Help DevOps teams respond faster with smarter alerts

Is your DevOps team drowning in alerts? Are you seeing an increase in escalations to management? Do you have new, tougher service issue response times to meet? Do you need to collaborate across teams to fix issues faster?
As companies scale up DevOps activity to deploy and support more new application services and updates, business leaders need to assure service levels during the next phase of growth. You will need to address three common growing pains:  not getting the right alerts soon enough; getting too many notifications, making it difficult to know what to prioritize among the clutter; and getting the wrong info at the wrong time.
Consider centralizing alert notification management
It may be time to get more efficient at responding to alerts. For a quick first response, you want the right team—and right team member—to be notified. For example, cloud database issues should automatically flow to the database expert – right?
Look at introducing some support to quickly set up on-duty and on-call schedule and shift patterns for weeks in advance. That way there will be no coverage gaps and you can streamline alert notifications to the right people at the right time.
For faster response, individuals can tailor the alert method to their preference, such as email, SMS, voice call or Slack. It’s also an advantage if your operations support team members can acknowledge a critical alert while away from the desk with SMS or mobile app—like when picking up a well-deserved latte at the café. It’s goes without saying that both the team and managers benefit from avoiding unnecessary escalations.
Collaborate to resolve alerts with ChatOps
For issues requiring broader input for fast diagnosis, you want to enable real-time collaboration. With ChatOps, the term coined by GitHub, stakeholders from different teams see alerts posted to a channel like Slack and have the conversations to diagnose the issue quickly.
Once you are up-and-running, you may want to tailor alert notification policies to help the team achieve more demanding requirements. For example, if you encounter issues that are taking too long to diagnose, you may want to customize a chain of escalations to bring in teams from the broader organization who can help troubleshoot.
Cloud operations can benefit from new management capabilities to get more efficient. Your first easy-to-take step? Adopt a policy-driven approach to delivering the right alerts to the right people at the right time.
You can start a 60-day free trial of IBM Alert Notification here.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud