If you’re familiar with my monthly retrospectives, you know they come with a lot of numbers. Let’s start with these: 7:1 ! That’s what proper teamwork looks like, folks!

At freistil IT, we enjoy our effective collaboration, too. While Philipp is still going through Operations Bootcamp (for an IT infrastructure like ours, there’s a lot of ground to cover), he’s also started to assist in production changes. We’ll soon post a blog entry with his first impressions of our small business. Markus decided to examine the life of a digital nomad for a few weeks: He’s traveling around Germany with his family in a camping van and takes care of our servers and your support requests via mobile broadband and local WiFi hotspots. And I’m enjoying a magnificent Irish summer at home, trying not to get a sunburn!

freistilbox

In June, more than 40 new websites launched on our hosting platform, increasing the total by 15% to 324. With the number of websites, our total traffic also grew: We delivered 12.15 terabytes of content in June, 3.7% more than in the month before.

Another number makes us very happy, too: We managed to keep the overall availability at an excellent level of 99,97% (99.98% in May).

Help Center

While the number of engineering support requests was exactly the same as in May (150), our resolution rate somehow was 15% lower with 107 tickets compared to 126 in May. We’ll need to have a look at possible causes.

On the other hand, we’ve improved our average reaction time by whopping 35%, from 9.7 hours down to only 6.3h. The reaction time breakdown below shows that we were able to cut the number of customers that had to wait more than 24 hours for a first reply by almost 60%!

We’re also proud that we’ve kept a perfect score of 100% positive customer feedback. Judging from comments like “Very friendly and helpful. My request has been solved very quickly. Thanks for that.”, we’re doing a good job.

Operations

With the continuing success of freistilbox, our infrastructure grew by 6% to 300 servers. Our metrics monitoring even increased by 9% to 98,951 metric points that we collect every 10 seconds.

That at the same time the number of on-call alerts went down by 13% isn’t something we’ll complain about. ;-)

Community events

June was a bit less conference-heavy and while I manned the stations, the new ops team went on tour:

• Markus attended WordCamp Hamburg and gave a talk about automated WordPress development setups. When he sat down with our friends from Palasthotel to demonstrate our communication tools, it turned into an impromtu BoF on remote working!

• Just a few days later, both Philipp and Markus went to the Netherlands and brought back at lot of inspiration from DevOps Days Amsterdam.

This month, I’m looking forward to flying to England again for DrupalCamp North East. If you’re going to be there, shoot me an email and let’s have drinks together!

I’m also proud that I’ve been selected to present among the high-calibre speakers at the Open Source Monitoring Conference in November.

Usually, the coming months will be a bit more quiet because many of our customers take their vacation time (there it is again, that word…). Since our internal backlogs are looong, there won’t be any boredom, though. And of course, we’ll always be there if you need us!