9 posts tagged with "ops"

Introduction​

There are plenty of good SRE/Ops related podcasts out there. I follow a few of them and listen to episodes whose titles sound interesting. The problem with podcasts is that some episodes focus on one topic, and other episodes deal with a host of topics. In between there is filler and things that are not relevant to the topic but are necessary to carry on a conversation. Spending 30-60 minutes listening to podcasts is not always a great use of time.

A while ago I decided to create a tool that summarizes podcasts for me using an LLM. If I find the summary interesting enough or there is something that I want to learn about, I go and listen to the entire episode. Such a tool might be useful to others also, so I made a website for it - https://www.srenews.info.

I encourage you to listen to the complete episodes if you find a summary interesting - they are linked from each summary page.

Introduction​

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. Like many modern teams, Slack might be your communication tool of choice. You can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Slack channel.

There are different ways of pushing incident events to Slack. In this article we will explore how to integrate IncidentHub incident lifecycle events using an incoming webhook. An incoming webhook can be used to send incident trigger, update, and resolve events to a specific Slack channel.

Note that IncidentHub also has an option to integrate with custom webhooks, which is different from Slack's webhooks. If you are using Slack, choose the Slack option. For a custom webhook server, choose the Webhook option. The format of the Slack webhook payload is different from that of the Slack webhook.

Slack Incoming Webhook Configuration​

You must have the correct permissions on your Slack workspace to be able to do this.

Follow these steps to configure an incoming webhook in your Slack workspace.

Introduction​

Incident updates on the public status pages of your cloud providers are often the first indication that they might have an outage. Providers also post updates about upcoming and ongoing maintenance on their status pages. Thus, monitoring your cloud status pages becomes crucial to your business operations. This article will guide you through the process of effectively monitoring such status pages.

• Introduction
• Identify Your Cloud Providers
• Locate Their Public Status Pages
• Understand the Status Page Structure
• Configure Notifications
  • Notification Challenges
• Best Practices
  • Filtering Your Monitors
  • Do Periodic Reviews
  • Have a Single View Across All Providers
• Include in Your Incident Response Plan
• Use a Monitoring Tool
  • The Benefits of Using a Monitoring Tool
• Conclusion
• FAQ

Identify Your Cloud Providers​

Work with your Dev/Ops/SRE and IT teams to come up with a comprehensive list of your cloud providers. Any service that is not managed by your teams is by definition a cloud service. Although we focus on Cloud providers - i.e. providers that let you deploy your services on their infrastructure - this article is equally applicable to any of your external SaaS vendors.

Introduction​

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. If Discord is your communication tool of choice, you can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Discord channel.

Discord webhooks allow external applications to send messages to specific channels within a Discord server. This article describes how to integrate Discord as a channel in your IncidentHub account using webhooks.

Note that IncidentHub also has an option to integrate with custom webhooks, which is different from Discord's webhooks. If you are using Discord, choose the Discord option. For a custom webhook server, choose the Webhook option.

Discord Server Webhook Configuration​

You must have the correct permissions on your Discord server to be able to do this.

Introduction​

A recent question in an SRE forum triggered this train of thought.

How do I deal with alerts that are triggered by internal patching/release activities but don't actually cause a downtime? If we react to these alerts we might not have time to react to actual alerts that are affecting customers.

I've paraphrased the question to reflect its essence. There is plenty to unravel here.

My first reaction to this question was that the SRE who posted this is in a difficult place with systemic issues.

Systemic Issues​

Without knowing more about the org and their alerting policies, let's look at what we can dig out based on this question alone

A few weeks ago we released a feature on IncidentHub which gives you a historical view of your monitored services' availability.

Why Was This Needed?​

On the dashboard where you can add services and channels, there is an overview panel that shows total incidents in the last 24 hours. You can get into a more detailed view by clicking on the button next to it. This opens up a popup where you can see active and resolved incidents - in the last 24 hours - and filter them by service.

This panel is good enough for a quick view on what's affecting your dependent services. However, sometimes there is a need to look back further. This is what the Availability page gives you - an overview of service health over the last 30 days.

Let's look at a few examples:

Chances are, most of your third-party cloud and SaaS dependencies are globally distributed and have many regions of operation. Chances are, your applications use a subset of a cloud or SaaS service. If you are monitoring such a service, why should you receive alerts for all regions or every single component in the service?

E.g. if you use Digital Ocean, you might be using Kubernetes in their US locations (NYC and SFO). You would want to know only when there is an outage in one of these locations. Digital Ocean's status page gives you the option to subscribe to outages across the board - it’s all or nothing. This is the case with most services with a few exceptions.

Choosing Specific Components to Monitor​

You can now choose which components/regions you wish to monitor in IncidentHub. Let us continue with our Digital Ocean example.

You can choose to monitor all components:

Introduction​

PagerDuty's Events API V2 lets you push events from your monitoring systems to PagerDuty. You can send such events when an incident is triggered, updated, or resolved. This article is a short guide on the different options to integrate PagerDuty with your monitoring and alerting systems.

• Introduction
• Lifecycle of an Incident
• The PagerDuty Events API v2
  • Prerequisites for Integrating with the Events API V2
  • Getting Your PagerDuty Integration Key
  • A Simple Example in NodeJS
  • The Dedup Key
• Conclusion

Lifecycle of an Incident​

If you are using PagerDuty for on-call management, an incident will typically go through these states:

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops?

As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

It's a no-brainer that you should know when such outages happen to be on top of things if/when it affects your running applications.

Most of your third party dependencies will have a public status page or a Twitter account where they publish updates on their outages. Here are some seemingly easy ways to monitor these pages

• Subscribe to the RSS feed of these pages
• Follow the Twitter account
• Sign up for Slack, Email, SMS notifications on the status page itself if the page supports these