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Tag: victorops

State of On-call Survey 2015 – Help Needed!
Last year, we launched the first ever State of On-call Report. We asked about tools, setting up on-call rotations, what team members are involved and what happens after the incident gets resolved…among other things. We got 500 responses and in the process, learned a lot about what people are doing to handle the challenge of on-call management.
A few key takeaways from 2014’s results…

In an effort to see if on-call is getting any better for anyone, we’re conducting the survey again this year. Because what fun is data if you can’t start picking out patterns, checking out year-over-year changes and looking for trends?

Our predictions for this year’s results…
- less folks are using homegrown monitoring and on-call systems because more options are now available off the shelf
- more organizations will report as having moved their infrastructure (or large parts of it) to the cloud
- an increase in the adoption of DevOps practices, especially when it comes to sharing the load of being on-call
- ChatOps will play a bigger role in how organizations do their incident management
- runbooks and collaboration will continue to be the two biggest factors in solving problems faster
- a decrease in the number of people saying on-call is getting worse (hopefully!)
If you’d like to help the cause, we’d love for you to spend a few minutes answering questions about being on-call. Click on the image above or here to begin the survey. We’ll be choosing one lucky winner from all the respondents to win a BB-8 from Sphero.

Check back in December when we release the 2015 State of On-call Report. We’ll be hosting a webinar with devopsy.kinsta.cloud, presenting the results. Stay tuned and thanks in advance for your help!
October 9, 2015
The Push to Make Ops More Social

Given that social coding is a thing, what about the other side? Operations has the same image of lone wolves solving problems in the dark. The culture of on-call is built around the concept that when you’re holding the pager, you’re the one on the front lines, so that everyone else can sleep.

Social operations, the ops in DevOps, is going to be about the same things that made social coding important: knocking down walls between individuals; making the knowledge of a system or infrastructure explicit and available, in context. But social operations is more difficult in two major ways: operations problems are often multidisciplinary, and often temporal – meaning that you have to be social when the situation arises,not on your time!

When I say that operations problems are multidisciplinary, I mean that solving a problem in an operational context might require a number of people with different domain expertise. The solution is going to be much more complex and may not be portable to other people. Fixing something that’s wrong with a puppet script inside of our own infrastructure is fundamentally different than contributing a bug fix back to an open source project, or otherwise contributing to an open development environment.

And when I say that operations problems are temporal, I mean that many of the forms of social engagement we’re getting used to in a social coding environment – forums, pull requests, etc. – are eminently useless when you’re in a firefight. When something’s wrong enough that you’re being paged at 2am, waiting for someone to respond to a comment thread on a pull request isn’t an option. You have to be able to get the right eyes on the problem, in a timely manner, if you want to solve infrastructure problems faster.

So, how can we make the operations side of DevOps social? What parts of “social” are useful in the context of an operations issue?

Opening up the knowledge of your team is a good place to start. Having the ability to get people involved is another good thing. Basically, what can we do to make it so that you know what you need to know, whether that’s how a problem was solved in the past, who’s available to get help, or what else is going on. That’s what we’re trying to figure out at VictorOps.

May 1, 2014
VictorOps Joins Rackspace Marketplace; Offers Collaborative Alert Management Platform for DevOps

Significantly Decreases Time To Resolution for Incidents to Reduce Costs For Customers

BOULDER, Colo., March 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — VictorOps, a collaboration and incident management platform designed for DevOps teams, today announced that it has joined the Marketplace for Rackspace® Hosting, RAX +0.03% , the open cloud company. As part of the Marketplace, VictorOps will offer a solution for Rackspace customers that gives them constant situational awareness of their application performance allowing for smarter, real-time collaboration around problems.

The VictorOps platform allows DevOps to define on-call schedules that notify team members of infrastructure and service delivery platform problems as they occur according to company, team and personal escalation policies. Team members are alerted via VictorOps’ native Android and iOS applications or by SMS, email or phone call.

“As long-term Rackspace customers, and as a DevOps driven organization, we’re excited to see tools like VictorOps in the Rackspace Marketplace,” said Nick Stielau, Director of Operations for Pantheon. Stielau is focused on architecting and selecting solutions that support his DevOps team members. “Without innovative, team-centric tools like VictorOps, creating an aligned development organization is an uphill battle,” he continued.

Team members can post ideas and trouble shoot problems in real-time while having unprecedented access to the data they need to solve the problem regardless of physical location or time-of-day. Teams that can share situational data easily, inject thoughts and comments, and leverage team members who are not physically present is key to reducing the time-to-resolution for the company and a better lifestyle for the team as a whole.

“The power of a collaborative solution for real-time problem solving is in its ability to leverage the entire team’s knowledge in a scalable way through all phases of the incident lifecycle,” said Todd Vernon, CEO and co-founder, VictorOps. “Bringing our collaboration platform to the Marketplace enables Rackspace customers to purchase a solution with new ways to solve problems in a smarter way, which can help solve the same or similar problems faster the next time they occur. This reduces overall costs for a business.”

“As early adopters of DevOps, we see VictorOps as a natural fit for the Marketplace,” said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace. “We share their desire to enable DevOps teams to do their jobs more effectively and believe that the addition of VictorOps will add great value to the Marketplace.”

For additional information about VictorOps and Rackspace Marketplace, visit: try.victorops.com/rackspace.

About VictorOps VictorOps is the world’s first collaborative alert management platform designed for DevOps teams that combines the power of people and data to solve IT problems in real-time. The VictorOps platform seamlessly orchestrates team situational awareness, incident creation, escalation, notification, and remediation with team members regardless of physical location or time of day. Privately held, VictorOps is backed by Costanoa Venture Capital and Foundry Group. For more information, visithttp://www.victorops.com and follow the company on Twitter @GoVictorOps.

SOURCE VictorOps

Copyright (C) 2014 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

March 19, 2014