We hold the pager.
A complete operations function for your AWS estate, delivered against a written SLA by engineers based in Australia. Not a ticket queue — a team that knows your architecture.
The whole run function, not the easy half
Monitoring is configured by us, alerts route to our on-call roster first, and no alert is allowed to page a human until there is a written, tested runbook behind it.
- Monitoring & alerting — CloudWatch, synthetics and log-based detection tuned to your SLOs, not vendor defaults
- Incident response — 24×7×365 first-line ownership, incident command for P1s, post-incident report within five business days
- Patch & lifecycle — Systems Manager patch baselines by environment, with maintenance windows you approve
- Backup & recovery — AWS Backup policy per workload, restore testing on a schedule, documented RTO/RPO
- Change management — peer-reviewed Terraform, policy checks in CI, approval gates on production
- Capacity & performance — trend review against agreed SLOs before it becomes an incident
- Cost visibility — spend reporting bundled in, with active FinOps on Managed and Enterprise plans
Alert hygiene comes first
Before we accept the pager we spend two weeks deleting or fixing alerts that fire without a useful action. On a typical estate that removes 60–70% of the volume — and it is the single biggest reason on-call stops hurting.
Contractual, measured, and credited when we miss
Response is measured from alert receipt or ticket creation to a human acknowledging and starting work — not to an autoresponder.
| Severity | Definition | Response | Update cadence | Target resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Production unavailable, data loss risk, or active security incident | 15 min, 24×7 | Every 30 min | 4 hours |
| P2 | Major degradation with a workaround, or single-AZ redundancy lost | 30 min, 24×7 | Every 2 hours | 1 business day |
| P3 | Minor fault, limited user impact, non-urgent change | 4 business hours | Daily | 5 business days |
| P4 | Service request, access change or question | 1 business day | On change | By agreement |
These are commitments, not averages. We deliberately do not publish measured performance figures we cannot show you the workings for — ask in a first meeting and we will walk through our actual SLA reporting for a comparable customer.
Three weeks to pager transfer
We do not accept the pager until the runbooks exist. Taking on-call for a system you do not understand is how MSPs end up escalating everything back to you at 2am.
Our full engagement model- Week 0
Discovery
Read-only access, automated inventory, architecture walkthrough with your team, and agreement on what is in scope and what is not.
- Week 1
Alert hygiene & monitoring
Existing alerts audited: each is fixed, deleted or given a runbook. New coverage deployed for the gaps.
- Week 2
Runbooks & access
Runbooks written jointly with your engineers and tested in non-production. Cross-account roles, MFA and session logging established.
- Week 3
Shadow then transfer
We run alongside your roster for a week, then take first-line paging. Your team stays as escalation, not front line.
What working with us actually feels like
Shared channel
A Slack or Teams channel with our engineers in it. Questions get answered by the person who built the thing.
Operations check-in
Thirty minutes: open incidents, upcoming changes, capacity concerns, and anything about to consume your included change capacity.
Service review
SLA performance, every incident and its cause, spend trend, risk register and the next three optimisations we recommend.
Review & DR test
A full Well-Architected review and a live disaster recovery exercise with a written result. Semi-annual on Enterprise.
“We went from three unplanned outages a quarter to none. The monthly review is the first vendor meeting I don't dread.”
Related case study
The customer moved onto Managed at go-live after an eleven-wave data centre exit — and has not had a P1 in the eight months since.
Read the case studyLeast privilege, fully auditable, revocable in one action
We never ask for IAM users or long-lived keys. Access is by cross-account role assumed through our identity provider, and every action we take appears in your own CloudTrail under a named engineer.
- Cross-account IAM roles with an external ID, scoped by permission boundary
- MFA enforced at our IdP; no shared credentials, ever
- Just-in-time elevation for privileged actions, time-boxed and logged
- Background-checked delivery staff under confidentiality agreements
- You can revoke the trust relationship at any time without contacting us
What we will not do
- Hold your infrastructure code in our own repositories
- Deploy an agent we will not let your security team review
- Make an unreviewed production change outside an incident
- Mark up your AWS consumption
All four are written into the services agreement.
Managed AWS questions
Can you work alongside our internal platform team?
That is the most common arrangement. We usually take 24×7 first-line operations and the undifferentiated heavy lifting; your team keeps the product-specific work. The boundary gets written down during onboarding so nobody assumes the other side has it.
What if an incident is in our application code?
We diagnose, contain and escalate to you with the evidence attached — logs, traces, timeline and what we ruled out. We do not sit on an incident waiting for business hours because the cause turned out to be above the platform.
Do you require specific tooling?
No. We work with CloudWatch natively, and equally with Datadog, New Relic, Grafana or Splunk if you already have them. We will tell you honestly when a tool is costing you more than it returns.
Is on-call handled offshore?
No. The after-hours roster is staffed from Australia and New Zealand. Every engineer on it has worked on your account during business hours.
What happens if we want to leave?
Thirty days' notice after the initial term, plus a documented handover: infrastructure code, runbooks, dashboards, a credential rotation plan and a walkthrough session. All of it lives in your accounts throughout the engagement anyway.
See what your estate looks like to us
The free Well-Architected review covers exactly the ground we would be taking over. No cost, no obligation.