October 2018 Summaries

PagerDuty is deeply committed to supporting nonprofit organizations through technology and proactive community engagement, particularly during National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The company's initiatives, led by the Employee Resource Group SisterDuty, include creating toiletry kits and raising funds for shelters like Casa de las Madres. Through its social impact arm, PagerDuty.org, the company pledges 1% of equity, product, and employee time to support global positive change, offering programs like Impact Pricing to provide nonprofits with free access to its platform. This commitment ensures that critical services, such as those provided by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Crisis Text Line, and Polaris, maintain 24/7 availability, safeguarding lives by streamlining incident response and coordination. By leveraging its technology, PagerDuty enhances the operational efficiency of these organizations, allowing them to focus on their mission of saving lives and addressing urgent social issues. CEO Jennifer Tejada emphasizes the importance of digital tools in supporting the essential functions of nonprofits, paralleling their significance to that in major enterprises, and reinforcing PagerDuty's dedication to improving lives through technology.

PagerDuty Summit 2018, held in San Francisco, offered an engaging and productive experience for attendees, including Zenoss, a key partner and sponsor. The event featured a range of activities such as training sessions at PagerDuty University, the launch of a new Integration Partner Program, and updates to the PagerDuty ZenPack, which improves IT alert management. Keynotes and breakout sessions highlighted the theme "From Ops to Opportunity," emphasizing solutions for tackling significant challenges. The summit also included enjoyable social elements like a performance by the B-52s and a community service project with the American Red Cross. The historic venue and the chance for face-to-face interactions with partners like PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada underscored the importance of collaboration beyond technical solutions. Overall, the summit was a successful platform for networking and exploring advancements in IT operations, leaving attendees looking forward to next year's event.

PagerDuty is eager to participate in AWS re:Invent, where it will engage with the global AWS community to showcase how its solutions can enhance digital operations, network security, and application performance. The company will emphasize its ability to enable digital operations excellence across AWS and hybrid cloud environments, assisting DevOps and ITOps teams in proactively managing incidents that affect customers and revenue. Key highlights include the introduction of PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics, which offer real-time actionable insights to improve customer experiences and business outcomes. Attendees can visit PagerDuty's booth for interactions and daily giveaways, and attend sessions and events such as a speaker session on team productivity with experts Dave Cliffe and Shannon Lietz, and a co-hosted Pub Crawl for networking opportunities.

Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco highlights the integration between PagerDuty and Oracle Cloud, enhancing real-time operations for Oracle's digital management. Initially utilizing webhooks and email integrations, Oracle has now advanced these capabilities with PagerDuty’s events API, aiding Oracle customers in application development, infrastructure monitoring, and improving customer experiences. The Oracle Developer Cloud Service integrates with PagerDuty to offer real-time incident responses, facilitating Agile development and DevOps automation. Oracle Management Cloud employs PagerDuty notifications for efficient incident management across infrastructure tiers. Additionally, Oracle Service Cloud leverages this integration to boost productivity and response times in service centers. The ongoing collaboration aims to further enrich these integrations, with demonstrations available at the Oracle OpenWorld event.

PagerDuty's annual Summit 2018 featured new product announcements and demonstrations of recent capabilities, highlighting significant enhancements across their platform over the past year. These included advancements in their Event Intelligence product, which uses machine learning to improve response times, and a new alert rules engine that automates alert routing and response actions. The company also expanded its integrations, now totaling over 300, with deeper connections to popular tools like Azure DevOps, Splunk, Jira, and ServiceNow, enhancing functionality and syncing capabilities. PagerDuty introduced new mobile app features to manage incidents remotely and new APIs to streamline communication and operations within chat tools. Additionally, a team hierarchy feature was launched to help growing companies maintain organizational structure. The conference concluded with gratitude for customer feedback, emphasizing ongoing innovation.

During a summer internship at PagerDuty, a software engineer gained valuable experiences that extended beyond technical skills. The role involved implementing customer-facing features and experimenting with machine learning, which enhanced the intern's proficiency in Ruby and problem-solving. Unexpectedly, the experience taught lessons about embracing mistakes and the importance of slowing down to find simpler solutions. Participation in events like PagerCon and Hack Day, as well as designing team T-shirts, exposed the intern to the significance of balancing creative and technical work, fostering personal connections, and developing a personal brand. Workshops by the Career Accelerator Program further emphasized self-reflection and career planning. The supportive culture at PagerDuty, emphasizing values like people first and trust, facilitated personal and professional growth, leaving the intern with insights on confidence, work-life balance, and the courage to make mistakes.

