Avoid frostbite: Stop doing code freezes

A code freeze is intentionally halting changes to your codebase and environments in an effort to reduce the risk of an outage.On the surface, pausing on deployments feels like a logical solution to preventing incidents. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-11-11

Now available, FireHydrant users can spin up a private Slack channel to manage incidents Read more

Julia Tran 2021-10-26

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of Service Catalog to help you better manage, query, and learn about the services that exist in your infrastructure.   Read more

Julia Tran 2021-10-06

FireHydrant is proud of our leadership and we want to highlight our awesome team of engineering managers. Meet Jouhné Scott! Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-10-05

Productivity revolves around quality. A Service Catalog helps promote this quality. So as your company strives to move faster, make sure quality moves with you. Read more

Max Tilka 2021-10-01

Reliability is not a metric that engineering alone controls, everyone in the business has a substantial stake in the reliability your customers feel. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-09-30

Learn more about our new plugin with Backstage Read more

Julia Tran 2021-09-14

Our engineer Christine Yi's perspective on contributing to an open source project with the Backstage and FireHydrant plug in and the three key values she learned Read more

Christine Yi 2021-09-14

Learn some of the basics around building a service catalog and our philosophy around this growing space. Read more

Max Tilka 2021-09-02

Learn about what's new and improved with FireHydrant, and what you can leverage for your team. Read more

Julia Tran 2021-09-02

FireHydrant is proud of our leadership and we want to highlight our awesome team of engineering managers. Starting off, we have Ally McKnight! Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-08-31

This is a quick primer to get started in Site Reliability Engineering if you're interested in becoming a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). Read more

Robert Ross 2021-08-16

We envision a world where all software is reliable, and we’re on a mission to help every company that builds or operates software get closer to 100% reliability. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $23 million to help us further our goal. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-08-10

Lessons learned from the front line that you actually immediately use in your incident management process. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-07-15

We're using MirageJS to enable front-end and back-end teams to develop features asynchronously, without obstacles. Read more

Hilary Beck 2021-06-17

We're over MTTR(esolution), but have you thought about MTTR(etro)? Read more

Robert Ross 2021-06-10

In May we released integrations with Checkly and Google Meet. Read more

Julia Tran 2021-05-27

Four things to consider when evaluating incident management platforms--from whether you have the culture and process to support a potential tool, to understanding your pain points, to knowing which key stakeholders to involve. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-05-26

Learn more about our integration with Google Meet Read more

Julia Tran 2021-05-21

Learn more about our integration with Checkly, an API and E2E monitoring platform Read more

Julia Tran 2021-05-21

Our panel discussion, "WTF is Incident Management," generated some great insight from a group of very experienced industry professionals. Read more

Megan Moore 2021-05-17

Failover Conf 2021 offered great discussions about reliability practices, concepts, and culture. Read more

Megan Moore 2021-05-07

Learn more about how incident tags can help you store more metadata and about our new customizable Slack incident modal. Read more

Julia Tran 2021-04-23

Building custom Slack commands is easy! You can run these commands directly from Slack to retrieve up-to-date information about your incident management process. Read more

Megan Moore 2021-04-15

We won an award! The MIM Awards recognize and reward effective Major Incident Management within the global IT Major Incident Management sector - and we won the 2020 Major Incident Software Innovation of the Year! Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-04-08

Announcing the first annual FyreHydrant Festival and the 2021 line-up Read more

Megan Moore 2021-04-01

Here are our latest product updates from March - now it's easier than ever to customize FireHydrant. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2021-03-31

To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we'll be spotlighting the Women of FireHydrant - this post is about Hannah Maguire, who is a business development representative. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-31

Using the Crystal programming language, you can share developer tools quickly and easily. FireHydrant's Backend Engineer extraordinaire, Jon Anderson, walks us through the steps of testing shell commands with the CLI. Read more

Jon Anderson 2021-03-29

To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we'll be spotlighting the Women of FireHydrant - this post is about Kate Stowell who recently joined our marketing team as a marketing manager focused on demand gen! Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-10

In this video, FireHydrant CEO and Co-Founder, Robert Ross, shares his thoughts and experience on why putting your APIs first can be a game-changer for your business and how it can pay dividends in the long haul. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-10

