Captain's Log: Diving into our scheduling design

Exploring distributed vs centralized incident command models

In this blog post, we’ll talk about two incident management structure models — distributed and centralized, including the pros and cons of each, and examples of what each structure looks like in our community.

Custom fields: make FireHydrant your personalized incident management platform

Custom fields empower you to tailor FireHydrant to your organization's specific needs and capture essential incident details. Track critical states, involved parties, resolution specifics, messages, and more, all aligned with your unique workflows.

210% ROI: unlocking the economic value of FireHydrant for incident management

Analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group conducted an in-depth evaluation of the costs associated with poor incident management practices and found that FireHydrant reduces the cost of incidents significantly.

Align platform and product engineering teams over incidents

This post explores how to align platform and product engineering teams by implementing business value proxy metrics and using incidents to inform them.

Incident severity: why you need it and how to ensure it’s set

Incident severity helps responders and stakeholders easily understand the impact of the incident, and set expectations for the level of response effort. Both of these help you fix the problem faster ... but first, you have to ensure severity is being set.

Upgraded role-based access control brings more visibility – and control – to incident management at your organization

Viewers and collaborator roles upgrade FireHydrant RBAC to give you more control – and your team more visibility

FireHydrant Private Incidents & Runbooks: more control for you, more security for your customers

Designed to prioritize data privacy and provide greater oversight of sensitive incidents, Private Incidents give you more flexibility and control when it comes to incidents involving data security or legal matters.

The “people problem” of incident management

Organizing everyone involved in an incident can be more complicated than mitigating the incident itself. But there are processes you can put into place that will draw boundaries around who does what during an incident and set your stakeholders at ease.

New related incidents functionality brings order to the chaos of highly complex incidents

We're making it easier to manage complexity across a set of incidents. You can coordinate efforts across incidents with the same root cause or break down complex incidents into manageable work streams.

Using PostgreSQL advisory locks to avoid race conditions

We used to see multiple incident declarations exceed our 3-second target each day. After this update, it became rare to see any at all.

Use incident cycle time to optimize your incident response process

Cycle time is how long it takes to move through each phase of an incident, from declaration all the way through resolution. Cycle time can help you evaluate the health of your incident response efforts and make improvements in the areas you can control.

The fastest and most robust path to incident declaration from monitoring tools

We’re making it even easier for teams to automate incident response. The moment a monitoring tools smell smoke, you can have an incident opened before you blink. Teams can now create decisive rules for triggered alerts in their favorite monitoring tools.

Status page best practices

Customer-facing status pages help companies efficiently acknowledge the concerns of their customers, building trust and establishing a single source of truth for information. Here are three best practices to keep in mind when creating yours.

Assembly time is where you have the most control of an incident

Although we can’t control how long it might take to mitigate an incident, we can exercise a great deal of control over how quickly and prepared we get to the scene of the problem. We call that phase of the incident lifecycle “assembly time.”

How to get started with incident management metrics

Incident metrics can give you insight into the success and growth of your incident response program and help you discover patterns in the causes and costs of incidents. And getting started is probably easier than you think.

Forgot to declare an incident? Add it retroactively in FireHydrant.

Keep a record of all your incidents, even if they happen too fast to document. Retroactively create incidents in FireHydrant without firing any Runbook automation – even if the incident has already been resolved.

Two data-backed ways to resolve incidents faster

Incidents are expensive — and only getting more so. Clearly, there’s an advantage to reducing the amount of time it takes to resolve incidents. With this in mind, we analyzed 50,000 incidents and found were two clear ways to decrease mean time to resolve.

The why and how behind running incident response game days

Documenting and training your team on your incident response processes is essential to ensuring a coordinated and efficient response effort. And training sessions, or game days, as they’re sometimes called, are one way to get everyone up to speed.

Create a service catalog that grows with you

There are incremental steps you can take to implement and then mature your approach to service-based incident response. In this blog post, we’ll talk about three approaches you can take based on your program’s maturity level.

How FireHydrant handled the SVB banking crisis

How to define roles for your incident response team

Assigned roles help teams spring into action after an incident is declared. This post explores what roles you should consider for your response plan, based on the size of your organization and your team’s incident response maturity level.

Automatically Create Incidents from Alerts with Alert Routing

New retrospective commenting unlocks greater collaboration and accuracy

Collaboration is essential to running effective, learnings-filled retrospectives. FireHydrant’s new retrospective commenting makes it easier for teams to create accurate, thorough retros, together.

