Latest from David
Multi-Tiered Escalation Policies are Paramount
As any team charged with keeping systems up and running will tell you, having one person on-call isn’t enough. What happens if your on-call engineer sleeps through his alert? What happens if his phone’s battery dies without him knowing, or if he gets an alert at an inconvenient time, like when stuck on a bus […]
Dec 11, 2015 · 3 minAll articles by David Shackelford
Showing 1–10Four Metrics for Driving Cultural Change in DevOps Teams
Everyone wants to optimize a team’s performance, but it’s not enough to just talk about it. To truly impact your team’s performance, you need to take a page from operationally mature DevOps teams and use metrics to gain valuable insight into your team’s work, enhance their capacity and drive cultural change. The right data allows […]
Do You Need Your Ticketing System for Real-Time Incident Management?
The term “operationally mature” characterizes companies that understand how incident management affects both employee well-being and business impacts. Operationally mature companies have a process in place with built-in reliability and accountability that limits high-severity incidents because of bugs. The more mature a company’s operations, the better it can maintain agility and adapt to change. So […]
The Pros and Cons of Remote Work in Ops
Remote work in Ops is divisive. The perks of working from home, your local coffee shop or wherever can be quite obvious to engineers and contributors. But some team leaders and company execs aren’t buying into it. One faction sees it as a way to do better quality work. Another has watched deadlines and motivation […]
#HugOps in Practice: Empathy Skills for DevOps
Get it together! Why is your service always down?!” We think we’re doing the whole DevOps thing right — new hires can deploy on day one, Travis CI is humming along, and we own the code we ship. But then something breaks, something doesn’t go according to plan, tempers flare up, and all that warm, […]
DevOps for non-engineers
If you’ve scrolled through LinkedIn or companies’ career pages, you’ve probably seen the term “DevOps” used as a part of a job title. DevOps Engineers and DevOps architects are everywhere, and many people are surprised to find that those titles aren’t correct. It sounds innocuous: After all, isn’t DevOps something that you do? If you’re […]
Nine Common Ops Mistakes (and How to Prevent Them)
Constant change is a reality for any growing, dynamic organization. Being receptive to change helps us quickly innovate and learn, yet at the same time, poorly-managed change can create instability and downtime. Ask any engineer what the number one cause of downtime in their systems is, and they’ll say change – software changes, network changes, […]
Reducing Incident Resolution Time
From raw incident count to response time, there are several key metrics that top Operations teams track to measure and improve their performance. One of the most popular metrics teams track for is mean time to resolution (MTTR). It’s the time between failure and recovery from failure, and is directly linked to your uptime. While […]
Four Steps to Free Your Organization From Scheduled Maintenance
Whether you’re an operations engineer or a customer, scheduled maintenance is often viewed as a given when delivering software as a service. While far better than surprise outages, planned downtime is still tough for everybody involved– customers will always have off-hours access needs, and the low-traffic times you want to perform maintenance are often the […]
There is No ‘I’ in Team: Transitioning Engineering Teams into a DevOps Model
As the pace of development and business continues to scale, teams need an agile and collaborative work environment to succeed. Moving to a DevOps model is a critical part of setting your engineering teams up to succeed, but making the transition can be challenging for many companies. What’s the deal? – Why you need a […]