Monitoring & Alerting: Evolution of reliability

When I started working for Scalable Press, an e-commerce startup, I experienced constant on-call issues due to various system failures, resulting in frequent PagerDuty alerts at all hours of the day and night. These outages and system downtimes negatively impacted the company's brand and reputation.

When customers faced issues accessing the website or placing orders, it created a frustrating experience for them, leading to negative reviews on Twitter and feedback in our community groups on Facebook. This resulted in a loss of customer loyalty and trust, ultimately affecting the company's bottom line.

The company's brand reputation was at stake, as a single major outage could lead to negative coverage and a loss of credibility and trust in the market. Merchants using our platform expected a reliable and seamless experience when advertising online to their customers, and any issues with the platform could cause them to switch to competitors like CustomInk. Therefore, it was essential for the company to prioritize resolving recurring issues to avoid damage to the brand's reputation and ensure customer satisfaction.

One reason for extended outages early on was that alerts were not providing enough information to identify the root cause of the issue, and there was no support available for troubleshooting. This left on-call engineers having to spend more time investigating issues without enough context or support, which led to longer resolution times, as well as frustration and burnout for the DevOps team.

Moreover, this technical debt increased the risk of human error and impacted the quality of the company's services. Without enough information and support, it was difficult to ensure that systems were running correctly, leading to more failures and more alerts.

Therefore, it was critical to address these issues by implementing a more efficient alerting system that provides enough information to identify the root cause of the issue and has proper support in place to troubleshoot effectively.

After months of hard work, I made significant improvements to our alerting system, runbook documentation, and overall system resilience. I'd driven the implementation of a new alerting system using Grafana, which could often fire before visible site outages began, actively preventing customer-facing damage. This significantly increased our system's resilience, reduced downtime, and ensured that our customers had a seamless experience.

Furthermore, I worked to document our systems by creating runbooks that explained how to do maintenance activities and get services back up and running if they'd fallen offline. This documentation enabled anyone in the team to jump in and fix issues, reducing our response time and increasing the efficiency of our team.

Overall, these improvements increased the reliability and scalability of our systems, improved our customer satisfaction, and helped reduce the technical debt we'd accumulated. These changes also led to increased trust from stakeholders who began bringing more issues to my attention to resolve, confident that I cared about them and that I'd work with them to find solutions together.