Announcing FireHydrant, a Tool to Manage Incidents

The Short Version

• Today we’re publicly launching registration to FireHydrant, our incident management tool

• We’ve raised $1.5M from Work-Bench

• We’re really excited, read the long version to see why

The Long Version

FireHydrant has a different backstory than most companies. I was teaching at General Assembly for several years, including one of the first Ruby on Rails courses in Santa Monica in 2012. The more classes I taught, I began to realize there’s a fundamental gap between what I was teaching at night, and what I was doing during the day as a full time engineer at DigitalOcean and Namely.

The experience gap between what it takes to write production grade software and what bootcamps teach you is _extremely_ wide. So I wanted to record a series of videos to help close the gap. The premise was simple: build an application from scratch using industry best practices and record _all_ of it documentary style. All I needed was an idea to build.

I was working as an engineer in fast paced startups in NYC when the product I’d record building came to me: A tool for helping engineers with their incident management. I had been involved in several fire fighting scenarios (from production databases being dropped, to Kubernetes upgrades gone wrong) and every incident had a common theme: absolute chaos. I began writing every line of code with live commentary, and soon FireHydrant started to take the shape of what I envisioned as an SRE while at Namely and I started to want it more than the video series. 40 hours of screencasts recorded later, I decided to stop recording and focus on the product for what it was becoming: An amazing tool that I wish I had as an SRE at my job.

As I was burning the midnight oil working on FireHydrant, it became even more apparent this tool needed to exist for everyone building and maintaining software. As luck would have it, I was introduced to the fine folks at Work-Bench here in New York City. Their enthusiasm for the product and knowledge of the SRE space was incredibly refreshing and indicated they are a clear fit for helping take FireHydrant to the next level.

Today, I’m super excited to say that two of my great friends have joined FireHydrant and together we’ve raised $1.5M with Work-Bench. With this round of funding, we’re going to bring it to the same types of people we are ourselves: people responsible for putting out fires. I’m also happy to announce that with this launch, our registration is public for you to try us out.

What We Are Solving

FireHydrant helps companies answer two main questions:

1. My application just went down, now what?

2. How can we make an outage like this never happen again?

Today’s application architectures, like microservices, have made diagnosing production issues more complex. With changes being pushed to production all the time, finding the causes of an incident can be even more difficult. Many companies’ incident management tools and processes come from a time when incidents were less complex, and root causes could be identified quickly from a smaller list of deployments, and aren’t effective in a world with increasingly complex systems and incidents.

Our Solution

FireHydrant delivers a modern incident management process that will automate and apply industry best-practices allowing your team to put out fires faster, learn from your incidents, and focus on preventing them in the future.

• Track and trace breaking changes by monitoring your deploys from GitHub pull request all the way through to a deployment.

• Fix disorganized incident response that falls apart when a serious incident occurs with our incident response tool that helps you apply SRE best practices to ensure your incidents are closed faster.

• Learn from your incidents and track remediations with our post mortem and analytics tools to find out what services are brittle and which teams most effectively put out fires.

What’s Next

With this round of funding, we’re going to be building our product to expand beyond our already powerful incident management, hiring engineers, and integrating with other great cloud service providers. Teams of all sizes, managing even the most complex of applications, can start using FireHydrant today.

There is one truth that I think all software organizations can agree on: **incidents will happen**. But how we manage and resolve them is what matters. FireHydrant was built with this idea in mind to help solve the problems we’ve encountered as engineers in the past.

P.S. We’re hiring! Remote friendly, awesome technology, and we believe in a healthy work-life balance. Check out our openings here.