Chris Sinjakli, PlanetScale, and Laura de Vesine, Datadog Inc
As long as software keeps breaking, incident management will be a core skill for SREs, but it’s one that’s always evolving.
Has the new wave of incident management platforms changed everything, or are they only as good as the practitioners using them? What’s different about how we handle incidents in the face of constrained budgets and layoffs? How does the industry desire to “just sprinkle some AI on it” interact with social norms built up over years?
The session will run as an unconference-style discussion. We could discuss the topics above, or take it in a completely different direction! We’ll spend the first part of the session writing up topics we’re interested in, group them together, and then open up the floor for discussions.
Laura de Vesine is a 25+ year software industry veteran. She has spent the last 9 years in SRE working in incident analysis and prevention, systems understanding, chaos engineering, and the intersection of technology and organizational culture. Laura is currently a staff engineer at Datadog, Inc. She also has a PhD in computer science, but mostly her kittens nap on her diploma.
author = {Chris Sinjakli and Laura de Vesine},
title = {Keep Calm and Handle the Incident},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}