The importance of right-sizing your retro

Skipping the retro shouldn’t be an option. Ditch the one-size-fits-all process to ensure that this important step is held at the end of every incident. Here’s how to make it happen.

Easy as 1, 2, 3: Ways to start learning from incidents today

Incidents provide an unparalleled opportunity to learn about your people, processes, and products under pressure. In this post, we’ll tell you how to ensure your team isn’t letting these opportunities for learning go to waste.

FireHydrant is now available through AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace + FireHydrant: your path to easier compliance, consolidated spend, and faster procurement.

The hidden costs of poor incident management

We’re all looking to maximize every dollar spent, every hire made, every hour logged. But there’s one cost center you might not be thinking about — incident management. This post explores the explicit and implicit costs associated with incidents.

A powerful new incident analytics experience is now generally available for Enterprise customers

Automatically measure MTTR, impacted infrastructure, task completion, and more with new incident analytics.

3 tips for reducing stress during incident response efforts

Panic takes time and energy away from swift incident response, leading to second-guessing, a higher likelihood of mistakes, and analysis paralysis. Here are three tips to minimize it.

A better way: 3 incident response areas prime for automation

By automating some rote parts of incident response, you reduce decision fatigue and help responders get to solving the problem faster with less stress. In this post, we talk about three areas of the incident response process that are prime for automation.

You really like us: customer trust wins FireHydrant 3 G2 awards

FireHydrant received three G2 Winter 2023 awards — High Performer, a High Performer in the Enterprise category, and a High Performer in the United Kingdom. We are honored to be recognized by G2 because these awards are based on customer reviews.

Learn from 50,000 incidents with the first Incident Benchmark Report

Using anonymized data from 50,000 incidents, the Incident Benchmark Report reveals insights into the when, what, who, and how behind incidents and highlights behaviors that correlate to faster response times.

Let’s talk bugs versus incidents

In this post, we’ll dig into the difference between a bug and an incident, why alignment on how they are defined matters, and how to ensure you’re still learning from the issue, even if it’s “just a bug.”

Integrations on Rails: How we build and deploy integrations at FireHydrant

This post explores how we built FireHydrant in a way that allows us to rapidly build and deploy integrations to help our product fit into responders’ workflows and not vice versa.

3 questions to ask in the build vs buy debate for incident response tooling

In many cases, there are components that go into building and running an incident management tool that aren’t considered. These are the three most common ones.

Getting started with severity levels

Incidents can take many forms. How you respond to the incident will vary based on the impact of the incident. And that’s where severity comes into play.

FireHydrant is now more powerful across the entire incident lifecycle

Sweeping platform improvements give you more power, configurability, and insights across every phase of an incident – even when it’s over. Discover what’s new in Status Pages, Retrospectives, and Analytics.

New reports stress the importance of strategic incident management practice

FireHydrant was recently featured in two industry reports, proving that strategic investments in incident management pay off for companies of all sizes.

There's a better way: how an incident management tool helps you conquer response challenges

Struggling with incident management? You're not alone. Adopting an incident management tool can help businesses simplify and conquer incident response challenges to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction while decreasing burnout.

Identify and manage impacted customers with our new Zendesk integration

FireHydrant's new Zendesk integration allows users to link Zendesk tickets with FireHydrant incidents to quickly assess customer impact, determine incident severity and. priority, and optimize stakeholder communications.

See the big picture with the Service Dependency Graph

Say hello to the Service Dependency Graph – a visual representation of the upstream and downstream impacts of an incident or change to your infrastructure.

Automate user provisioning with SCIM

Using FireHydrant's newest SCIM 2.0 protocol you can now easily add and delete users with set role permissions and update groups.

We’ve made it even easier to manage your FireHydrant configuration with Terraform

Use the FireHydrant Terraform provider to configure Runbooks, task lists, service dependencies, incident roles, and more.

To require or not require (fields): that is the question

We recommend a light touch when using required fields in your incident declaration process. Here are a few things to consider before rolling out updates.

FireHydrant Tasks provide turn-by-turn navigation during an incident

Centralize your incident management playbooks and enforce consistent practices every time. Give every incident responder turn-by-turn navigation for working through incidents — all without leaving Slack.

