Preventing Outages During the Holiday Shopping Season

Michael Butt
Learn more about BigPanda

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.

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Preventing Outages During the Holiday Shopping Season

Michael Butt
Learn more about BigPanda

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.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Beyond Traditional Autoscaling: The Future of Kubernetes in AI Infrastructure

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI Drives Surge in Data Budgets

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

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Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

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A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

Will AI Solve the Growing Data Divide?

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

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