One of the questions we hear at trade shows and events is: “Our team isn’t huge…do we really need a mobile alert system?” Our answer starts by asking: “Whoactually does business just from 9am to 5pm, and what DevOps or IT team works from the same location?”
Development and IT teams don’t work like that anymore and with mobile devices powerful enough to support almost any business function, many job descriptions have turned toward a 24/7 support model. Especially if your company has a website that is responsible for revenue – a setup by definition that requires a 24/7 support model if you don’t want to lose revenue with each outage.
If your business model requires 24/7 uptime and your employees must embrace the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ business model, how are you going to harness the potential of mobile apps to empower your employees in this new paradigm? Add in the extra stress of having team members (especially support ones) located all over the world and it quickly becomes evident that a mobile alert system is an essential piece of the puzzle.
Successful DevOps teams require members to effectively communicate and collaborate in order to solve problems on-the-fly. Adding a mobile solution is an obvious answer to the question of how to get people remotely engaged in troubleshooting development issues as they arise. When stepping in to help solve a problem becomes as easy as opening up your phone and checking your Twitter feed, the barrier to entry is lowered and hopping in to assist the on-call team doesn’t feel quite as much like an interruption of your down time.
As Ferris Bueller reminded us: life moves fast. The same can be said for the alerts coming in from your infrastructure monitoring tools. You can either drown in the wake, surrender to your inbox or find a better way of dealing with the noise. Having the ability to get a read on the health of your systems at a glance sounds like something far away in the future, but fortunately, with VictorOps, the future is at your fingertips.
We know the importance of mobile alerts because we live in Colorado and our support team loves to ski. Unfortunately, customer issues don’t stop for fresh powder so when support tickets come into Salesforce on the weekend in the winter, the support team uses our own Salesforce integration to send those alerts into the VictorOps timeline. From there, the support team can acknowledge the ticket and then get to work on solving the problem. They like to call it “support from the ski lift”.
Your team doesn’t have to be located near mountains or love to ski in order to see the value of being able to quickly get up to speed on the context of an issue and then jump in to help troubleshoot. A mobile alerting system is one way to accomplish this. Another might be telepathy. Let us know which one works better for you.
