Incidentally Reliable Podcast by Xurrent

Hosted by Xurrent IMR

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Welcome to the The Incidentally Reliable Podcast, where we dive into the world of engineering and bring you first-hand experiences and captivating insights from experts in the ever-evolving front lines of DevOps and Site Reliability. With a new guest every episode, learn how elusive reliability can be as we peek into their journey in the industry so far, engineering innovations made in distress, manoeuvred nightmares, their war-room stories, and their opinions on the current state of the space.

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22 recent

October 9, 2026Episode 451 min

Weather Forecasting for Your Infrastructure | Incidentally Reliable S3E4 🎙️

Most systems only tell you what already broke, they are reactive by design. In this episode, our guest Zac Nickens, founder of Resonance Systems, joins host Jim Hirschauer to unpack the difference between visibility and true observability, how Resonance's Horizon product predicts service interruptions before they happen, and why AI agents need a simulated blast radius check before they ever touch production. It is a deep dive into proactive reliability, explainable AI, and what it takes to trust a system you cannot fully see. 🎙️ Incidentally Reliable is brought to you by Xurrent. 🔗 Learn more: https://www.xurrent.com/incident-management-response Guest: Zac Nickens, Founder of Resonance Systems 🔗 https://resonancesystems.ai/ 🔗 https://www.typedworld.ai/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-nickens-2aa96a79/ #IncidentallyReliable #sre #devops #ai #observability #incidentmanagement #Xurrent #podcast #explainableai

August 28, 2026Episode 325 min

High Cardinality, High Stakes | Incidentally Reliable S3 E3

Host Jim Hirschauer sits down with our guest Steve Flanders, Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk and a founding member of OpenTelemetry, to talk through the real cost of high cardinality data, why the OpenTelemetry Collector works best as a control plane and not just a forwarder, and why SLO based alerts beat threshold based ones every time. They also get into the level of effort it actually takes to tame observability data and how to stop paging for things that do not matter. 🎙️ Incidentally Reliable is brought to you by Xurrent. 🔗 Learn more: https://www.xurrent.com/incident-management-response Guest: Steve Flanders, Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk 🔗 https://sflanders.net/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveflanders/ #IncidentallyReliable #SRE #DevOps #Observability #OpenTelemetry #IncidentManagement #Xurrent #Podcast #PlatformEngineering

July 24, 2026Episode 221 min

Never Let AI Touch Prod Alone | Incidentally Reliable S3 E2

Host Jim Hirschauer sits down with our guest Zahan Parekh, founder of Gimic, to talk runbooks, why they go stale, and why AI still needs a human in the loop before it touches production. They also get into governance, access control, and audit trails, the guardrails regulated industries rely on before letting AI near prod.🎙️ Incidentally Reliable is brought to you by Xurrent. 🔗 Learn more: https://www.xurrent.com/incident-management-response Guest: Zahan Parekh, Founder of Gimic 🔗 https://gimic-tech.com/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/zahan-parekh-1a5bb21b0/ #IncidentallyReliable #SRE #DevOps #AIAutomation #IncidentManagement #Xurrent #Podcast #ProductionEngineering #platformengineering

February 13, 2026Episode 138 min

The Zenduty Journey, AI-Native Response, and a New Host | Incidentally Reliable S3E1

We are back for Season 3 of the Incidentally Reliable podcast! 🎙️In this season premiere, we are kicking off a new chapter as part of Xurrent. Our new host, Jim Hirschauer, sits down with podcast veteran and Zenduty co-founder, Vishwa, for a special throwback episode.They take a trip down memory lane to uncover the real story behind Zenduty, why it was built, how this podcast started, and the massive "needle in the haystack" observability problem that still plagues SRE teams today.💡 In this episode, we cover:-The transition from Zenduty to Xurrent: What’s changing?-Why observability tools often create more noise, not less.-The "Culture vs. Tooling" debate: Why you can't buy reliability.Jim’s vision for Season 3.----------------------------------------------------------------------🔗 Connect with us:Website: https://www.xurrent.com/podcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xurrent/#SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #Podcast #Zenduty #Xurrent #DevOps #IncidentManagement #TechPodcast #SeasonPremiere

August 1, 2025Episode 456 min

Once an SRE, always an SRE | Incidentally Reliable with Sudarshan Balakrishna

In this episode, Sudarshan shares his experience leading high-performing SRE and infrastructure teams at Rippling, Twilio, Walmart, and Epsilon. He talks about reducing CI/CD costs by 60 percent, cutting on-call alerts by 65 percent, and the mindset required to build resilient systems.

June 18, 2025Episode 354 min

CTRL + ALT + Scale: Building More Than Just Code | Incidentally Reliable with Sakshi Jain

In this episode, Madhu Rawat (CTO, Xurrent) sits down with Sakshi — Co-founder and Head of Engineering at Kapstan, with leadership experience at Sumo Logic and UpGrad. They discuss the evolution of observability, building for scale, the role of AI in incident management, and what it means to lead engineering teams through change.

May 21, 2025Episode 245 min

Redefining ITxM with Zenduty × Xurrent | Incidentally Reliable

In this episode, Phil (CPO) and Madhu (CTO) from Xurrent sit down with Vishwa and Ankur from Zenduty to talk about ITxM, building for reliability across teams, and how product and platform thinking come together in real-world incident workflows.

April 25, 2025Episode 142 min

S2 | #1 - Deepak Rajanna - From Cart Failures to Satellite Footprints

In this episode, we speak with Deepak Rajanna, CPTO at SatSure and ex-Amazon, Flipkart, xto10x, about pricing failures at scale, war room lessons from Big Billion Days, and building satellite-powered systems with SRE principles at their core.

December 20, 2024Episode 1439 min

#14 - Amit Rindhe - GoDaddy's Journey to Hosting Reliability

In this episode of Incidentally Reliable, we sit down with Amit Rhinde, Head of Engineering at GoDaddy, to uncover the secrets behind building resilient systems, scaling global operations, and ensuring uptime for millions of users. Amit takes us through his incredible journey, from pioneering SRE practices at Adobe and AWS to leading one of the world's most trusted hosting platforms.

September 27, 2024Episode 1329 min

#13 - Denys Pashutynski - Press Start to Scale: SRE in Gaming

In this episode of Incidentally Reliable, we chat with Denys Pashutynski , Senior Engineering Manager of Site Reliability at Roblox, about the challenges of maintaining gaming reliability for millions. Denys, with experience at companies like Twitter, AWS, and eBay, dives into how Roblox handles latency, traffic spikes, and customer expectations.