About ChrisChris is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at incident.io, where they're building incident management products that people actually want to use. A software engineer by trade, Chris is no stranger to gnarly incidents, having participated (and caused!) them at everything from early stage startups through to enormous IT organizations.Links Referenced:
incident.io: https://incident.io


Practical Guide to Incident Management: https://incident.io/guide/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: Let’s face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that you probably can’t prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Today’s promoted guest is Chris Evans, who’s the CPO and co-founder of incident.io. Chris, first, thank you very much for joining me. And I’m going to start with an easy question—well, easy question, hard answer, I think—what is an incident.io exactly?Chris: Incident.io is a software platform that helps entire organizations to respond to recover from and learn from incidents.Corey: When you say incident, that means an awful lot of things. And depending on where you are in the ecosystem in the world, that means different things to different people. For example, oh, incident. Like, “Are you talking about the noodle incident because we had an agreement that we would never speak about that thing again,” style, versus folks who are steeped in DevOps or SRE culture, which is, of course, a fancy way to say those who are sad all the time, usually about computers. What is an incident in the context of what you folks do?Chris: That, I think, is the killer question. I think if you look at organizations in the past, I think incidents were those things that happened once a quarter, maybe once a year, and they were the thing that brought the entirety of your site down because your big central database that was in a data center sort of disappeared. The way that modern companies run means that the definition has to be very, very different. So, most places now rely on distributed systems and there is no, sort of, binary sense of up or down these days. And essentially, in the general case, like, most companies are continually in a sort of state of things being broken all of the time.And so, for us, when we look at what an incident is, it is essentially anything that takes you away from your planned work with a sense of urgency. And that’s the sort of the pithy definition that we use there. Generally, that