Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement with Personalized Service Maturity Notifications

Earlier this month OpsLevel added personalized, automated notifications to our Service Maturity offering. With these weekly emails, service owners don’t need to remember to review their services in OpsLevel; each Monday OpsLevel will send them a digest report that makes it simple to stay on top of service maturity and encourages a regular review cadence.

If you build it, they will come?

Building and maintaining successful, reliable software applications at scale typically means iteration. Whether that’s feature development work or maintenance work to keep services secure and performant, the work is almost never finished. That’s why OpsLevel believes strongly in service maturity. Whatever your organization likes to call it, when you have a culture of continuous improvement, you’re well positioned to meet or even exceed the expectations of end users.

In a perfect world, embracing service maturity tasks would be second nature for all development teams. But this is typically not the case–we all have many priorities and competing demands for our time. So, with this weekly reminder, we’re aiming to make building your culture of continuous improvement easier.

What info does the report contain?

Within the weekly report, service owners will find two sections. The first is an overview that summarizes the current levels of all the services a user owns. Since this report is tailored per-user, it will roll-up services owned by all the teams the notification recipient is a member of. In the example below the recipient owns seven services across multiple teams, including three services at the Bronze level, three at Silver, and one at Gold.

Focus and prioritization are core principles of OpsLevel’s Service Maturity approach. So rather than show a long list of failed checks, the second section of the report, titled Needs Attention, is designed to encourage service owners to review their least mature services. In the example below we see some of Bronze services, including a preview of some of the failing checks on those services.

In the spirit of focus, the weekly Service Maturity notification will never show details on more than three services in an email, or more than three failing checks per service. From the notification, direct links are available to all the relevant dashboards, services, and checks, so service owners can always go deeper and review their failing checks (on any of their services) and learn what action to take to make improvements and start leveling up.

OpsLevel also believes in recognizing a job well done, so if a service owner has no failing checks, they’ll receive a friendly, success-state email.

Remove Friction

The weekly Service Maturity report is just one piece of the continuous improvement puzzle. An email can cue a routine, but if you want to make taking action as easy as possible for developers, there are other things to consider:

 
• Are there explanations for why checks matter?
 
• Are there clear next steps for how to pass checks?
 
• Are checks scoped to apply to only relevant services?
 
• Are you leveraging OpsLevel’s integrations and extensibility?

If you’re ready to build a culture of continuous improvement (and ship more reliable services) with Service Maturity, request your OpsLevel demo today.