Alert fatigue can not only cost not only cause more errors and financially impact your business but can also be detrimental to your health. This post goes over how alert fatigue manifests and some ideas on how to combat it, Read more

Robert Ross 2021-03-09

March 8th marks International Women's Day and we're taking a moment to celebrate the incredibly talented Women of FireHydrant. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-08

To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we'll be spotlighting the Women of FireHydrant - this post is about Tori Crawford who is a software engineer working on our backend. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-05

We had a great time at DeveloperWeek Virtual 2021 a few weeks ago on February 17-19, 2021. The event was jam-packed with great speakers, roundtable discussions, workshops, and more - and we had a lot of fun meeting some of the 5000 attendees.  Read more

Kate Stowell 2021-03-04

To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we'll be spotlighting the Women of FireHydrant - this post is from our Head of Marketing, Joanna Lin. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-03

To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we'll be spotlighting the Women of FireHydrant - starting first with Maggie Gourlay, our senior engineering manager! Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-03-01

We've made some exciting updates to the platform that makes creating Runbooks easier for new users, we spoke at Hashitalks and Developer Week, plus completely updated our website! Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2021-02-26

We've released more powerful analytics filtering so that you can drill down into your data even further. Here are some ideas on how to best get a handle on what's available. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2021-02-26

We've been giving the FireHydrant brand a little nip tuck to meet the needs of our customers and future customers. Here's an update on the journey so far. Read more

Joanna Lin 2021-02-23

Between 2021-02-05 00:20 and 2021-02-05 02:44, FireHydrant experienced an incident resulting in delayed runbook execution steps (Slack channel creation, etc) and intermittent availability issues on app.firehydrant.io. This is our incident retrospective. Read more

Daniel Condomitti 2021-02-23

Business Insider looked at a broad range of attributes, including the strength of the founding team; the investors and their caliber; valuations, recent and total funding based on estimates from PitchBook; and the product or service the startup offers. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-02-13

Why are we using the term 'postmortem' when no one died? In any other job, conducting a postmortem means someone perished, so we need to switch to another phrase to lessen the gruesomeness of software incidents. I wanted to provide some ideas that your organization could possibly run with as a replacement to “Postmortem.” Read more

Robert Ross 2021-02-10

We've had a lot of product updates this month. Check out our integrations with Opsgenie and VictorOps, new templates for incident types, and many other small improvements Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2021-01-28

Venture-capital firms in 2020 pumped $5.8 billion into New York technology startups. Companies developing risk-management, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies are among those getting the biggest shares of the investments. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-01-27

Incidents are inevitable, and the reality is some of them are inevitably going to repeat themselves. Common incident types were slightly burdensome for our customers, so we're announcing an easy way to declare incidents using templates. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-01-27

We all know it: You expect your software tools to work every time, all the time. Let's do better this year - there’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to fireproofing your software. Read more

Robert Ross 2021-01-19

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, this past December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. See how we fared in 2020. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2021-01-08

This is the first in a series of interviews with experts about reliability, incident response, and other related topics. We sit down with Jeff Smith from Centro to ask for his thoughts on reliability and incident management. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-12-17

We made it to our final episode! Thank you to everyone that tuned in and watched Bobby get a Terraform provider up and running. We hope you enjoyed watching me through the good, bad, and ugly these past 20 or so hours. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-12-04

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual was held online on November 18th to 20th. We had a lot of fun attending and saw a lot of great talks. Read our wrap-up below. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-11-24

In episode 9 of Throughput Thursdays, we work to configure a Runbook and get it to work! Watch part 1 of our two-part finale below to see what happens. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-11-20

In episode 8 of Throughput Thursdays, we break down all the logically grouped pieces into their own interfaces and create an interface on our client that can return. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-11-13

In episode 7, we create resources for managing teams and severities through the Terraform provider, which means we now can now manage more of users’ FireHydrant configurations with code. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-10-30

HashiConf Digital October 2020 was the second HashiConf to be held online due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was held on October 14 and 15 on HashiCorp’s digital event platform. Read our take om HashiConf Digital October 2020. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-10-27

