Deck the halls! It's time for the annual holiday Code Freeze, that festive time of year when businesses impose a precautionary halt to code changes and Operations should be quiet. But before you kick up your feet, make sure that demand doesn’t lead to availability embarrassments. After all, retail experts suggest that we’re in for another online-heavy holiday shopping season, so businesses need to brace for increased digital traffic...with little tolerance for failure.

Unlike the Black Friday lines of old, today’s online consumers are barely even willing to wait 30 seconds to make an online transaction. One in three consumers will gladly abandon ship in a matter of seconds if mobile apps or websites are sluggish or if these services provide a negative digital experience. How long would you wait for the Target website to come back online before opening Walmart.com?

In our always-on digital economy, downtime equals disappointed customers, tarnished brands and significant financial losses (to the tune of $5,600 per minute). So, the pressure is on to provide continuous availability, and when the inevitable does occur, to quickly detect the issue, resolve the incident and minimize the business impact.

But how do you prepare IT teams for elevated site traffic and the ensuing incidents? And how do you shore up your complex IT environment for the holiday season?

Prep to accelerate incident response

While you can’t always foresee or prevent incidents, especially in increasingly complex IT infrastructures, you can mitigate the damage they do by being ready for them. To lessen the mean time to remediation (MTTR), you need defined processes and procedures for responding to incidents. So, schedule those incident response dress rehearsals where you lay out potential issues, experiment with fixes and analyze performance.

Check your holiday readiness by asking yourself and your teams...

Preparation questions, like:

Did you set priorities, so teams respond to the most severe incidents first? And is there a set escalation path?

Do you know your peak throughput to scale according to the elevated digital activity?

Are there features you can disable to unlock additional capacity?

Do you have a communications plan to continuously update business leaders about the health of your system?

Perhaps most critical: what happens if an incident arises? Who is in charge of the technical support and are there on-call support teams and developers in case an incident occurs outside of operating hours? Have you standardized runbooks that solve common issues?

Did you update your observability dashboards and refresh your SLOs, in case systems fail?

And deployment questions, like:

Did you do dry runs to test notifications?

Have you executed a load test to identify bottlenecks?

Are you continuously updating capacity based on peak loads?

While your team’s readiness is critical, modern e-commerce businesses also need to monitor their IT environments by using intelligent observability solutions.

Survive the holiday season with Moogsoft

100% uptime — that is what the holiday season demands. And observability with AIOps can move you closer to that goal. By ingesting an entire IT stack’s data, observability gives you visibility into what’s going on in your apps and supporting services. In the meantime, the supporting AIOps technology provides meaningful insight into your data by providing context, real-time analytics and anomaly detection. In practice, this technology helps teams quickly identify and fix issues that affect the performance of a business’s apps and vital services.

While there are a slew of observability platforms in the marketplace, only one provides a single unified cloud monitoring solution that gives you visibility into your entire tech stack with just one dashboard. Moogsoft converges the power of observability with AIOps. With observability’s early indicators, deep diagnosis and fast detection and AIOps’s end-to-end, comprehensive views of the IT environment, tech teams get rapid, accurate problem resolution for increased uptime.

Some large software vendors offer a broad suite of tools, including AIOps and observability. But getting these tools to work together can lead to inefficiencies, tool proliferation and latency. If you’re trying to keep pace with rising customer expectations, you need faster attention to service-impacting issues and likely don’t have time for these inefficiencies.

Before holiday shoppers officially start decking the halls and filling up their online carts, make sure your systems are ready to handle increased loads and that your IT team is equipped to handle any system failure that may come its way. But also, adopt the tools you need to monitor these ever-complex tech stacks, quickly and efficiently respond to incidents and minimize service interruptions.

And the good news is: there’s still time to see how Moogsoft can help your business avoid the Nightmare Before Christmas — our intelligent observability platform can get up and running in the time it takes you to make a cappuccino! Take our observability platform for a free spin or if you’d like to take a look under the platform’s hood, download your very own copy of our Observability with AIOps for Dummies e-book.

Happy holidays and cheers to a smooth holiday shopping season!