Our fully-redesigned incident response experience delivers a more intuitive workflow

The incident response experience on FireHydrant has been fully redesigned for more intuitive workflows. Anyone on your team can easily onboard into an incident and navigate the response process — and you can enforce best practices along the way.

FireHydrant Incident retrospective: June 24, 2022

Between 2022-06-23 20:25 and 022-06-24 21:39, FireHydrant experienced an incident resulting in customers being unable to authorize the FireHydrant Slack app. This is the incident retrospective.

3 mistakes I’ve made at the beginning of an incident (and how not to make them)

Let’s look at three mistakes I’ve made during those stressful moments during the beginning of an incident — and discuss how you can avoid making them.

June releases: discover a faster and more intuitive FireHydrant

FireHydrant’s June releases deliver a more intuitive Slack app, increased Runbook automation and conditional logic, smarter retros, and more.

Words matter: incident management versus incident response

The first step in understanding how to shift from incident response to incident management is to define what those terms mean.

What leading Outward Bound expeditions taught me about incident management

There are a number of lessons I learned guiding weeks-long backcountry leadership courses for teens that I carried with me into my roles in incident management. In this blog post, I’ll share three that stand out.

3 ways to improve your incident management posture today

You can see big gains from small investments when it comes to incident management, and the fundamentals can be put in place without purchasing tools or hiring new staff. Here are three steps you can take to better incident management today.

Spotlight on Carissa Zukowski, engineering manager at FireHydrant

In this installment of our employee spotlight series on FireHydrant team members, we’d like you to meet Carissa Zukowski, the newest engineering manager on our product team.

We can’t all be Shaq: why it’s time for the SRE hero to pass the ball and how to get there

By taking some first steps away from being the hero, we can help our companies shift toward better incident management and improve things for our customers, for our teammates, and for ourselves.

The not-so-obvious positive outcomes of great incident management

The industry and markets are volatile right now. More than ever, you should be focused on shipping great products, retaining engineers, and building trust with customers. The right incident management strategy can help you make strides in all three.

Announcing our new Webex Meetings integration

FireHydrant has expanded its integrations portfolio to include Cisco's Webex Meetings video collaboration platform. Now users can automate Webex bridge creation directly from FireHydrant.

Understanding Service Level Objectives

How to create effective SLOs and connect them with SLAs and SLIs.

Get more from your Jira integration with custom field support

FireHydrant now supports incident data field mapping to Jira custom fields, including the most common epic ticket type and customer-defined fields.

Service dependencies help you instantly discover all services impacted by an incident

Use service dependencies to define key relationships within your service catalog and unlock more time to respond to incidents.

Collaboratively author retrospectives with our new Google Docs integration

Use our new Google Docs integration to export incident data and work collaboratively on retrospectives, all while maintaining traceability back to your FireHydrant incident.

Product update: ensure consistent data across all your retros with two new features

FireHydrant gives you a framework to run retrospectives. Now we're creating a better way to learn and analyze from retrospectives by guaranteeing consistent data and volume from your team.

Best practices for building an incident management plan and process

A thoughtful incident management plan can help you avoid future security incidents and cut down your incident response time drastically.

FireHydrant hack week spring 2022 has shipped

One of our core values at FireHydrant is continuous improvement. Our engineering team runs bi-annual hack weeks to create space for experimentation, optimization, and building things that we’re passionate about.

FireHydrant is now free for small teams

We envision a world where all software is reliable, and today we’re making that vision more of a reality for small teams. Today, FireHydrant is pleased to announce our new Free Tier for small teams!

When to hire an Incident Commander

Do you need a dedicated incident commander? We will explore what an incident commander is, what forms the role can take, and when you should consider the addition of a dedicated incident commander to your organization.

Better task management in Slack…check!

We are introducing a better experience in Slack to view and manage all your tasks during an incident.

Incident severity and priority 101

In this post we'll explain the differences between Incident severity and Incident priority as well as detail out practical levels and summaries for both.

An easier way to create runbooks

The experience of creating runbooks has been redesigned to make it easier for you to see the most important information. Our updates also introduce the ability to clone a runbook by selecting “Copy” on a saved runbook.

