Ops.lol

Hi Folks!I’m on call for Incident Command here at PagerDuty part of this week, and I was wondering if you have a ritual or process for what you do when those alarms go off. I confess, after having been on call for various types of production systems over the years, that my first stop after ack’ing an alert is to stop in the bathroom - if you need to or not, just like Mom used to tell you on road trips. Then I make sure I have a beverage. The call might be long and require a bit of talking, so I want to have something to drink. Then I’m ready to go after that incident for however long it takes. Fortunately our incidents at PagerDuty aren’t nearly as bad as some I’ve been in for past jobs, where calls would run so long the battery would run out on my phone. But it pays to be prepared!What do you need to get you through an incident? I’d love to hear what keeps you going.  --mandi 

Walking into a tech conference hall can be overwhelming. Tons of exhibitors trying to catch your attention with the latest industry trends, and you only have 30 minutes between one talk and the next, or that important networking meeting you’ve scheduled.Why not ask for a little help from your AI friends to use your time wisely and go straight to the booth that will show you what is really important for your operations?That's exactly what this PagerDuty customer did during AWS Hamburg this week. 👀 Look what they got:  

Just encountered another textbook case of environment-specific behavior making its way to production. You know the scenario - clean test runs, green pipelines, and a deployment that somehow manages to uncover every possible edge case we didn't account for. Ops problem now xD The fascinating part isn't even the divergence between environments, but rather the almost ritualistic "works on my machine" declaration that follows. It's particularly interesting how this phrase has survived decades of technological evolution, from bare metal to containers to orchestrated clusters.Some observations from today's incident:Local environment: Pristine, controlled, predictable Production environment: Meeting real-world chaos with unexpected grace Monitoring dashboards: Telling stories that local logs never hinted at Incident timeline: Growing longer as we discover more dependencies Postmortem doc: Already filling up with "lessons learned"For those keeping score at home, this is precisely why we've bee

Who missed the holiday season? Hey there, fellow code wranglers and server whisperers!'Tis the season to be jolly... and to dodge tech questions like Neo dodges bullets in The Matrix! 🎄💻As we gear up for the annual family gathering extravaganza, I couldn't help but chuckle at this all-too-relatable gem floating around the interwebs. You know the drill - you've barely hung up your coat when Aunt Marge corners you with that gleam in her eye:"Oh, sweetie! You work with computers, don't you? My toaster's been acting up..."Suddenly, your years of containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code expertise vanish faster than a production server during a Black Friday sale. You find yourself channeling your inner Caitlin, mustering all your willpower to utter that magical two-letter word: "No."But fear not, my fellow holiday heroes! I've got a foolproof strategy to keep your sanity intact this season:Develop selective hearing loss when words like "computer," "internet," or "thing

AI accepting a DevOps job 

Hey there, fellow responders! 👋Check out this revolutionary new "serverless" data center I stumbled upon! 🤯Serverless Data Center. Credit: nixCraftBehold the future of computing - it's so serverless, there aren't even any servers! 😂Gone are the days of pesky hardware, blinking lights, and that annoying hum of actual machines doing work. This next-gen facility is the epitome of low maintenance:No servers = No problems! 🎉 Monitoring? More like "ignororing," am I right? 👀 Incident management? The only incident here is how much money we're saving! 💰 Site reliability? More like "sight reliability" - if you can't see any servers, they must be reliable! 👍Just imagine the peace of mind knowing your infrastructure is so cutting-edge, it doesn't even exist! No more 3 AM wake-up calls, no more capacity planning headaches, and definitely no more "have you tried turning it off and on again?"The best part? It scales infinitely! Need more power? Just add more... nothing! 🚀So come on down to t

👋 Hey Community,You've all been there - it's 2 AM, production is down, and your phone is buzzing off the nightstand. How do you tackle these high-pressure situations? Let's see which incident response style resonates with you:The Zen Master 🧘‍♂️ You've seen it all before. You calmly ssh into the server, methodically work through your mental checklist, and guide your team through the storm.   The Caffeinated Coder ☕ Sleep is for the weak! You're already firing up your IDE before the alert finishes. Time to crush this bug before the sun rises.   The Log Whisperer 🕵️‍♂️ grep is your middle name. You dive deep into log files, piecing together the puzzle while muttering "Interesting..." under your breath.   The Slack Champion 🤝 You're all about clear communication. Your status updates are a thing of beauty, keeping everyone in the loop without flooding the channel.   The Meme Lord 😎 Sure, the site's on fire, but have you seen this relevant xkcd? You keep spirits high with well-timed GI

Hey there, fellow DevOps warriors and SRE superheroes! 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️Check out this hilarious sign at a train station. Looks like even escalators are joining our "refuse to work" club! 😂The sign reads: "This escalator is refusing to escalate. This has been escalated to the engineer who is on their way up (or down) to check it out."Sound familiar? It's like our production environment on a Monday morning, am I right? 🙃Let's break this down in true platform engineering style:Incident: Escalator refusing to escalate (aka "The Classic Monday Deploy") Detection: Probably some poor commuter who got a surprise leg workout Escalation: Routed to on-call engineer (hope they're not stuck in traffic!) Resolution: Engineer en route (ETA unknown - classic) Mitigation: "PLEASE USE THE LIFT" (aka failover to backup system)I bet the escalator's just throwing a fit because someone forgot to update its dependencies. Or maybe it's protesting against all those microservices we keep forcing it to carry! 🤖On a

Hey fellow ops warriors and deployment daredevils!So, picture this: It's 4:55 PM on a Friday, you're chugging your third Red Bull, and your dev team just dropped a "minor update" on your lap. You know, the kind that "definitely won't break anything." 🙄Before you start sweating bullets or reaching for that emergency whiskey bottle in your desk drawer, I've got the perfect solution for all your deployment dilemmas!Behold, the pinnacle of tech innovation: https://shouldideploy.today/This cutting-edge, AI-powered, blockchain-based, quantum-computing marvel will revolutionize your deployment strategy! (And by that, I mean it's a random yes/no generator with pretty colors.)Simply visit the site, and BAM! Instant decision made for you. Who needs risk assessment when you have this bad boy?Pros:Saves hours of meetings and debates Looks super official (big fonts, yo!) Gives you someone else to blame when things go southCons:May occasionally tell you to deploy on a Friday (use at your own risk!)