FireHydrant Blog
Discover industry insights, deep dives, product updates, and more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Spotlight on Kate Stowell, Marketing Manager 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 Kate Stowell who recently joined our marketing team as a marketing manager focused on demand gen!
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.
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'
Why are we using the term 'postmortem' when no one died? In any other job, conducting a postmortem means someone perished, so we need to switch to another phrase to lessen the gruesomeness of software incidents. I wanted to provide some ideas that your organization could possibly run with as a replacement to “Postmortem.”
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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: 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.
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.
3 Defensive Programming Techniques for Rails
Incidents happen all the time because of bad code deploys. 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 simple 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.
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?
Severity Matrix Updates
We’re on a mission to make responding to incidents a bit less chaotic. One of the best features we offer (we’re definitely not biased, no way) is a simple way to define how a severity gets determined when you open an incident. We call it the severity matrix, and today it has a new look.
Instrumenting Ruby on Rails with Prometheus
If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. In the Rails community, this is commonly achieved with NewRelic and Skylight; but we achieve visibility using Prometheus and Grafana. Check out this guide on how to use Rails with Prometheus.