Improved routing for Jira Cloud and Jira Server tickets with multi-project support

You can now route your incident tickets and follow-up work to remediation teams' Jira projects directly from FireHydrant, saving you valuable time and clean-up work

It's not ready for production until it has an Operational Readiness Checklist

Operational Readiness Checklist adds a layer of accountability and resilience to improve your service catalog best practices. Learn more to help improve your service adoption and incident response.

Announcing our newest integration: Confluence

Starting today, incident and retrospective data that lives inside FireHydrant is now easier than ever to export to your Confluence account.

Shhh... we have Private Incidents

FireHydrant is now offering private incidents. This will allow engineering teams to collaborate with their security and compliance counterparts on a shared platform.

Avoid frostbite: Stop doing code freezes

A code freeze is intentionally halting changes to your codebase and environments in an effort to reduce the risk of an outage.On the surface, pausing on deployments feels like a logical solution to preventing incidents. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.

Now Available: Private Slack Channels

Now available, FireHydrant users can spin up a private Slack channel to manage incidents

FireHydrant expands Reliability Platform with Service Catalog

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of Service Catalog to help you better manage, query, and learn about the services that exist in your infrastructure.  

Spotlight on Jouhné Scott, Engineering Manager at FireHydrant

FireHydrant is proud of our leadership and we want to highlight our awesome team of engineering managers. Meet Jouhné Scott!

How Service Catalog Increases Productivity

Productivity revolves around quality. A Service Catalog helps promote this quality. So as your company strives to move faster, make sure quality moves with you.

Reliability is not an engineering metric

Reliability is not a metric that engineering alone controls, everyone in the business has a substantial stake in the reliability your customers feel.

Now available: FireHydrant plugin for Backstage

Learn more about our new plugin with Backstage

A Developer's Perspective: Lessons from Open Source with FireHydrant and Backstage

Our engineer Christine Yi's perspective on contributing to an open source project with the Backstage and FireHydrant plug in and the three key values she learned

What is a Service Catalog?

Learn some of the basics around building a service catalog and our philosophy around this growing space.

Year-to-Date Product Updates

Learn about what's new and improved with FireHydrant, and what you can leverage for your team.

Less is more: Improved Incident Header view

Spotlight on Ally McKnight, Engineering Manager at FireHydrant

FireHydrant is proud of our leadership and we want to highlight our awesome team of engineering managers. Starting off, we have Ally McKnight!

Chaos Engineering Your Incident Management Process

Chaos engineering is an essential part of creating an effective incident management system and implementing processes that can help keep you in control when real chaos threatens your code.     

Getting Started with Site Reliability Engineering

This is a quick primer to get started in Site Reliability Engineering if you're interested in becoming a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

We’ve raised a $23M Series B to help us get to a world where all software is reliable

We envision a world where all software is reliable, and we’re on a mission to help every company that builds or operates software get closer to 100% reliability. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $23 million to help us further our goal.

Pragmatic Incident Response: 3 Lessons Learned from Failures

Lessons learned from the front line that you actually immediately use in your incident management process.

Working Together (but Separately) with MirageJS

We're using MirageJS to enable front-end and back-end teams to develop features asynchronously, without obstacles.

The MTTR that matters

We're over MTTR(esolution), but have you thought about MTTR(etro)?

FireHydrant May 2021 Product Updates: The summer of integrations

In May we released integrations with Checkly and Google Meet.

Four things to consider when evaluating incident management platforms

Four things to consider when evaluating incident management platforms--from whether you have the culture and process to support a potential tool, to understanding your pain points, to knowing which key stakeholders to involve.

New Integration: Create Google Meet Incident Bridges Automatically

Learn more about our integration with Google Meet

New Integration: Declare FireHydrant Incidents from Checkly Alerts 

Learn more about our integration with Checkly, an API and E2E monitoring platform

WTF is Incident Management? Post-Panel Wrap-Up

Our panel discussion, "WTF is Incident Management," generated some great insight from a group of very experienced industry professionals.

Failover Conf 2021 Wrap-Up

Failover Conf 2021 offered great discussions about reliability practices, concepts, and culture.

FireHydrant April 2021 Product Updates: Incident Tags & Customizable Slack Incident Modals

Learn more about how incident tags can help you store more metadata and about our new customizable Slack incident modal.

Creating Custom Slack Commands

Building custom Slack commands is easy! You can run these commands directly from Slack to retrieve up-to-date information about your incident management process.