PagerDuty has been recognized as a leader in G2Crowd's Fall 2018 Grid Report for Incident Management, achieving top rankings in both Market Presence and Customer Satisfaction. G2Crowd is a platform that uses verified user reviews to guide B2B purchase decisions by offering transparency through genuine feedback from customers and end-users. The report evaluates incident management solutions based on their usage and success, with PagerDuty receiving high satisfaction ratings, as 92 percent of users awarded it 4 or 5 stars. Additionally, 86 percent of users believe the platform is progressing positively, and 87 percent would recommend it to others. The full report provides detailed insights, including competitive analyses on various aspects such as feature comparisons and deployment.

The author shares their journey from a career in social services to joining PagerDuty, highlighting the culture shock experienced during the transition and the comfort found in the company's retrospective meetings. The blog delves into the psychological theories underpinning PagerDuty's reflective practices, such as psychoanalysis, vulnerability, restorative justice, and systems theory, explaining how these theories enhance team dynamics and individual growth. PagerDuty's commitment to Agile software development and the "you build it, you own it" philosophy is underscored, along with the company's focus on customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. The retrospective meetings at PagerDuty allow for open communication, support vulnerability, and use restorative justice principles to address team challenges, ultimately promoting a culture of inclusivity and accountability. The author draws parallels between these practices and social work ethics, emphasizing the potential for reflective practices to improve productivity and mental health by acknowledging the influence of systems on individual behaviors.

PagerDuty's Schedule Override feature provides a crucial support mechanism for on-call responders, allowing them to delegate their responsibilities temporarily during significant life events or unforeseen circumstances without disrupting the entire on-call rotation. This feature is particularly important within DevOps cultures, where engineers are expected to manage the full lifecycle of their code, including incident response. By facilitating the sharing of on-call duties, PagerDuty aims to mitigate burnout among employees, which can lead to decreased performance and costly turnover. The tool underscores the importance of human-centric considerations in tech environments, as illustrated by stories like Dan Wade's from Vacasa, where empathy and teamwork led to improved morale and productivity. As digital signals demand continuous attention, the Override feature exemplifies how modern tech workers can maintain operational efficiency while supporting the well-being of their colleagues.

During the 2018 PagerDuty Summit, co-founder and CTO Alex Solomon announced the winners of the annual PagerDuty Summit Awards, which celebrate outstanding customers and partners for their innovative use of the PagerDuty platform across various categories. The Community Champion Award was given to Simon Fiddaman from eBay's eCG NOC for his active involvement in the PagerDuty Community. Xero, a New Zealand-based company, received the International Customer of the Year Award for enhancing its incident response with PagerDuty. SightLife, a nonprofit working to eliminate corneal blindness, won the Impact Award for using PagerDuty to improve corneal donation processes. ING Australia earned the Customer Experience Award for leveraging PagerDuty to enhance its customer service through automated monitoring and machine learning. SignalFx was honored as the Innovation Partner of the Year for its collaboration with PagerDuty to enhance customer value, while AWS received the Alliance Partner of the Year Award for its strong partnership with PagerDuty, highlighted by their integration with AWS CloudWatch and presence on the AWS Marketplace. These awards underscore the significant contributions and successful partnerships that drive PagerDuty's growth and success.

PagerDuty Engineering exemplifies a work culture that balances creating safe spaces with a focus on productivity, termed Getting Stuff Done (GSD). The organization fosters an environment where engineers feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves and addressing sensitive topics, supported by inclusive practices and strategic time management. A specific team within PagerDuty illustrates this balance through their journey of merging two distinct cultures, ultimately embracing values of vulnerability, inclusiveness, and GSD. They established safe spaces for open communication, ensured inclusivity across geographically dispersed team members, and adopted a light process approach to maintain efficiency. Their success is attributed to a combination of creating safe spaces for vulnerability, fostering inclusiveness by treating the workplace as a home, and achieving significant productivity by being open to process improvements. This unique blend, described as their "secret sauce," has led to improved team health and significant customer value delivery.

Lisa Yang is an Expert Services Consultant on PagerDuty's Digital Insights team, working remotely from Brooklyn, where she helps customers maximize their PagerDuty investment and improve responders' on-call health. With a background in Film and Gender Studies, Lisa initially pursued a career in film before discovering her passion for the technical aspects of the industry, which led her to transition into the tech field. Despite her non-traditional path, she successfully leveraged her skills in project management and resource coordination from film production to thrive in her role at PagerDuty. Lisa's journey reflects her adaptability and willingness to embrace new challenges, as seen in her career shift and her pursuit of Olympic weightlifting, where she has won competitions and applies the discipline it requires to her professional life. Her love for visual storytelling persists, as she remains an avid movie enthusiast, and she appreciates the supportive work environment at PagerDuty, which values community and continuous improvement.