Do you need an incident commander? (Yes.) This article is about how to staff your incident command rotation through a couple of different strategies.

  Ryan McDonald — FireHydrant

What an interesting idea, an insurance plan that pays out automatically when a cloud provider has an outage.

  L.S. Howard — Insurance Journal
Full disclosure: Fastly, my employer, is mentioned.

LaunchDarkly revamped the way that their on-call system works. Learn about the experience through the eyes of a newly-onboarded engineer.

  Anna Baker — LaunchDarkly (via The New Stack)

Catchpoint’s yearly SRE Report is out with four key findings. You have to fill out a form with your email address, and then the link to download the report is presented in your browser.

  Catchpoint

This article shows why one-thread-per-request can be a bottleneck and presents alternatives.

  Ron Pressler — Parallel Universe (via High Scalability)

And this is a truth about incidents: there are always more signals than there is attention available.

It’s so true.

  Fred Hebert — Honeycomb

If you’ve ever even considered running a retrospective, read this article.

This is my favorite piece of advice from this article:

If you think ‘this might be a stupid question,’ ask it.

  Emily Ruppe — Jeli

I’m still not sure how I feel about AIOps. Fortunately, this article takes a measured stance while providing some useful insight.

Conclusion: AI won’t replace SREs – but it can help

  JJ Tang — Rootly
This article is published by my sponsor, Rootly, but their sponsorship did not influence its inclusion in this issue.

There’s a really great discussion of “pilot error” at the end of this air accident summary video.

  Mentour Pilot

There are some really great names and talks on the agenda for this half-day virtual conference on April 1.

  IRConf

This article is about building a framework, rather than using one off-the-shelf, to ensure that it’s tailored to the needs of your orgnaization.

  Ethan Motion

When are you smarter than your playbooks, and when are your playbooks smarter than you?

  Andre King — Rootly
This article is published by my sponsor, Rootly, but their sponsorship did not influence its inclusion in this issue.

This one is about piecing together the story of how an incident unfolded. One interviewee might mention something new, and then you can ask later interviewees about it.

  Cory Watson — Jeli

All about alert fatigue: how to recognize it and how to fix it once you notice it.

  Emily Arnott — Blameless

This one includes a summary of their February 2 outage:

[…] a routine deployment failed to generate the complete set of integrity hashes needed for Subresource Integrity. The resulting output was missing values needed to securely serve Javascript assets on GitHub.com.

  Jakub Oleksy — GitHub

Following on last week’s article about the term “postmortem”, this one has even more great reasons to pick a different word.

  Blameless

This article recommends a two-stage approach to writing an incident retrospective report: a “calibration document” and then the final report.

  Thai Wood — Jeli

In this episode of the podcast Page it to the Limit, they discuss learning how to be an incident commander.

There was major AWS outage and the second day I was incident command.

  Kat Gaines, with guest Iris Carrera — Page it to the Limit

This article discusses three aspects of fully owning your systems: mandate, knowledge, and responsibility. After defining those terms, it goes on to discuss what happens if one of the three is missing.

  Alex Ewerlöf

I really like the “Managing High RPS” section, especially the part about ignoring events if they’re too old to be relevant any longer.

  Ankush Gulati and David Gevorkyan — Netflix

Cool idea! When a process is overloaded, the system drops requests based on heuristics until the overload condition has passed.

  Bryan Barkley — LinkedIn

Here’s another take on incident severity and priority levels. The two terms are different and mean specific things.

  Robert Ross — FireHydrant

Can we please agree to stop calling them “postmortems”?

  Ash P — Cruform Newsletter

The term “service level” goes back to the US highway system maintenance procedures, among others.

  Akshay Chugh and Piyush Verma — Last9

Charity Majors has railed against metrics for years. Now, her company Honeycomb has a metrics product offering. How does she square it?

  Charity Majors — Honeycomb

Despite the December AWS outage, folks aren’t fleeing AWS, and multi-cloud designs for reliability still don’t make sense, according to this cloud consultant. The media angle is fascinating.

  Lydia Leong — Cloud Pundit

This article has a great list of ideas of who to talk to, plus a section on how to prioritize when you’re short on time.

  Daniela Hurtado — Jeli

Here’s the next incredibly useful article in Jeli’s Incident Analysis 101 series. This one covers the skills and traits of a good incident analyst, along with what not to look for.

  Laura Maguire — Jeli

This article has a remarkable level of detail on 13 incidents at Twitter that were related to cache. The authors open with an explanation of why they focused on cache-related incidents.

  Dan Luu and Yao Yue

[…] the same three pillars form the core of any good process, whether it’s for the largest e-commerce giant or a scrappy SaaS startup.

The three pillars are:

1. Clarity
2. Transparency
3. Calm

  Lisa Karlin Curtis — incident.io

This one recommends doing away with “P0” and “P5” and instead using plain words like “Low” and “High”.

  Stephen Whitworth — incident.io

Feature flags can be a useful way to resolve user impact during an incident.

  Weihan Li — Rootly
This article is published by my sponsor, Rootly, but their sponsorship did not influence its inclusion in this issue.

Implementing a dead-switch for your alerting tool is really important so that you don’t blissfully sleep through an outage.

  Chris Loukas — HelloFresh

As SRE #1, the author of this article got to define the SRE role from the ground up.

  Fred Hebert — Honeycomb

In this article, I will share five lessons I learned about starting SRE teams (or engagements, or organizations).

This article is all about the shape of an SRE team, rather than technical details like SLOs and such.

  Andrea Spadaccini — USENIX ;login:

Why do we use the term “root cause”? I especially love the opening analogy.

  John Allspaw — The ReadME Project

Our Reliability Manifesto is a succinct collection of rules, guidelines, and best practices that reflect our current thinking on what it takes to build a reliable system.

  Christian Hardenberg — Delivery Hero

Here’s how New Relic sets their S*Os.

Set SLIs and SLOs against system boundaries

  Dan Holloran and Elisa Binette — New Relic

It involves lots of machine learning and a “team resilience score”.

  Jennifer Riggins — The New Stack

Every incident is unique, so incident analysis is about learning in order to improve resilience, rather than trying to “fix” a “root cause”.

  Laura Maguire — Jeli

A lot of incident management guides out there are aimed at established, big-scale companies. Things are different when you’re in startup mode.

  Chris Evans — incident.io

This is so cool! It’s a guide for what kinds of incidents you’re likely to learn the most from. There’s a long list of things to look out for with explanations.

  Laura Maguire and Vanessa Huerta Granda — Jeli