Just call us "Major Incident Software Innovation of the Year"

We won an award! The MIM Awards recognize and reward effective Major Incident Management within the global IT Major Incident Management sector - and we won the 2020 Major Incident Software Innovation of the Year!

Announcing FyreHydrant Festival and the 2021 Line-up

Announcing the first annual FyreHydrant Festival and the 2021 line-up

FireHydrant March 2021 Product Updates

Here are our latest product updates from March - now it's easier than ever to customize FireHydrant.

Spotlight on Hannah Maguire, Business Development Representative at FireHydrant

To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we'll be spotlighting the Women of FireHydrant - this post is about Hannah Maguire, who is a business development representative.

Testing Shell Commands with the Crystal CLI

Using the Crystal programming language, you can share developer tools quickly and easily. FireHydrant's Backend Engineer extraordinaire, Jon Anderson, walks us through the steps of testing shell commands with the CLI.

Why Your APIs Should Fly First Class

In this video, FireHydrant CEO and Co-Founder, Robert Ross, shares his thoughts and experience on why putting your APIs first can be a game-changer for your business and how it can pay dividends in the long haul.

Alert Fatigue and Your Health

Alert fatigue can not only cost not only cause more errors and financially impact your business but can also be detrimental to your health. This post goes over how alert fatigue manifests and some ideas on how to combat it,

DeveloperWeek Virtual 2021 Wrap Up

We had a great time at DeveloperWeek Virtual 2021 a few weeks ago on February 17-19, 2021. The event was jam-packed with great speakers, roundtable discussions, workshops, and more - and we had a lot of fun meeting some of the 5000 attendees. 

Announcing Updated Analytics Filters to Dive Even Deeper into your Historic Incident Data

We've released more powerful analytics filtering so that you can drill down into your data even further. Here are some ideas on how to best get a handle on what's available.

Product Updates: Creating a New Runbook Just Got Easier with Templates

We've made some exciting updates to the platform that makes creating Runbooks easier for new users, we spoke at Hashitalks and Developer Week, plus completely updated our website!

Did Something Change About FireHydrant?

We've been giving the FireHydrant brand a little nip tuck to meet the needs of our customers and future customers. Here's an update on the journey so far.

February 4th, 2021 Incident Retrospective

Between 2021-02-05 00:20 and 2021-02-05 02:44, FireHydrant experienced an incident resulting in delayed runbook execution steps (Slack channel creation, etc) and intermittent availability issues on app.firehydrant.io. This is our incident retrospective.

Article: 46 enterprise tech startups to bet your career on in 2021

Business Insider looked at a broad range of attributes, including the strength of the founding team; the investors and their caliber; valuations, recent and total funding based on estimates from PitchBook; and the product or service the startup offers.

It's Time We Throw Out the Usage of 'Postmortem'

In any other job, conducting a postmortem means someone perished. Let's switch to a phrase that lessens the gruesomeness of software incidents. I wanted to provide some ideas that your organization could possibly run with as a replacement to “Postmortem.”

Product Updates: Integrations with Opsgenie and VictorOps, and more!

We've had a lot of product updates this month. Check out our integrations with Opsgenie and VictorOps, new templates for incident types, and many other small improvements

Article: New York tech startups see jump in funding activity

Venture-capital firms in 2020 pumped $5.8 billion into New York technology startups. Companies developing risk-management, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies are among those getting the biggest shares of the investments.

New Feature: Incident Types

Incidents are inevitable, and the reality is some of them are inevitably going to repeat themselves. Common incident types were slightly burdensome for our customers, so we're announcing an easy way to declare incidents using templates.

2021 is the Year of Reliability

We all know it: You expect your software tools to work every time, all the time. Let's do better this year - there’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to fireproofing your software.

A Look Back at 2020

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, this past December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. See how we fared in 2020.

4 Questions with Jeff Smith

This is the first in a series of interviews with experts about reliability, incident response, and other related topics. We sit down with Jeff Smith from Centro to ask for his thoughts on reliability and incident management.

The Final Episode - Episode 10 of Throughput Thursdays

We made it to our final episode! Thank you to everyone that tuned in and watched Bobby get a Terraform provider up and running. We hope you enjoyed watching me through the good, bad, and ugly these past 20 or so hours.

KubeCon North America 2020 Wrap-up

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual was held online on November 18th to 20th. We had a lot of fun attending and saw a lot of great talks. Read our wrap-up below.

