September 2018 Summaries

PagerDuty has launched new integrations with the Atlassian suite, including Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Jira Ops, and Bitbucket, to enhance real-time digital operations for IT, DevOps, and developer teams. Unveiled at the Atlassian Summit in Barcelona, these integrations were developed based on feedback from over 3,000 shared customers, aiming to streamline workflows by providing bidirectional synchronization and greater context through PagerDuty's Event Intelligence capabilities. This collaboration allows Atlassian users to efficiently manage incidents and service requests, leveraging PagerDuty's platform to reduce noise and improve productivity by offering access to over 300 tool integrations. The partnership enables users to engage the right personnel with relevant information in real-time, enhancing coordination across the Atlassian tool stack and offering features not natively available within the Atlassian suite. These integrations are designed to be easy to set up and scale with businesses, allowing teams to work more effectively and drive innovation.

PagerDuty Analytics is a platform designed to enhance the understanding and management of digital operations by offering actionable insights beyond traditional metrics such as MTTA and MTTR. It introduces new features like Operational Review Analytics, which simplifies the process of running operational reviews by providing prescriptive metrics related to on-call processes, service reliability, and business impact. The platform aims to align digital operations with business outcomes by offering insights from real-time data, covering aspects like team health, major incident response effectiveness, and ROI of DevOps tools. PagerDuty is also open-sourcing documentation to help organizations conduct operational reviews effectively, based on insights from mature digital businesses and its own processes. Future developments include exploratory analytics dashboarding and advanced analytics for industry benchmarking, which will allow organizations to customize their metrics and improve operational maturity. The integration with PagerDuty Visibility further bridges the gap between technical operations and customer experiences, enhancing the overall impact on business services.

PagerDuty Visibility is a new product designed to enhance communication and situational awareness during critical incidents by bridging the gap between technical and business contexts. It offers real-time insights into the operational status of business services, accessible through mobile apps, to ensure that everyone in an organization has a shared understanding of incidents' impacts. Key features include Business Services, which map technical dependencies to business capabilities for non-technical stakeholders, and Impact Metrics, which provide continuous updates on business service health. These capabilities support the new Visibility Dashboard, allowing synchronized awareness across different stakeholders during emergencies. Additionally, the web-based Visibility Console, part of the existing Operations Command Console, integrates these new functionalities at no extra cost for current users. This comprehensive platform offers a unified view of how technical incidents affect digital experiences, aiming to improve digital operations efficiency.

Marguerite des Trois Maisons, a product owner at PagerDuty's Toronto office, emphasizes the value of collaboration and the unique role she plays as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) product owner, focusing on internal development rather than external product shipment. With a background in various languages, both coding and spoken, she transitioned from a developer to her current role by actively listening and engaging with her team to improve processes and foster leadership without the necessity of formal management training. Despite initial challenges due to the undefined nature of her role and lack of established processes, Marguerite leveraged feedback and collaboration to shape her position and drive improvements in infrastructure and tooling for developers. As PagerDuty grows, she is excited about enhancing collaboration between infrastructure teams and breaking down existing silos to foster innovative thinking.

PagerDuty Summit 2018 concluded as a significant DevOps conference, bringing together customers, partners, and prospects to engage in discussions on teamwork, product use, and corporate responsibility. Key presentations included insights from the product team on Event Intelligence and Analytics, a talk by author Patrick Lencioni on team productivity, and a fireside chat led by Olivia Khalili with industry leaders discussing the real-time application of PagerDuty in critical situations. The event also featured the announcement of new initiatives like Impact Pricing to support nonprofits and the recognition of distinguished contributors through the PagerDuty Summit Awards. Breakout sessions provided diverse insights across product, value, and technical tracks, illustrating the broad applicability of PagerDuty’s solutions beyond IT operations. The summit celebrated collaboration and innovation, expressing gratitude to its community, and anticipation for the next year's event.

At PagerDuty, the author shares experiences that highlight the company's commitment to fostering a culture of inclusion and psychological safety, particularly as a queer woman in tech. The author recounts a supportive interaction with their manager, Arup Chakrabarti, who demonstrated trust and respect by addressing a concern without requiring justification, which reinforced a sense of belonging and safety. PagerDuty emphasizes explicit expectations, continuous improvement, and blameless postmortems to cultivate a supportive and inclusive environment. The company invests in its people, prioritizing diversity through initiatives like Employee Resource Groups, such as SisterDuty, which support women and help build community trust. Despite these efforts, the author acknowledges that there is still room for improvement, and PagerDuty is committed to enhancing its inclusivity efforts by integrating them with its compassionate DevOps culture.

