Reliability

Alerting, Community, Operations Performance, Reliability

The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet

ZooKeeper, for those who are unaware, is a well-known open source project which enables highly reliable distributed coordination. It is trusted by many around the world, including PagerDuty. It provides high availability and linearizability through the concept of a leader, which can be dynamically re-elected, and ensures consistency through a majority quorum. The leader election and failure detection mechanisms are fairly mature, and typically just work... until they don't. How can this be? Well, after a lengthy investigation, we managed to uncover four different bugs coming together to conspire against us, resulting in random cluster-wide lockups. Two of those bugs laid in ZooKeeper, and the other two were lurking in the Linux kernel. This is our story.

Evan Gilman

15 min read

Features, On-Call Life, Reliability

PagerDuty Introduces Team Organization Feature

No matter what team you’re on, PagerDuty helps you resolve incidents faster. DevOps involves collaboration across multiple teams for better reliability and quality assurance. Having a central, shared tool like PagerDuty to manage incidents across the company makes that collaboration a heck of a lot simpler. Our new team organization feature makes it even easier for different teams like Operations, Development, and Customer Support to work together. Here’s how

Sam Lewis

2 min read

Alerting, Best Practices & Insights, Reliability

Best Practices in Outage Communication: Customers

Outages are chaotic, and it can be difficult to figure out the best way to let your  customers know what is going on. One of the first big decisions you’ll need to make is whether you’re going to respond only to people who inquire about the issue, or if you’re going to be more proactive and post updates publicly. Many of the leading technology companies have begun to transparently discuss outages with their customers, and there are a number of good business reasons for doing so. Regardless of your approach, here are 6 things you can do to ensure successful customer communication during outages.

Sam Lewis

8 min read