UnifyStack Documentation

It's easy to get lost in the weeds when it comes to operations. There is so much noise being generated by alerts and engineers are getting pulled in different directions fighting fires and trying to keep the system available.

UnifyStack helps you tame your operations and make data-driven operational decisions to ensure that your customers are happy and your engineers aren't stretched too thin.

We tackle the ops problem in two ways:

  1. Allow you to extract deep operational insights from your events and alerts so everyone is on the same page and you can make data-driven ops decision.
  2. Provide alert response automation to reduce MTTR and auto-remediate known issues.

deep insight image

Why

  1. Make smarter business decisions with deeper operational insights.
  2. Provide better customer experience by reducing your MTTR (mean time to recovery).
  3. Provide better engineer experience by reducing toil:
    a. Automate diagnostic actions to save engineering time.
    b. Eliminate false positives and capture transient issues.
    c. Reduce amount of pages by auto-remediating known issues.

Installation

At the moment there are no installations or deployments. UnifyStack works as a fully managed solution that integrates with tools, services, and cloud providers you use.

Key Concepts

What Is An Event

A UnifyStack event is an occurrence of either an alert or a notification that something happened in your system. Usually events indicate that a customer is impacted, will be impacted, or more generally that your service is not operating as expected. Alerts can be forwarded using webhooks from your various alerting/monitoring systems. Once in UnifyStack they can be tagged, searched, plotted on trend graphs, etc.

What Is A Workflow

You can attach workflows to events. Workflows allow you to tie actions together that automate actions your engineers typically perform in response to alerts.

workflow view

Workflows consist of 3 parts

  1. Workflow Trigger
  2. Workflow Items
  3. Workflow Links

Workflow Trigger

A Workflow trigger is the entrypoint to a workflow and is used to tie a UnifyStack event to a workflow. There must be exactly 1 trigger per workflow. External events (e.g. Datadog monitor alerts, etc) can trigger workflows through Workflow Triggers.

Workflow Items

Workflow items encapsulate actions that you wish to perform in response to events. They can be serially or parallelly linked to from triggers and to each other using Workflow Links.

Workflow links connect triggers to workflow items, they also connect workflow items to each other. They are a 1 to 1 mapping but multiple links can have the same source or destination (giving you the same effect as a many to many mapping).

Security

We take security very seriously and have gone to great lengths to make sure our data is always secure.

  1. Our data is not accessible to the public internet.
  2. All sensitive data (such as API keys, passwords, customer logs, etc.) are encrypted in-flight and at rest using AES-256.
  3. Our encryption keys are rotated regularly.
  4. Sensitive data is scrubbed from our logs.

For help debugging errors reach out to us at support@unifystack.com