Configuring a Runbook - Episode 9 of Throughput Thursdays

In episode 9 of Throughput Thursdays, we work to configure a Runbook and get it to work! Watch part 1 of our two-part finale below to see what happens.

Breaking down the interface - Episode 8 of Throughput Thursdays

In episode 8 of Throughput Thursdays, we break down all the logically grouped pieces into their own interfaces and create an interface on our client that can return.

More New Terraform Resources - Episode 7 of Throughput Thursdays

In episode 7, we create resources for managing teams and severities through the Terraform provider, which means we now can now manage more of users’ FireHydrant configurations with code.

HashiConf Digital October 2020 Wrap-up

HashiConf Digital October 2020 was the second HashiConf to be held online due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was held on October 14 and 15 on HashiCorp’s digital event platform. Read our take om HashiConf Digital October 2020.

Creating a Data Source - Episode 6 of Throughput Thursdays

In Episode 6, we update our Terraform resource for FireHydrant functionalities and create a data source for FireHydrant services. This allows us to pull services from a list and link them to functionalities. Linking resources like this lets us do a lot of cool things with Terraform.

Moving from Redux Thunk to Redux-Saga: A walk-through

At FireHydrant, we recently began to replace our usage of thunks with Sagas to handle our data fetching. Read how we moved from Redux Thunk to Redux-Saga.

Dastardly Disasters

Do you like spooky stories about incidents? If you do, you should check out the new streaming series called Dastardly Disasters on Snyk’s Twitch channel. The first episode aired on October 16 and featured FireHydrant’s CEO Robert (Bobby) Ross, Alyssa Miller from Snyk, and Jacob Plicque from Gremlin, sharing stories about incidents they encountered in their careers.

Product Updates: Conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks, CSV Exports, and much more

A lot can happen in a month: we also released conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks, premiered a fun video at Chaos Conf, filmed Throughput Thursdays on Twitch, and hosted a webinar, but wait, there’s more!

Incident Ready: How to Chaos Engineer Your Incident Response Process

We’re pretty sure using a real incident to test a new response process is not the best idea. So, how do you test your process ahead of time? Learn how to use chaos engineering principles to stress test your incident management process.

About Last Week: A Chaos Conf Wrap-up

That’s a wrap! We had a great time at Chaos Conf last week - from great presentations to engaging conversations in the Slack community - we were glad we could be a part of it.

Testing Our Terraform Resources - Episode 5 of Throughput Thursdays

In this episode of Throughput Thursdays, we test our Terraform resources. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

How to: Automatically Archive Incident Slack Channels using conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks

FireHydrant’s Slack integration is a great way to speed up your incident response, especially if FireHydrant Runbooks is automatically creating channels in your Slack workspace for each incident.

Adding Two Terraform Resources - Episode 4 of Throughput Thursdays

In episode 4, we were able to achieve creating two full-blown Terraform resources for FireHydrant environments and functionalities. While simple resources, they unlock a lot of power that did not exist previously for teams that want to document their infrastructure using Terraform.

How to: Email Incident Stakeholders with conditions in FireHydrant

Our release of conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks has made it easier for teams who rely on email to communicate with key stakeholders or a distribution list.

New Release: Incident Automation Just Got Even Better with Conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks

We’ve made your favorite FireHydrant feature, FireHydrant Runbooks, even more powerful with conditions - a way to build custom logic into your runbook automation.

Article: ‘DX on steroids’ — the explosion of cloud in 2020

It’s no secret that the cloud has become the enterprise technology hero of 2020. COVID-19 ensured any kind of backburner considerations shot to the front of IT stakeholders’ minds.

Are You Going to Chaos Conf?

Things are gearing up in our preparations for Chaos Conf by Gremlin. We're sponsoring the conference -- will we see you there?

Article: Cloud Startups Ride Wave of Pandemic-Fueled Investments

Cloud-computing startups have landed new investments and customer accounts during the coronavirus pandemic as many companies have accelerated cloud-related projects to keep ahead of the competition.

Fixing Some Code Sins - Episode 3 of Throughput Thursdays

In episode 3, we built a flexible API client for our Terraform provider that implements a really simple interface. We also wrote some simple but effective tests and replaced the original cruft in the provider code with our new API client.

Build Your API First

Going API first will save you headaches in the long run. This post shares why choosing to go API first from Day 1 will be a game-changer for your business, and the decisions we made at FireHydrant to do this.