PagerDuty Summit 2018, held at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco, brought together over 800 attendees, including thought leaders and DevOps enthusiasts, for a day of learning and networking. The conference featured keynote speakers such as Gap CTO Rathi Murthy, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who discussed topics ranging from startup growth and incident management to the future of artificial intelligence. CEO Jennifer Tejada emphasized the significance of real-time operations and announced new products like Event Intelligence, Visibility, and Analytics. The event included 12 breakout sessions covering incident response, DevSecOps, and chaos engineering, with contributions from companies like Funding Circle and Stitch Fix. Additionally, PagerDuty University was launched to offer technical training, and the annual Breakathon saw 107 participants, with Reddit's team winning grand prizes. The summit promised another day of sessions and activities on its second day.

PagerDuty is leveraging its product and workforce to support social impact organizations by launching initiatives like Impact Pricing, which offers nonprofits 10 free licenses of their Platform Team plan, enabling access to features such as On-Call Management and Notification capabilities. The company is committed to making community a key stakeholder, pledging 1% of equity, employee volunteer time, and product to empower mission-driven organizations through technology and capacity building. PagerDuty's social impact strategy extends beyond product donation, including dedicated resourcing for social impact and philanthropy, partnerships with diversity-focused organizations, and formalized volunteer time for employees. CEO Jennifer Tejada emphasizes the importance of digital tools for all organizations, noting that nonprofits like Crisis Text Line and Wikimedia Foundation benefit from real-time operations management. The company has also integrated social impact into its annual conference, featuring nonprofit keynote speakers and recognizing impactful customers.

PagerDuty is enhancing its offerings for DevOps teams by providing integrations with over 300 tools, including a collaboration with Microsoft Azure DevOps, formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). This integration enables development and IT operations teams to automate incident resolution, improve visibility, and address business-impacting issues in real-time, leveraging Azure's end-to-end toolchain for a complete enterprise-grade solution. Azure DevOps offers a suite of standalone services such as Azure Pipelines, Repos, Boards, Test Plans, and Artifacts, which work seamlessly with PagerDuty to support the entire DevOps lifecycle from code development through deployment and incident response. By utilizing machine learning, PagerDuty equips teams with operational health insights and event intelligence, allowing organizations to preemptively tackle customer-impacting issues and deliver higher-quality software more efficiently. Existing VSTS users can easily transition to Azure DevOps and integrate with PagerDuty through its marketplace listings, ensuring seamless adoption and continued improvement in their DevOps processes.

Training is essential for excellence in both sports and digital operations management, as demonstrated by top athletes like LeBron James and Tom Brady, who maintain their elite status through continuous practice. This principle applies equally to digital operations, where consistent training equips practitioners to handle incidents effectively. Effective training is not just about repetition but also ensuring correct actions, similar to how a golfer practices form for optimal performance. In digital operations, this involves understanding roles, responsibilities, and communication during incidents. The importance of a team-based approach to training is highlighted, as relying on a few individuals is insufficient for achieving complex goals. Organizations often overlook training due to its complexity, but PagerDuty addresses this with its PagerDuty University, offering technical and best-practice training to enhance digital operations skills. As part of the PagerDuty Summit, a day of training and coaching in San Francisco aims to provide valuable insights and hands-on experience for attendees.

Harness provides Continuous Delivery as-a-Service, leveraging AI and machine learning to automate deployment and health checks, thereby addressing the complexities often overlooked in manual deployment processes. By using unsupervised machine learning algorithms, such as Hidden Markov Models and KMeans Clustering, Harness can instantly detect anomalies and regressions in application performance and quality from APM and log data, a task that would typically take human engineers hours to accomplish. This automation not only facilitates rapid deployment but also ensures a safety net for rollbacks if new issues are identified. The integration with tools like PagerDuty allows for pre-deployment incident checks, preventing deployments in unstable environments. Steve Burton, a DevOps Evangelist at Harness, emphasizes the platform's ability to enable organizations to deploy quickly without compromising system integrity, drawing on his extensive experience in the field.

After returning from a tour across the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, the author shares insights about the significant progress made by the PagerDuty Asia Pacific team in enhancing digital service reliability since opening their regional headquarters in 2017. The tour, which included participating in the PagerDuty Connect event in Sydney, highlighted the region's thriving entrepreneurial spirit among DevOps and ITOps leaders and the strong demand for technological innovations such as AI, IoT, and cloud services. The region is predicted to see substantial growth in AI-based IT operations, with digital products contributing significantly to the GDP by 2021. The author emphasizes the vibrant community of DevOps practitioners eager to share knowledge and accelerate digital transformation, supported by initiatives like the PagerDuty Online Community and Global Reseller Program. Additionally, the expansion of collaborations, notably with Amazon Web Services (AWS), aims to streamline access to PagerDuty's platform, further enhancing their presence in the APJ market. The narrative concludes with a reflection on the burgeoning development in Sydney and anticipation for the upcoming PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco.