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Preventing Outages During the Holiday Shopping Season

Michael Butt

The most destructive root cause of 75 percent of outages during big online events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unplanned configuration changes to a system – when IT and Ops teams find something they think might cause a problem and try to fix it immediately, unintentionally creating a much bigger issue for the web or mobile site.


The following are BigPanda's top recommendations for preventing outages during throughout the entire holiday shopping season:

- Identify the systems that are mission critical to your business. Many companies don't and try to treat their entire system as business critical – and this is a mistake. 

- Have a bulletproof plan for your critical services. Once you've identified what your critical services are, know how to keep them up with a bulletproof plan for them. For instance, if Amazon checkout goes down – you need a disaster and recovery plan for this. But if the Recommendation Engine has problems, this is not at the same level of criticality. 

- Tier your services. Having 3-5 tiers makes prioritization and response much easier, quicker and more effective when there is a problem. And make sure you have a backup and failover plan for the highest tier of your services. 

- You don't need failover for everything. IT and Ops teams who try to have failover for everything often discover that they don't have it ready for anything. 

- Don't become overly focused on the components of infrastructure. Make sure you are spending more time and focus on your services. 

- Make sure you have planned for load capacity. Not planning for the sheer volume of people visiting your web or mobile site accounts for 25 percent of outages during big online events. 

- Use a tool that allows you to consolidate your IT data. Implementing an alert correlation platform allows IT and Ops teams to separate signal from noise and focus more on the customer experience by providing a consolidated view of their IT alert data. This allows them to stop being reactive firefighters and become proactive before an issue has the chance to affect the customer.

Michael Butt is Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda.

APM

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Preventing Outages During the Holiday Shopping Season

Michael Butt

The most destructive root cause of 75 percent of outages during big online events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unplanned configuration changes to a system – when IT and Ops teams find something they think might cause a problem and try to fix it immediately, unintentionally creating a much bigger issue for the web or mobile site.


The following are BigPanda's top recommendations for preventing outages during throughout the entire holiday shopping season:

- Identify the systems that are mission critical to your business. Many companies don't and try to treat their entire system as business critical – and this is a mistake. 

- Have a bulletproof plan for your critical services. Once you've identified what your critical services are, know how to keep them up with a bulletproof plan for them. For instance, if Amazon checkout goes down – you need a disaster and recovery plan for this. But if the Recommendation Engine has problems, this is not at the same level of criticality. 

- Tier your services. Having 3-5 tiers makes prioritization and response much easier, quicker and more effective when there is a problem. And make sure you have a backup and failover plan for the highest tier of your services. 

- You don't need failover for everything. IT and Ops teams who try to have failover for everything often discover that they don't have it ready for anything. 

- Don't become overly focused on the components of infrastructure. Make sure you are spending more time and focus on your services. 

- Make sure you have planned for load capacity. Not planning for the sheer volume of people visiting your web or mobile site accounts for 25 percent of outages during big online events. 

- Use a tool that allows you to consolidate your IT data. Implementing an alert correlation platform allows IT and Ops teams to separate signal from noise and focus more on the customer experience by providing a consolidated view of their IT alert data. This allows them to stop being reactive firefighters and become proactive before an issue has the chance to affect the customer.

Michael Butt is Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda.

APM

The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

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