2025-08-27 –, Potter Auditorium - Kenneth C Rowe Management Building
You have vendors. Your vendors have vendors. It's vendors all the way down. When one of your vendors has an incident or outage, your customers feel it, and your customers don't care who your vendors are. So it's up to you to manage expectations even when you can't facilitate fixing the problem.
Recognizing, troubleshooting, and remediating incidents on the services your team owns and runs is hard enough; when the incident is actually happening to an upstream vendor, what can you do? Large outages might get attention from mainstream media, or at least be well-recognized among other technology teams. Those large incidents can have catastrophic results for your organization. Smaller or more obscure might just be a temporary annoyance.
How your team handles vendor outages is more and more important as many teams become more dependent on SaaS and cloud providers for most of their tool chain as well as their production environments. This session will discuss how to plan for vendor incidents, what to have on hand, and provide some suggestions for how your team can cope when someone else is having a very bad day.
Mandi Walls is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty. For PagerDuty, she helps technology organizations increase their effectiveness with modern IT practices and unplanned incidents. She is a regular speaker at technical conferences when she isn’t podcasting, streaming, or writing about PagerDuty. She is interested in the emergence of new tools and workflows to make the task of operating large complex computing systems more approachable.