Live from Cape Cod - Episode 2 of Throughput Thursdays

In Episode 2, Bobby is live in Cape Cod, sitting on a dock about 4 inches from the edge of a lake. Last week we built a skeleton of a Terraform provider. Now we’ll get the provider to create and delete resources, like services in FireHydrant.

7 Ways to Get Acquainted With a New Codebase

Tori Crawford, one of our engineers, walks through some ways that you can get immersed in unfamiliar code. She gathered input and insights from the rest of the FireHydrant team to create this quick playbook on best practices that will make tackling any new codebase easier.

September Product Updates: Analytics, Damage Report, Archiving, and more!

This September, check out our new and improved analytics experience, new Slack app home, and many more updates.

We’re Building a Terraform Provider! - Episode 1 of Throughput Thursdays

In Episode 1, we started out the Terraform provider with a simple data resource against the FireHydrant API. We were able to successfully retrieve information about a single service and display its name in our terminal!

DevOpsDays Chicago 2020 Wrapup

DevOpsDays Chicago 2020 was held online on September 1. This is our wrap-up of DevOpsDays Chicago

How FireHydrant's CI/CD Infrastructure Fixes Bugs Faster

Almost everyone knows that working with third-party APIs can be challenging. Sometimes the errors happen unexpectedly. Sometimes the error information that you receive is inaccurate. While most people feel these pains acutely, I’d like to share how we answer these challenges at FireHydrant and how it’s helped us avoid headaches and stress.

KubeCon Europe 2020 Wrap-up

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual happened online, August 18-20. It was the first virtual KubeCon, due to the coronavirus pandemic. I was happy to attend, although this was the second straight virtual conference I’ve participated in that ran on Amsterdam time.

August Product Updates: Zoom, Slack, Runbook updates, & more

This past month, we’ve been committed to simplifying the platform while making some of our most critical workflows more powerful than ever. Here you’ll find some highlights over the last month.

New Integration: Create Zoom Incident Bridges Automatically

Incident response doesn’t only happen in Slack, so today we’re happy to announce our integration with Zoom to create incident bridges automatically. Now a Zoom meeting can be added with fully customizable titles and agendas based on your incident details.

July Product Updates: Status Pages, Incident Redesign, and more

Fire hydrants usually have a firehose hooked up, and do we have a firehose of updates this July. We’ve been focused on making FireHydrant simpler to use and more deeply integrated with existing workflows to make managing your complex systems easier.

PagerDuty Integration Updates

It's easier than ever to turn PagerDuty alerts into FireHydrant incidents in one click.

Incident Page Updates

Here's a set of changes to the incident and retrospective pages to further simplify the incident command center.

Announcing Status Pages

Communication is one of the hardest things to do well while responding to incidents. At FireHydrant, we’ve focused on helping people communicate well within their teams when responding to incidents, and also after the fact during post-incident reviews. Here's our latest product release - Status Pages

HashiConf Digital Wrap-up, June 2020

The first HashiConf Digital event was held on June 22-24, online. This is our take on the event.

The Culture of the Codebase

We like to have fun when we build our product - read about how Rebecca Black's "Friday" snuck its way into our codebase.

Sticking to Your SLAs with FireHydrant Runbooks

Due to the complexity of systems, it’s no longer a matter of “if” our systems will fail but “when”. To manage expectations for when our systems do fail, we can look no further than our Service Level Agreement.

On-Call and COVID-19 Survey Results

We conducted an On-Call and COVID-19 survey from April 8 to April 27, 2020 and received 141 anonymous responses. Here are the results.

Article: This engineer built a tool to help him automatically respond to IT issues during his day job and then turned it into a startup that just raised $8 million

When Bobby couldn't find the tools he needed to effectively tackle incidents, he built one. Now announcing FireHydrant's $8M Series A.

Article: FireHydrant lands $8M Series A for disaster management tool

A technology adventure: First the audio wasn’t working correctly on Zoom, then Google Meet. It was like a case study in what FireHydrant is designed to do — help companies manage incidents and recover more quickly when things go wrong with their services.

Announcing Our Series A

For the past year we've seen over 50,000 hours of incidents, 20,000 runbook actions automated, and 10 million deploy events, and we're happy to announce our $8M Series A led by Menlo Ventures.

