared if it does. The true business continuity management lifecycle begins long before an incident. Whether you’re looking to start planning now, or refreshing your current processes to ensure they ..read more