In Episode 6, we update our Terraform resource for FireHydrant functionalities and create a data source for FireHydrant services. This allows us to pull services from a list and link them to functionalities. Linking resources like this lets us do a lot of cool things with Terraform. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-10-23

At FireHydrant, we recently began to replace our usage of thunks with Sagas to handle our data fetching. Read how we moved from Redux Thunk to Redux-Saga. Read more

Mandy Mak 2020-10-21

A lot can happen in a month: we also released conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks, premiered a fun video at Chaos Conf, filmed Throughput Thursdays on Twitch, and hosted a webinar, but wait, there’s more! Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-10-20

Do you like spooky stories about incidents? If you do, you should check out the new streaming series called Dastardly Disasters on Snyk’s Twitch channel. The first episode aired on October 16 and featured FireHydrant’s CEO Robert (Bobby) Ross, Alyssa Miller from Snyk, and Jacob Plicque from Gremlin, sharing stories about incidents they encountered in their careers. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-10-20

We’re pretty sure using a real incident to test a new response process is not the best idea. So, how do you test your process ahead of time? Learn how to use chaos engineering principles to stress test your incident management process. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-10-15

That’s a wrap! We had a great time at Chaos Conf last week - from great presentations to engaging conversations in the Slack community - we were glad we could be a part of it. Read more

Joanna Lin 2020-10-13

In this episode of Throughput Thursdays, we test our Terraform resources. If you missed it, you can watch it here. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-10-09

FireHydrant’s Slack integration is a great way to speed up your incident response, especially if FireHydrant Runbooks is automatically creating channels in your Slack workspace for each incident. Read more

Joanna Lin 2020-10-07

In episode 4, we were able to achieve creating two full-blown Terraform resources for FireHydrant environments and functionalities. While simple resources, they unlock a lot of power that did not exist previously for teams that want to document their infrastructure using Terraform. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-10-02

Our release of conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks has made it easier for teams who rely on email to communicate with key stakeholders or a distribution list. Read more

Joanna Lin 2020-10-01

We’ve made your favorite FireHydrant feature, FireHydrant Runbooks, even more powerful with conditions - a way to build custom logic into your runbook automation. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-10-01

It’s no secret that the cloud has become the enterprise technology hero of 2020. COVID-19 ensured any kind of backburner considerations shot to the front of IT stakeholders’ minds. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-09-30

Things are gearing up in our preparations for Chaos Conf by Gremlin. We're sponsoring the conference -- will we see you there? Read more

Joanna Lin 2020-09-28

Cloud-computing startups have landed new investments and customer accounts during the coronavirus pandemic as many companies have accelerated cloud-related projects to keep ahead of the competition. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-09-25

In episode 3, we built a flexible API client for our Terraform provider that implements a really simple interface. We also wrote some simple but effective tests and replaced the original cruft in the provider code with our new API client. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-09-25

Going API first will save you headaches in the long run. This post shares why choosing to go API first from Day 1 will be a game-changer for your business, and the decisions we made at FireHydrant to do this. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-09-21

In Episode 2, Bobby is live in Cape Cod, sitting on a dock about 4 inches from the edge of a lake. Last week we built a skeleton of a Terraform provider. Now we’ll get the provider to create and delete resources, like services in FireHydrant. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-09-18

Tori Crawford, one of our engineers, walks through some ways that you can get immersed in unfamiliar code. She gathered input and insights from the rest of the FireHydrant team to create this quick playbook on best practices that will make tackling any new codebase easier. Read more

Tori Crawford 2020-09-16

This September, check out our new and improved analytics experience, new Slack app home, and many more updates. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-09-14

In Episode 1, we started out the Terraform provider with a simple data resource against the FireHydrant API. We were able to successfully retrieve information about a single service and display its name in our terminal! Read more

Robert Ross 2020-09-11

DevOpsDays Chicago 2020 was held online on September 1. This is our wrap-up of DevOpsDays Chicago Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-09-03

Almost everyone knows that working with third-party APIs can be challenging. Sometimes the errors happen unexpectedly. Sometimes the error information that you receive is inaccurate. While most people feel these pains acutely, I’d like to share how we answer these challenges at FireHydrant and how it’s helped us avoid headaches and stress. Read more

