July 2016 Summaries

Continuous integration (CI) is a valuable software engineering practice that involves testing code changes immediately upon commitment, allowing for early problem detection and rapid feedback on code quality. This practice is often paired with continuous deployment, where successful code passes through unit tests and is released to production, enabling quick adaptation to business needs while reducing risks. Integrating incident management processes, such as sending failed build details to platforms like PagerDuty, enhances communication and transparency, allowing for proactive strategies like premortems to identify and address potential issues before they impact users. This integration also provides a less stressful learning environment for junior developers and enriches the code review process by highlighting specific areas for improvement. By transforming incident management from a reactive to a proactive process within the CI framework, teams can reduce code debt and bolster the stability and reliability of their product.

PagerDuty Summit, scheduled for September 13th in San Francisco, will emphasize the intersection of digital transformation and operational maturity, with insights from industry leaders like Gene Kim and Maynard Webb. Attendees can expect a comprehensive lineup of activities, including a solutions expo, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities. The event will also highlight the PagerDuty Operational Excellence and Innovation Awards, celebrating organizations excelling in digital transformation and operational maturity. Participants are encouraged to share their success stories by submitting them for award consideration and to ensure their attendance by registering for the summit.

PagerDuty has announced the appointment of Jennifer Tejada as the new CEO and a member of its board, highlighting her expertise in customer experience, market building, and operational excellence as assets for the company's growth and innovation strategy. The announcement coincides with a 95 percent year-over-year increase in revenue growth from enterprise business and a 90 percent overall revenue growth, along with acquiring over 1,200 new global customers. Co-founder and CTO Solomon expressed enthusiasm about partnering with Tejada, emphasizing her role in leading product innovation and supporting digital transformation for enterprises.

PagerDuty takes pride in its company culture, which is reflected in its recognition as a Top Workplace by the Bay Area News Group, an accolade based on employee opinions. The company has also earned several awards in 2016, including the IT World Awards and a Silver Stevie Award for Customer Service, while its VP of Marketing, Astha Malik, was honored by the California Diversity Council for leadership. Emphasizing collaboration, transparency, diversity, and work-life balance, PagerDuty focuses on hiring supportive colleagues and developing strong managers to foster a team culture that enables employees to excel. The company is dedicated to providing a workplace that supports both personal and professional growth, alongside offering innovative incident management solutions that enhance digital business reliability. PagerDuty is hosting its first-ever summit to engage with customers and industry leaders like Gene Kim and Maynard Webb, underscoring its commitment to digital business advancement.

The integration between Cisco Spark and PagerDuty, demonstrated at Cisco Live, illustrates how easily various tools can be connected using PagerDuty's Custom Event Transformer. This feature allows users to transform incoming HTTP requests into events understood by PagerDuty, enabling seamless integration with any ChatOps tool. The integration specifically allows Cisco Spark users to trigger PagerDuty incidents from within Spark, aggregating all messages from a dedicated chat room into one incident and providing the ability to close incidents with a simple "thanks." The process involves transforming base64 encoded URLs and leveraging webhooks to facilitate communication between the two platforms. The ease of setting up such integrations underscores the flexibility offered by PagerDuty's Custom Event Transformer, which can be tailored for various workflows and functionalities, as evidenced by a live demo at Cisco Live and an invitation to explore further at the PagerDuty Summit.

Attending the AWS Enterprise Summit and AWS Summit in London provided insights into the evolving cloud landscape and the importance of adopting a DevOps culture for successful cloud migration. Stephen Orban emphasized that infrastructure teams must become Cloud Centers of Excellence, distributing operational responsibilities across various teams, which aligns with the DevOps principle of "you build it, you run it" articulated by Amazon's CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels. The shift to cloud computing is highlighted by companies like GE, which are closing data centers to benefit from cloud efficiencies. The conference also discussed the transition from traditional infrastructure to serverless architectures, underscoring the importance of focusing engineering efforts on revenue-driving services rather than infrastructure maintenance. Additionally, there was a focus on evolving from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to microservices, which impacts incident response workflows and emphasizes starting with simple systems that work, in line with Gall’s Law. The event underscored AWS's continuous innovation and influence in the tech industry.

