May 2016 Summaries

PagerDuty has been recognized as a Gold winner in two categories at the 11th Annual 2016 IT World Awards® by Network Products Guide, highlighting its achievements in IT Products and Services for Enterprise and Customer Service Team of the Year for companies with 100 to 499 employees. This recognition underscores PagerDuty's success in providing an agile incident management solution that enhances operational reliability and agility through the integration with ITOps and DevOps monitoring stacks, thereby improving system performance and customer experience. Additionally, PagerDuty's customer service excellence is evident in their consistently high satisfaction ratings, maintaining an average customer satisfaction score of 98.6% in 2015, and significantly outperforming industry benchmarks for first reply and total customer wait times. The company is honored to be acknowledged alongside other industry leaders and takes pride in its commitment to fostering quality customer relationships and supporting customer success.

Knowledge16 has been a significant conference for PagerDuty, marked by engaging interactions with users, successful demonstrations, and valuable insights into ServiceNow's impact on the ITSM space. A key highlight was showcasing the bi-directional integration with ServiceNow, which synchronizes incidents and updates seamlessly, allowing users to manage incidents primarily through PagerDuty without needing to toggle back to ServiceNow. This integration simplifies incident management and reduces service ticket handling time, with setup taking just a few minutes. The conference underscored ServiceNow's transformative role in helping organizations track, analyze, and improve their services, shifting away from outdated ITSM tools. Discussions revealed a need for PagerDuty's solution to replace inefficient incident response practices that lead to downtime and revenue loss. The event emphasized that while adopting ServiceNow is crucial for IT maturity, PagerDuty's integration serves as a vital tool for modernizing IT operations and supporting agile and DevOps-focused development.

Service Management (ITSM) focuses on optimizing how IT is utilized within an organization, necessitating a strategic toolset tailored to specific organizational needs to ensure optimal service delivery and infrastructure availability. The approach involves consolidating ITSM services into a unified hub, supporting diverse IT infrastructure speeds and processes, and assessing the flexibility and integration capabilities of potential toolsets. These challenges are addressed in an on-demand webinar titled “Organizing and Optimizing ITSM Toolsets,” which aims to provide insights on enhancing current operations environments by effectively managing information flow and optimizing people, processes, and tools in a modern operational setting.

ITSM solutions have evolved significantly with the emergence of ServiceNow, a platform that has modernized IT operations by replacing outdated on-premise systems. At the Knowledge16 event in Las Vegas, the excitement is palpable as attendees and partners gather to celebrate ServiceNow's impact on IT infrastructure. Recognizing the importance of ServiceNow, PagerDuty released its first certified integration with the platform in December 2015, enabling customers to maintain critical systems effectively. At Knowledge16, PagerDuty announced a new certified integration with ServiceNow, allowing for seamless connectivity, bi-directional sync, incident management, and user mapping between the platforms. This integration is part of PagerDuty's suite of over 150 integrations for various IT and operations tools, designed to enhance service reliability and customer satisfaction.

Developing redundant services is crucial for IT and DevOps organizations focused on high availability, especially when managing large distributed systems and applications. Apache ZooKeeper has become a popular choice in the open-source community for serving as a centralized service to maintain critical information. Organizations often face challenges and bugs in implementing configuration, data synchronization services, naming registries, notification services, and messaging queues. PagerDuty's experts, Arup Chakrabarti and Evan Gilman, will share their insights on troubleshooting Apache ZooKeeper in an upcoming TechLive webinar. They will discuss how PagerDuty engineers identify and fix bugs to ensure high-performing, reliable systems, offering participants the chance to improve their incident resolution times and application uptime.

PagerDuty has enhanced its platform with the introduction of the PagerDuty Services Group, a feature that allows customers to group multiple integrations monitoring various layers of their IT systems into a single, cohesive service representation. Historically, the concept of "service" in PagerDuty has been pivotal for integrating different tools, defining incident behavior, and determining notification protocols. The new feature aims to simplify the organization of these integrations, enabling users to connect tools like New Relic, Splunk, and Pingdom under one service without downtime or reconfiguration. This initiative is part of PagerDuty's broader strategy to strengthen the service-centric approach for organizing IT systems, which is essential for effective incident response and maintaining the integrity of business-level services. Customers are encouraged to adopt this approach and provide feedback on their experience, as PagerDuty continues to develop this foundational aspect of its platform.

Enterprises today are navigating the challenges of integrating modern IT practices with their existing legacy systems through the concept of Bimodal IT, which was introduced by Gartner. This model requires IT operations to balance two modes: Mode 1, which focuses on maintaining the stability and security of traditional infrastructure, and Mode 2, which emphasizes the need for agility and rapid deployment to meet increasing enterprise demands. While "rip and replace" strategies are often unfeasible, organizations are encouraged to embrace Mode 2 to avoid future issues and enhance operational efficiency. Key strategies for successfully managing this dual approach include improving visibility across both modes and adopting bimodal solutions like incident management services that cater to the needs of both operational modes. By implementing these strategies, enterprises can enable faster research and development, meet customer demands, and ensure a successful transition to a Bimodal IT framework, ultimately benefiting both the organization and the IT teams.

PagerDuty and Threat Stack recently co-hosted a workshop in Seattle, focusing on modern incident management and cloud security. The event highlighted the importance of fostering a security-first culture that encourages collaboration among operations, security, and development teams. This culture is essential for efficient incident response, especially in the face of evolving security threats. PagerDuty and Threat Stack have integrated their systems to manage cloud security incidents more effectively, emphasizing automation and quick notification processes. The integration allows for improved alert escalation and resolution times, leveraging tools like Slack for real-time communication. Companies like GE Capital, Macy’s, and Nordstrom have successfully adopted similar collaborative approaches through DevOps, and Threat Stack's own transformation underscores the value of embedding security within daily workflows. The workshop underscored that in today's fast-paced environment, a proactive and integrated security stance is crucial for protecting applications and systems, regardless of team size or resource constraints.