January 2017 Summaries

Full-stack visibility refers to the comprehensive monitoring and understanding of an entire IT infrastructure, encompassing tools, applications, systems, and services, whether they are hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments. This visibility is achieved through various forms such as data tables, dashboards, and performance metrics, utilizing a mix of tools for application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, log analytics, and more. Organizations utilize these tools to monitor and interpret data, ensuring optimal performance and availability of their systems while automating infrastructure and application management. Solutions like PagerDuty go beyond traditional visibility by integrating incident management, response orchestration, and operational efficiency visualizations to provide a holistic view that includes human elements in resolving incidents and improving service levels. By centralizing data and responses, PagerDuty offers a unified platform to manage and visualize the health of applications, services, and infrastructure, enabling teams to respond effectively to incidents and continuously improve their service delivery.

Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, expressed deep concern and disappointment regarding President Trump's executive order on immigration, which imposed a 90-day entry ban for non-U.S. citizens from seven countries. She emphasized that this order contradicts the values of diversity and inclusivity that America historically upholds, and asserted that the nation's strength lies in its immigrant roots. Tejada praised the public's response of protest and advocacy for inclusivity and equal opportunity, reinforcing that PagerDuty benefits from a diverse workforce and skill-based immigration programs. While none of the company's employees were stranded, she acknowledged potential travel impacts and assured efforts to provide support and guidance. Tejada also highlighted PagerDuty's commitment to diversity by announcing donations to the ACLU and pledged personal contributions, underscoring the company's dedication to inclusivity regardless of political actions.

Instacart is revolutionizing the grocery shopping experience by addressing the declining interest in traditional grocery stores among millennials and working professionals. The company has developed a business model focused on seamless digital and real-world interactions, supported by a robust IT infrastructure that spans from mobile app ordering to delivery. Co-founder Brandon Leonardo emphasizes the importance of experience, strong values of ownership, and separation of concerns in scaling their infrastructure. Instacart's various teams, such as Catalog Ops, Consumer and Search, and Logistics Ops, collaborate to ensure accurate product information, efficient search and delivery, and effective shopper management. The company's ability to create a seamless customer experience is likened to magic, with the complexity hidden from users. Leonardo advises entrepreneurs to prioritize ruthlessly, focusing on what truly matters in the long run.

PagerDuty, known for its unique name and innovative approach to event orchestration and intelligence, is poised for significant growth as it capitalizes on the digital transformation movement that demands seamless technology operations. The company's strategic focus is on providing full-stack visibility and orchestrating both technical and business responses to service disruptions, making it a vital tool for enterprises aiming to maintain and exceed KPI targets amidst increasing data complexity. This aligns with industry trends, as highlighted by IDC's prediction of a doubling in advanced digital transformation efforts by 2020. PagerDuty's recent accolades, such as the TechTarget’s 2017 Modern Infrastructure Award for best DevOps tool, underscore its impact in the tech landscape. With a strong leadership team, an expanding market presence, and over 8,000 customers, the company offers promising opportunities for those interested in shaping the future of digital business operations.

In response to the challenges of managing communication during IT outages, PagerDuty has introduced the Stakeholder Engagement feature to streamline communication and coordination with business stakeholders across organizations. This feature allows stakeholders to subscribe to real-time updates through preferred channels like SMS, email, or push notifications, ensuring that they have access to a single source of truth during critical incidents. The new incident status page provides a chronological timeline of updates, aiding in reducing resolution times and easing postmortem analyses by automatically recording updates. The Stakeholder User License offers a cost-effective solution for businesses by allowing them to purchase stakeholder users at a lower price than full user licenses, with the Enterprise plan including one free stakeholder user per full user license. This initiative aims to enhance the digital delivery and coordinated response capabilities of organizations beyond the IT department. Additionally, a webinar is scheduled to further explore the benefits and use cases of the Stakeholder Engagement feature.

PagerDuty has announced an exclusive integration with ServiceNow Express, designed to enhance incident management and resolution workflows for IT teams. This certified integration, available via the ServiceNow Express Store for the Istanbul version, enables seamless creation and updating of ServiceNow Express tickets from various monitoring tools integrated with PagerDuty. It allows for enhanced visibility and response orchestration across platforms, automating manual tasks and reducing response times to incidents. The integration supports creating new users in PagerDuty based on ServiceNow responders, pulling response schedules into ServiceNow, and acknowledging Express tickets in Slack. This collaboration aims to improve business outcomes, user engagement, and overall user experiences, continuing PagerDuty's commitment to supporting ServiceNow integration users from past releases.

PagerDuty is launching a new webinar series aimed at enhancing the management of digital operations and infrastructure, starting with two sessions focused on 2017 trends in DevOps and Oracle's customer experience improvements using PagerDuty's tools. The first webinar, scheduled for January 12, 2017, will feature discussions with industry leaders from AWS, AppDynamics, Datadog, and Threat Stack, addressing the mainstream adoption of DevOps, enterprise implementation challenges, and the integration of security within DevOps practices. The second session on January 19, 2017, will highlight how Oracle leverages PagerDuty's Operations Command Console to improve customer experience by visualizing application performance and infrastructure health, thereby enabling real-time incident response and reducing Mean Time To Identification (MTTI). Both webinars promise insights into the evolving landscape of digital operations and encourage participants to register and follow PagerDuty for updates on future sessions.

PagerDuty has open-sourced its incident response documentation, a comprehensive guide designed to help organizations efficiently manage and resolve major incidents. This documentation, developed from years of learning and refinement, outlines best practices for preparing for on-call responsibilities, handling major incidents, and conducting post-mortems. Aimed at on-call practitioners and those involved in operational incident response, it provides tools and lessons to decrease response times and improve service reliability. While some proprietary information has been omitted, the documentation remains a valuable resource under the Apache License 2.0, allowing for commercial and private use with appropriate credit. The initiative encourages community collaboration and improvement, with the documentation available on PagerDuty’s GitHub account for modification and use as a foundation for internal processes.