OpsLevel Logo
Product

Visibility

Catalog

Keep an automated record of truth

Integrations

Unify your entire tech stack

AI Engine

Restoring knowledge & generating insight

Standards

Scorecards

Measure and improve software health

Campaigns

Action on cross-cutting initiatives with ease

Checks

Get actionable insights

Developer Autonomy

Service Templates

Spin up new services within guardrails

Self-service Actions

Empower devs to do more on their own

Knowledge Center

Tap into API & Tech Docs in one single place

Featured Resource

March Product Updates
March Product Updates
Read more
Use Cases

Use cases

Improve Standards

Set and rollout best practices for your software

Drive Ownership

Build accountability and clarity into your catalog

Developer Experience

Free up your team to focus on high-impact work

Featured Resource

The Ultimate Guide to Microservices Versioning Best Practices
The Ultimate Guide to Microservices Versioning Best Practices
Read more
Customers
Our customers

We support leading engineering teams to deliver high-quality software, faster.

More customers
Hudl
Hudl goes from Rookie to MVP with OpsLevel
Read more
Hudl
Keller Williams
Keller Williams’ software catalog becomes a vital source of truth
Read more
Keller Williams
Duolingo
How Duolingo automates service creation and maintenance to tackle more impactful infra work
Read more
Duolingo
Resources
Our resources

Explore our library of helpful resources and learn what your team can do with OpsLevel.

All resources

Resource types

Blog

Resources, tips, and the latest in engineering insights

Guide

Practical resources to roll out new programs and features

Demo

Videos of our product and features

Events

Live and on-demand conversations

Interactive Demo

See OpsLevel in action

Pricing

Flexible and designed for your unique needs

Docs
Log In
Book a demo
Log In
Book a demo
No items found.
Share this
Table of contents
 link
 
Resources
Blog

The 3 Most Overlooked Strategies for Minimizing Downtime

Insights
Standardization
DevX
DevOps
SRE
The 3 Most Overlooked Strategies for Minimizing Downtime
OpsLevel
|
March 29, 2022

Downtime sucks (duh) - it means unhappy end users and engineers. Failures and error messages frustrate customers and interrupt engineers (or worse, wake them up).

But from an engineering leader’s perspective, it’s especially frustrating when you realize it all could’ve been easily avoided. Let’s review 3 overlooked strategies for minimizing downtime.

1. Codify Tribal Knowledge

Have you ever worked at a company that had that one person with encyclopedic knowledge of every single service and system deployed to production?

An engineering manager would do anything to have this person on the team. For an engineer on their team, this expert would be an incredible resource that they could rely on for architectural knowledge of all kinds. Like the details of service configurations, metadata, or dependencies that are hugely helpful when debugging operational issues. Or when developing new features, so you avoid reinventing the wheel with duplicate functionality.

And naturally, Support and Product teams would love this person too: they would be the universal router triaging - and often answering - hard questions!

Unfortunately, this person is rare and fleeting. Even if they do exist at your company, eventually they will leave. Or just be on vacation at the critical moment when their insights are needed most.

Plus, after you have about 50 services at your company, this person - short of a photographic memory - likely doesn’t even exist! After that point it’s simply too difficult - impossible even - for one person to keep track of all the details of all the microservices running in production.

Many engineering organizations, especially those that have just gone through rapid growth, find themselves with a one single point of (human) failure. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a microservice catalog automated, scalable service discovery - for humans - is possible.

2. Automate & Build-in Your Best Practices

A microservice catalog can also provide specific, actionable production-readiness guidelines to your developers. Then it continuously monitors for adherence to those standards with automated checks.

These guidelines can be crafted to cover every aspect of service quality, including security, scalability, reliability, and resiliency. Checks are dynamically applied to relevant services based on their language, tier, lifecycle stage, etc.

With the right reminders and guardrails in place, engineers can comfortably operate existing microservices and spin up new ones with best practices built-in. The result? You’ll be meeting or exceeding your service level agreements in no time.

3. Centralize Incident Response Tooling & Info

Of course incidents will still happen - so how prepared your teams are to respond matters. No matter how exacting your proactive guidelines are, teams need to be equipped to react effectively–especially when they can be paged at any time for a service they might not be an expert in.

A microservice catalog can help. It won’t replace your existing tools like PagerDuty or Datadog. Instead it complements and unifies them by providing complete context and connecting all the dots.

With a microservice catalog, you can access all the critical information necessary to resolve an outage. There’s no need to dig through ten different outdated wikis or spreadsheets to understand what a service does, who the owner is, and where the relevant runbooks and observability data resides.

Don’t lose precious minutes during an incident because an on-call engineer has to verify whether the impacted services are monitored in New Relic or Datadog.

Instead, track all the metadata about your services in one single place so you don’t discover an orphaned or poorly documented service during a sev1 incident.

Summary

No engineering leader, organization, or application can completely avoid downtime. But with these proactive, holistic strategies, it’s possible for software teams to be better prepared and substantially reduce their downtime.

If you’re considering any of the strategies, get in touch today to learn how OpsLevel can accelerate their implementation and make downtime a distant memory.

More resources

March Product Updates
Blog
March Product Updates

Some of the big releases from the month of March.

Read more
How Generative AI Is Changing Software Development: Key Insights from the DORA Report
Blog
How Generative AI Is Changing Software Development: Key Insights from the DORA Report

Discover the key findings from the 2024 DORA Report on Generative AI in Software Development. Learn how OpsLevel’s AI-powered tools enhance productivity, improve code quality, and simplify documentation, while helping developers avoid common pitfalls of AI adoption.

Read more
Introducing OpsLevel AI: Finding Your Lost Engineering Knowledge
Blog
Introducing OpsLevel AI: Finding Your Lost Engineering Knowledge

Read more
Product
Software catalogMaturityIntegrationsSelf-serviceKnowledge CenterBook a meeting
Company
About usCareersContact usCustomersPartnersSecurity
Resources
DocsEventsBlogPricingDemoGuide to Internal Developer PortalsGuide to Production Readiness
Comparisons
OpsLevel vs BackstageOpsLevel vs CortexOpsLevel vs Atlassian CompassOpsLevel vs Port
Subscribe
Join our newsletter to stay up to date on features and releases.
By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy and provide consent to receive updates from our company.
SOC 2AICPA SOC
© 2024 J/K Labs Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use
Privacy Policy
Responsible Disclosure
By using this website, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Data Processing Agreement for more information.
Okay!