PagerDuty has introduced new features, Response Mobilizer and Response Bridge, to streamline and enhance the complexity of critical incident response by dynamically organizing involvement and information sharing among responders. The Response Mobilizer allows for the addition of individuals or escalation policies to incidents by sending personalized invitations, enabling real-time collaboration with context. In conjunction with this, the Response Bridge feature facilitates immediate participation in online meetings by including conferencing details in the incident, ensuring efficient communication during high-pressure situations. These enhancements aim to improve the coordination and effectiveness of responders and Incident Commanders by providing timely notifications and response options, thereby managing chaos and meeting service level agreements during critical events. The features are available on PagerDuty's Standard and Enterprise plans, with live demonstrations offered at events like Cisco Live in Las Vegas.

Web conferencing has significantly enhanced over recent years, offering features like clear video streams, embedded chat, and file sharing, which have benefited organizations like PagerDuty by facilitating seamless collaboration among geographically distributed teams. The introduction of the Response Bridge feature by PagerDuty further revolutionizes incident response by automating the process of connecting the right responders to incidents, thus eliminating manual efforts and ensuring quick resolutions, even at inconvenient hours. Response Bridge integrates with any web conferencing tool, allowing responders to join meetings with ease and providing them with full incident context beforehand, which is crucial during critical situations. This feature, launched at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, is designed to streamline the path to incident resolution by integrating people, processes, and tools, and is available on PagerDuty’s Standard and Enterprise plans.

Cisco Live is a major annual technology conference that offers a wide array of activities, including networking opportunities with industry professionals, technical and business breakout sessions, interactive labs, and keynote speeches, such as Kevin Spacey’s talk on storytelling in the age of disruption. The conference features the World of Solutions expo, which allows attendees to explore solutions from Cisco and its partners, and includes a Network Operations Center demonstration. Highlights include Maroon 5 at the Customer Appreciation Event and numerous sessions on topics like DevOps and network operations. The PagerDuty booth will offer live demos of new features for incident responders, exciting giveaways, and the chance to win branded Beats headphones. Attendees are encouraged to visit various booths, including Hop & Brew for refreshments, and to engage with the curated list of top events to maximize their experience.

In July's partner spotlight, PagerDuty highlights its integrations with FreshService, Instana, and PepperData, each offering unique enhancements to incident management solutions. FreshService improves incident management by consolidating and prioritizing alerts in collaboration with PagerDuty, streamlining processes for DevOps teams with features like on-call scheduling and multi-channel notifications. Instana addresses the issue of alert noise by automatically modeling application architectures, reducing unnecessary alerts while integrating with PagerDuty to maintain effective incident management. PepperData focuses on providing granular alerts for Hadoop performance issues, allowing users to turn numerous metrics into actionable alerts via PagerDuty, thus offering deeper insights into cluster performance and ensuring timely incident responses. Together, these integrations with PagerDuty enable improved operational efficiency and response to IT challenges.

PagerDuty has introduced a new feature called Add-ons, which allows users to enhance their incident management capabilities by adding custom scripts and web pages to their accounts, thereby tailoring the platform to their specific needs. These Add-ons provide additional functionality beyond the core PagerDuty product and are hosted within users' accounts, enabling a more personalized and efficient management of the incident lifecycle. Examples of available Add-ons include tools for detecting scheduling conflicts, exporting user lists to CSV files, viewing the status of PagerDuty services, and analyzing incident density trends. Users can integrate these pre-built Add-ons using PagerDuty's V2 API or create their own, with guidance available in the company's knowledge base. For further support, PagerDuty invites users to reach out via their support email.