Mark Starkman 2020-09-02

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual happened online, August 18-20. It was the first virtual KubeCon, due to the coronavirus pandemic. I was happy to attend, although this was the second straight virtual conference I’ve participated in that ran on Amsterdam time. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-08-26

This past month, we’ve been committed to simplifying the platform while making some of our most critical workflows more powerful than ever. Here you’ll find some highlights over the last month. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-08-04

Incident response doesn’t only happen in Slack, so today we’re happy to announce our integration with Zoom to create incident bridges automatically. Now a Zoom meeting can be added with fully customizable titles and agendas based on your incident details. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-07-28

Fire hydrants usually have a firehose hooked up, and do we have a firehose of updates this July. We’ve been focused on making FireHydrant simpler to use and more deeply integrated with existing workflows to make managing your complex systems easier. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-07-17

Meet the newest member of the FireHydrant team, Tori Fluharty. Read more

Tori Crawford 2020-07-17

It's easier than ever to turn PagerDuty alerts into FireHydrant incidents in one click. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-07-06

Here's a set of changes to the incident and retrospective pages to further simplify the incident command center. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-07-06

Communication is one of the hardest things to do well while responding to incidents. At FireHydrant, we’ve focused on helping people communicate well within their teams when responding to incidents, and also after the fact during post-incident reviews. Here's our latest product release - Status Pages Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-07-02

The first HashiConf Digital event was held on June 22-24, online. This is our take on the event. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-06-30

We like to have fun when we build our product - read about how Rebecca Black's "Friday" snuck its way into our codebase. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-06-24

Due to the complexity of systems, it’s no longer a matter of “if” our systems will fail but “when”. To manage expectations for when our systems do fail, we can look no further than our Service Level Agreement. Read more

Mike Lacsamana 2020-06-08

We conducted an On-Call and COVID-19 survey from April 8 to April 27, 2020 and received 141 anonymous responses. Here are the results. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-06-02

A technology adventure: First the audio wasn’t working correctly on Zoom, then Google Meet. It was like a case study in what FireHydrant is designed to do — help companies manage incidents and recover more quickly when things go wrong with their services. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-05-20

When Bobby couldn't find the tools he needed to effectively tackle incidents, he built one. Now announcing FireHydrant's $8M Series A. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-05-20

For the past year we've seen over 50,000 hours of incidents, 20,000 runbook actions automated, and 10 million deploy events, and we're happy to announce our $8M Series A led by Menlo Ventures. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-05-20

Deserted Island DevOps was held on April 30, 2020, in the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was the first tech conference held in Animal Crossing, as far as I know, and was streamed live on Twitch. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-05-04

Failover Conf was held online on April 21, 2020 hosted by Gremlin. in this post, Rich Burroughs shares some of his thoughts on the event and the talks he was able to catch. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-04-24

Bobby shares his new hobby: making craft cocktails. In this post we’re going to make a classic: The Old Fashioned. Read more

Robert Ross 2020-04-21

We sit down with experts to get their insights on handling on-call teams during COVID-19. They all have different viewpoints, but some themes emerge, like managing alerts, having empathy, and practicing self-care. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-04-16

Meet Mark, the newest member of the FireHydrant engineering team. He shares his journey and some advice on working remotely. Read more

Mark Starkman 2020-04-07

Learnings from Netflix from an excellent talk from Lorin Hochstein from Spinnaker Summit 2010 called “OOPS! Learning from Surprise at Netflix.” Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-04-06

We sit down with Alex Hidalgo to chat about his new book. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-04-02

Meet Rich, our newest addition to the team. Read more

Rich Burroughs 2020-03-26

Check out our latest release - an update to our ticket and task tracking features in FireHydrant. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2020-03-17

Here are 3 postmortem practices that embrace a blame-free culture. Read more

Mandy Mak 2020-03-09

How to make the most of FireHydrant's Service Catalog. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-01-31

3 practical ways for CS and Engineering teams to work better together. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2020-01-15

How to get past the nonsense and look at problems differently. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-11-12