Deserted Island DevOps Wrap-up

Deserted Island DevOps was held on April 30, 2020, in the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was the first tech conference held in Animal Crossing, as far as I know, and was streamed live on Twitch.

Failover Conf Wrap-up

Failover Conf was held online on April 21, 2020 hosted by Gremlin. in this post, Rich Burroughs shares some of his thoughts on the event and the talks he was able to catch.

The Old Fashioned

Bobby shares his new hobby: making craft cocktails. In this post we’re going to make a classic: The Old Fashioned.

Advice for On-Call Teams During COVID-19

We sit down with experts to get their insights on handling on-call teams during COVID-19. They all have different viewpoints, but some themes emerge, like managing alerts, having empathy, and practicing self-care.

OOPS! Learning from Surprise at Netflix

Learnings from Netflix from an excellent talk from Lorin Hochstein from Spinnaker Summit 2010 called “OOPS! Learning from Surprise at Netflix.”

Q&A with Alex Hidalgo on SLOs

We sit down with Alex Hidalgo to chat about his new book.

Announcing Ticketing

Check out our latest release - an update to our ticket and task tracking features in FireHydrant.

Grow your Blame-Free Culture with These Postmortem Best Practices

Here are 3 postmortem practices that embrace a blame-free culture.

Make the Most from FireHydrant's Service Catalogs with These 4 Tips

How to make the most of FireHydrant's Service Catalog.

3 Ways to Help CS and Engineering Work Better Together

3 practical ways for CS and Engineering teams to work better together.

Avoid Institutionalized Incident Nonsense

How to get past the nonsense and look at problems differently.

Article: How you react when your systems fail may define your business

Just around 9:45 a.m. Pacific Time on February 28, 2017, websites like Slack, Business Insider, Quora and other well-known destinations became inaccessible. For millions of people, the internet itself seemed broken.

Announcing Runbooks

Announcing our most powerful feature yet: FireHydrant Runbooks is a better way to automate your incidents.

A Single Person On-Call “Rotation” is a Critical Vulnerability

Why distributing your on-call workload is critical.

NFS with Docker on macOS Catalina

You like living on the edge, life is fun on the edge until the edge is a macOS major update. Then you use vibrantly colorful words, some that your dead ancestors heard, all because your development environment now doesn’t work in spectacular fashion.

Open Source can be a Silver Bullet, but your Application Might be a Werewolf

A story about open source.

Graceful Error Handling with Redux

Redux powers our global state at FireHydrant, one of the things we use most heavily is the ability to let redux store our API errors to handle failure states on the UI. See how we're using Redux to power our global state at FireHydrant.

Announcing our AWS CloudTrail Integration

Check out our latest integration with AWS CloudTrail.

Dynamic Kubernetes Informers

How we updated our Kubernetes integration at FireHydrant.

Announcing our Statuspage.io Integration

Announcing our latest integration with Statuspage.io.

3 Defensive Programming Techniques for Rails

Defensive programming is great for codifying how a bug could be introduced, and raising an error right before it would happen, or choosing an alternative path. Here are some simple ideas to defend yourself against mistakes.

A Gophers Guide to San Diego

The FireHydrant team is dominantly from San Diego, 3 of our 4 person team actually. We’re here to enjoy the awesome community that Go has been creating and to meet new faces. But we also wanted to give back a little with a small guide on food and drinks in Downtown San Diego.

Product Updates: July 2019

Our latest updates - let anyone open an incident in Slack, the launch of Severity Matrix, and a new integration with Jira.

Announcing Flare: Make Opening Incidents Stress Free

We’re launching a new feature today that allows anyone in your organization to kick off your incident response process with an appropriate severity level attached from Slack.

So You Want To Give A Tech Talk?

So you’ve signed up to give a tech talk, awesome! You’re a subject matter expert in something and want to share your knowledge, that’s what helps make a community awesome. You’re going to be speaking in front of a room of people that you don’t know in a place you’ve likely never been, talking about something you confidently know. Sounds easy, right?

Monitorama 2019 Recap

We attended Monitorama and took a few notes for you to enjoy. Read the talk recaps.

New Features: Webhooks + Saved Searches

Read more about our latest releases - we've launched webhooks and now you can keep your frequent searches for later.

Rails without Webpacker

We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. This is a summary of the steps you can take to use vanilla webpack in your Rails application.