Best Practices for When s*IT Hits the Fan
Dave Cliffe, PagerDuty
Outages suck; how you handle them shouldn’t. At PagerDuty, we talk to real customers experiencing real outages all the time. Operations escalations and downtime can be handled in many ways:
- During the incident: who to alert when, how to communicate, handling dependency and downstream failures, disclosure
- After the incident: post-mortems, public disclosure, formalizing process vs. investing in automation, preventative actions
There are also ways to keep engineers sane, customers happy, and the $$$ flowing. In this talk, come learn about best practices from across the industry, including how PagerDuty executes during an outage (but trust us, those never happen).
Dave Cliffe, PagerDuty
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/cliffe_dave_100x115_0.jpg?itok=BfXCTra-)
Dave is an engineer who has adopted a more peaceful role as "sherpa" on the Product team at PagerDuty, a company whose sole goal is to make the lives of DevOps engineers everywhere a calmer, sanity-filled reality. Before PagerDuty, Dave worked in cloud computing at Microsoft on the Windows Azure team. Frequently, he wonders which is scarier: being an on-call engineer responsible for an outage or being a parent. The debate rages on.
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![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/all/modules/usenix/usenix_files/images/usenix-locked.png)
author = {Dave Cliffe},
title = {Best Practices for When {s*IT} Hits the Fan},
year = {2014},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
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