Resources

Wondering about severity levels? We explain what incident severity levels are, how to classify them, and how they will affect your incident management process.

Five nines uptime is a goal to have a system that is fully operational 99.999% of the time, which would result in approximately 6 minutes downtime per year.

Something big happened at Blameless this month — our “Postmortem” feature was updated to its new name, “Retrospective”. To the naysayer, I suppose you’re thinking, This seems trivial. Different teams call it different names anyway, so why bother making the change? First let me say, thank you for reading our blog and I hope you finish this one through to the end. Now, allow me to explain our reasoning and why we’re excited about this update.

Alert fatigue is the phenomenon of employees becoming desensitized to alert messages because of the overwhelming volume and number of false positives received.

Wondering about SRE Tools? We explain the best tools for every step of the SRE development process.

Communication can make or break the effectiveness of a team responding to an incident. On-call needs to know real-time status updates plus all relevant tasks. Support, customer success and functional owners across the business need assurance that it’s being handled. Blameless’ new powerful CommsFlow™, core to the platform, is designed to operate timely, context-rich and automated communications, from start to completion. The lift becomes much lighter, everyone is updated, and most importantly, engineers have time to focus.

Looking to build or improve your DevOps Team? We will explain the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps Team within your organization, and how to start building one.

Wondering what runbook is? We explain what a runbook is, common tasks a runbook can help with, and how to create one.

Having good reliability means that incidents are nothing special, merely variations of our regular work. Such a perfect dream of Site Reliability Excellence means that there are clear paths to expertise and common grounding between teams happens frequently. To make this vision a reality, we run an open session at Blameless that builds on musical traditions of improvisation. Inspired by western jazz and Indonesian percussion orchestras, our weekly session seeks to build group intuition through a discipline of iterative collaboration. In this talk I introduce our approach to continuous learning, Practice of Practice Gamelan. What we've created is an opportunity for coming together in a collaborative way without the anxiety of performing under pressure. We share mental models through the telling of stories, playing of games, and riffing of ideas. Different areas of our socio-technical system are explored as seen through different eyes. By learning about how our coworkers view the system we operate together, we continuously build new connections through our newly shared perspectives. We not only learn how our teammates strive towards Reliability Excellence in their daily work, we also reduce unknowns about the system itself, giving us more flexibility to adapt around inevitable ambiguity. Come see how we want incidents to be just another time to get together and jam about some fascinating part of the system that has suddenly revealed itself as a wrong note we can learn by.