Case Study: Backblaze slashes mean time to mitigation by 91% with FireHydrant
Key results
The challenge
As Backblaze's customer base and infrastructure grew, its incident management strategy struggled with unclear service ownership, off-hours interruptions without an on-call rotation, and miscommunication during simultaneous incidents. The team needed to automate coordination, lower the load on incident managers, and track everything happening in an incident.
The solution
Backblaze implemented FireHydrant's Incident Management and Signals products to automate on-call scheduling and escalations, map service ownership through the Service Catalog, and centralize alerting to reduce noise. Automation spun up Slack channels, generated Google Meet calls for high-severity incidents, and created Jira tickets.
“FireHydrant has dramatically improved our time to respond, which in turn has dramatically improved our time to mitigation, which means we solve problems faster.”
SBSam BurkeSRE and Incident Manager, Backblaze
The results, in context
Backblaze reported a 91% reduction in mean time to mitigation, along with fewer incidents and more accurate SLOs. Paging volume for engineers dropped from two or three pages per day to twice in an entire week. Figures are quoted from FireHydrant's published customer story and dated to the sourcing date.