Just around 9:45 a.m. Pacific Time on February 28, 2017, websites like Slack, Business Insider, Quora and other well-known destinations became inaccessible. For millions of people, the internet itself seemed broken. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2019-10-31

Announcing our most powerful feature yet: FireHydrant Runbooks is a better way to automate your incidents. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-10-17

Why distributing your on-call workload is critical. Read more

Daniel Condomitti 2019-10-09

You like living on the edge, life is fun on the edge until the edge is a macOS major update. Then you use vibrantly colorful words, some that your dead ancestors heard, all because your development environment now doesn’t work in spectacular fashion. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-10-08

A story about open source. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-09-22

Redux powers our global state at FireHydrant, one of the things we use most heavily is the ability to let redux store our API errors to handle failure states on the UI. See how we're using Redux to power our global state at FireHydrant. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2019-09-16

Check out our latest integration with AWS CloudTrail. Read more

Daniel Condomitti 2019-09-16

How we updated our Kubernetes integration at FireHydrant. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-08-28

Announcing our latest integration with Statuspage.io. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-08-22

Incidents happen all the time because of bad code deploys. Defensive programming is great for codifying how a bug could be introduced, and raising an error right before it would happen, or choosing an alternative path. Here are some simple ideas to defend yourself against simple mistakes. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-07-29

The FireHydrant team is dominantly from San Diego, 3 of our 4 person team actually. We’re here to enjoy the awesome community that Go has been creating and to meet new faces. But we also wanted to give back a little with a small guide on food and drinks in Downtown San Diego. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-07-24

Our latest updates - let anyone open an incident in Slack, the launch of Severity Matrix, and a new integration with Jira. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-07-12

We’re launching a new feature today that allows anyone in your organization to kick off your incident response process with an appropriate severity level attached from Slack. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-06-28

So you’ve signed up to give a tech talk, awesome! You’re a subject matter expert in something and want to share your knowledge, that’s what helps make a community awesome. You’re going to be speaking in front of a room of people that you don’t know in a place you’ve likely never been, talking about something you confidently know. Sounds easy, right? Read more

Robert Ross 2019-06-12

We attended Monitorama and took a few notes for you to enjoy. Read the talk recaps. Read more

The FireHydrant Team 2019-06-07

Read more about our latest releases - we've launched webhooks and now you can keep your frequent searches for later. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-06-03

We’re on a mission to make responding to incidents a bit less chaotic. One of the best features we offer (we’re definitely not biased, no way) is a simple way to define how a severity gets determined when you open an incident. We call it the severity matrix, and today it has a new look. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-28

We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. This is a summary of the steps you can take to use vanilla webpack in your Rails application. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-28

How to get started on creating your SLO, SLA, and SLI's. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-16

If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. In the Rails community, this is commonly achieved with NewRelic and Skylight; but we achieve visibility using Prometheus and Grafana. Check out this guide on how to use Rails with Prometheus. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-05

Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Check out this post on getting to know Istio Ingress. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-02

Learn how to structure a Go application with Docker Compose as your development environment. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-01

Learn how to set up a new Rails app in Docker compose. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-01

Rails and ActiveRecord provide a simple interface for retrieving information from a database. With a few characters, I can retrieve all of my users with User.all. This simplicity is great, but it breaks down when you start doing more advanced queries. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-01

Our latest product releases: SSO, Post Mortem Generator. Today we're happy to announce our single sign-on support and updates to our postmortem functionality. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-01

FireHydrant has a changelog feature with a Kubernetes integration - read how our changelog works with Kubernetes. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-05-01

At FireHydrant we use Redux Form for all of our forms. It is extremely easy to build complex form logic with all sorts of added bonuses that make using it in our React/Redux front end a no brainer. Learn how FireHydrant uses Redux Form. Read more

Dylan Nielsen 2019-04-23

How FireHydrant is built to support creating data in our integration-ready platform. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-04-23

Today we're happy to release our incident status page feature! If you operate within an organization that has stakeholders that need the gist of what's going on, how to respond to customers, and give a general feeling of "we're on it," this feature was built for you. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-04-11

Today we're publicly launching FireHydrant, a tool to manage incidents. Read more about our journey. Read more

Robert Ross 2019-04-02