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Taming the Call Storm

Vincent Geffray

In today's digital world, it is possible to gauge the cost implications of an IT outage on employee productivity, revenue generation but it is usually much more tricky to measure the negative impacts on the very IT people's lives.

Think about this for a minute:

You're a financial advisor and you are meeting with this young couple who just got married 2 months ago. They want to purchase their first place and call it "home." They are interested in what your bank has to offer for mortgage … They only have an hour for you and you've already walked them through the different options and the associated costs.

At this point, you just need to collect a few more information about their income, their credit score and just run the numbers with the mortgage computer application. You log onto the mortgage portal, you see the spinning wheel in the middle of the screen but nothing happens. You try again, you may even apologize and reboot your computer. You try again and get the same damn wheel.

The friendly couple really needs to leave now as they must get back to work. And they do. Your day couldn't get any better, right?

Now what? You could open a ticket with Corporate IT, but you really want to make sure someone hears the story of what just happened. You want to share your feelings and talk to someone real. You are now calling the dedicated 1-800 line to IT Technical Support. What you don't know yet is that thousands of agents have experienced the exact same issue and want to share their frustration with the team they think is responsible for all this mess: IT. Because of the unplanned volumes of calls, you will most likely be placed on-hold and in queue before someone can actually answer your call. From a Service Desk perspective this is called a Call Storm! An unplanned influx of angry colleagues calling the IT Desk.


Now, put yourself in the service desk professional's shoes who will be taking your call … They have to answer hundreds of calls just like yours. They must remain nice and courteous. They usually need to apologize for the inconvenience like if they were responsible for this problem. On top of that, they may have to apologize for not being able to provide you with any update other than "Yes, we know the mortgage application is down. All our engineers are looking into the issue. Sorry, we actually don't know how long this will last"

Isn't it another great day in IT land?

What's going on? How long will this last? What are we doing about it? If you've ever had a major incident impact users throughout your organization, chances are you've heard those questions before. Your IT team may already be trying to diagnose and correct the issue, but the questions just keep coming …

Customers and end users just want to make sure IT is aware of the issue. But when hundreds — even thousands — try to contact the service desk, then you have a call storm. And the inability to properly weather it increases the urgency end users feel.

To reduce the volumes of inbound calls into the support center, IT Alerting solutions are designed to help expedite the IT response process and proactively communicated with impacted business users.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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Taming the Call Storm

Vincent Geffray

In today's digital world, it is possible to gauge the cost implications of an IT outage on employee productivity, revenue generation but it is usually much more tricky to measure the negative impacts on the very IT people's lives.

Think about this for a minute:

You're a financial advisor and you are meeting with this young couple who just got married 2 months ago. They want to purchase their first place and call it "home." They are interested in what your bank has to offer for mortgage … They only have an hour for you and you've already walked them through the different options and the associated costs.

At this point, you just need to collect a few more information about their income, their credit score and just run the numbers with the mortgage computer application. You log onto the mortgage portal, you see the spinning wheel in the middle of the screen but nothing happens. You try again, you may even apologize and reboot your computer. You try again and get the same damn wheel.

The friendly couple really needs to leave now as they must get back to work. And they do. Your day couldn't get any better, right?

Now what? You could open a ticket with Corporate IT, but you really want to make sure someone hears the story of what just happened. You want to share your feelings and talk to someone real. You are now calling the dedicated 1-800 line to IT Technical Support. What you don't know yet is that thousands of agents have experienced the exact same issue and want to share their frustration with the team they think is responsible for all this mess: IT. Because of the unplanned volumes of calls, you will most likely be placed on-hold and in queue before someone can actually answer your call. From a Service Desk perspective this is called a Call Storm! An unplanned influx of angry colleagues calling the IT Desk.


Now, put yourself in the service desk professional's shoes who will be taking your call … They have to answer hundreds of calls just like yours. They must remain nice and courteous. They usually need to apologize for the inconvenience like if they were responsible for this problem. On top of that, they may have to apologize for not being able to provide you with any update other than "Yes, we know the mortgage application is down. All our engineers are looking into the issue. Sorry, we actually don't know how long this will last"

Isn't it another great day in IT land?

What's going on? How long will this last? What are we doing about it? If you've ever had a major incident impact users throughout your organization, chances are you've heard those questions before. Your IT team may already be trying to diagnose and correct the issue, but the questions just keep coming …

Customers and end users just want to make sure IT is aware of the issue. But when hundreds — even thousands — try to contact the service desk, then you have a call storm. And the inability to properly weather it increases the urgency end users feel.

To reduce the volumes of inbound calls into the support center, IT Alerting solutions are designed to help expedite the IT response process and proactively communicated with impacted business users.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...