April 2019 Summaries

PagerDuty's journey over the past decade has been marked by significant achievements, including its recent milestone of going public on the New York Stock Exchange. The company attributes its success to a strong emphasis on its people, highlighting a company culture that prioritizes respect, shared values, and a commitment to innovation. Named one of the Best Places to Work in the San Francisco Bay Area, PagerDuty fosters an environment where employees, known as "Dutonians," are encouraged to champion customer needs, lead with innovation, and collaborate effectively. As PagerDuty expands with new offices and remote opportunities, the focus remains on recruiting individuals who embody the company's core values and contribute to its mission of building transformative products for developers and IT professionals. Looking to the future, PagerDuty is committed to investing in its team as it continues its rapid growth and innovative endeavors.

The 2019 Slack Frontiers event in San Francisco showcased the deep integration between Slack and PagerDuty, designed to enhance real-time operations for modern ITOps and DevOps teams. The integration allows users to manage incidents, reassign tasks, and access additional incident context directly within Slack, effectively transforming it into a third user interface for PagerDuty alongside its desktop and mobile platforms. This seamless connection between the two platforms aims to streamline digital operations by reducing the need for platform toggling and improving incident response efficiency. Notably, users can create dedicated Slack channels for incident management from within PagerDuty, facilitating real-time communication and response coordination. Tom Clark from ITV highlighted how this integration centralizes alert management, enabling clear visibility and streamlined recovery processes. The event also featured a session where experts, including PagerDuty's VP of Product, discussed successful incident management strategies and how the collaboration between Slack and PagerDuty supports these efforts.

Bjoern Zinssmeister, founder and CEO of Templarbit, discusses the evolution and future of DevSecOps, emphasizing the integration of security into the early stages of application development. Reflecting on his early experiences with web applications and the challenges of security, Zinssmeister highlights how DevSecOps fosters collaboration between development and security teams, creating a shared language for evaluating risk and encouraging a culture where security is a collective responsibility. This approach enhances speed, agility, and customer satisfaction while promoting automation in security processes, such as automated static application security testing and real-time alerts for vulnerabilities. Zinssmeister underscores the importance of using new technologies to bridge people and processes, paving the way for more proactive security measures. He envisions a future where deeper integrations between security tools and real-time notification systems like Slack and PagerDuty will provide better insights and faster response times, ultimately focusing on improving the customer experience and anticipating data breaches.

PagerDuty recently participated in and sponsored the Accelerate Good Global (AGG) summit, organized by Fast Forward, which brought together tech nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists to discuss creating social impact through technology. Key themes from the event included the power of community in driving technological solutions for societal good, the role of emotions in fostering social change, and the mutual benefits of volunteerism as a means of building empathy. The summit also emphasized the importance of being "impact-curious," where nonprofit entrepreneurs focus on solving core problems rather than finding markets for products, and highlighted various tech-driven initiatives addressing humanitarian needs, such as Tarjimly’s translation platform for refugees and Upsolve’s financial services for families. Social media's potential to amplify social impact initiatives was another focus, with leaders like Aria Finger of DoSomething.org explaining how digital platforms can drive offline action. Furthermore, success for nonprofits was discussed in terms of impact rather than profit, with metrics centered around human wellness and quality of life improvements. These interconnected themes underscore the commitment of organizations like PagerDuty to support nonprofits through initiatives such as the 1% Pledge, aimed at expanding social reach and impact.

PagerDuty is set to showcase its integration with ServiceNow at the Knowledge19 event in Las Vegas from May 7-9, where it will highlight its real-time digital operations management capabilities at Booth #737. The integration between PagerDuty and ServiceNow aims to enhance service delivery by combining ServiceNow's workflow and ticketing features with PagerDuty's digital operations management, thereby helping organizations reduce business impact from issues, mitigate security risks, and improve overall operations. Attendees can engage in various activities, including visiting the ExpoNow Show Floor to learn about PagerDuty's platform, celebrating PagerDuty's 10-year anniversary with exclusive swag, and networking at the TopGolf event alongside AWS and Dynatrace. PagerDuty will also conduct a speaking session on May 9, where Julian Dunn, Senior Manager of Product Marketing, will discuss the concept of HybridOps and how the integration with ServiceNow can break down silos and enhance collaboration across IT and DevOps teams.

PagerDuty's integration with Google Firebase Crashlytics offers a robust solution for developers aiming to maintain application stability by automating responses to crashes and enhancing team coordination. Firebase allows for rapid app development by managing analytics, databases, messaging, and crash reporting, while PagerDuty complements this by ensuring real-time alerts and responses to critical issues. This integration facilitates the swift resolution of high-impact crashes through features like response automation, stakeholder communication, priority-based triage, ITSM integration, and postmortem analysis. By alerting teams to new, regressed, or rapidly increasing crash issues, it empowers them to improve customer experiences and focus more on innovation rather than troubleshooting. This partnership between PagerDuty and Firebase is designed to minimize downtime and optimize the app development process, allowing teams to address stability issues promptly and efficiently.

PagerDuty is committed to fostering positive social impact through its initiatives that support nonprofits and social enterprises in enhancing their operational capabilities and expanding their community outreach. With a focus on real-time information delivery during critical situations, PagerDuty.org aids organizations in sectors such as disaster response and healthcare. Following its public listing, PagerDuty established a donor-advised fund with the Tides Foundation to bolster strategic grant-making. The company's 1% Pledge commits equity, product, and employee time to drive social change, offering free licenses to nonprofits and encouraging employee volunteering. Through partnerships with organizations like Code2040 and Girls In Tech, it promotes diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. Additionally, PagerDuty shares its expertise in incident response and leadership with nonprofits to amplify their impact, demonstrating its belief in the power of business to effectuate broad social change.

PagerDuty celebrated a significant milestone by ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, marking its transition to a public company. This achievement underscores the company’s evolution from an on-call automation tool for developers to a comprehensive real-time operations platform that serves DevOps, IT, Support, and Security teams. Founded by three software developers familiar with managing "always on" cloud services, PagerDuty has grown by leveraging DevOps principles, machine learning, automation, and orchestration to help businesses manage real-time operations effectively. With customers like GE, Vodafone, Pinterest, and Slack, PagerDuty is committed to enhancing digital experiences and ensuring operational reliability. The company emphasizes its dedication to its users, employees, and the broader community, maintaining a focus on innovation, inclusivity, and social impact through initiatives like the 1% Pledge. With its public offering, PagerDuty aims to broaden its reach, accelerate innovation, and continue supporting mission-driven organizations globally.

PagerDuty Summit 2019, held from September 23-25 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, promises an expanded experience for over 1,000 IT practitioners, developers, influencers, and thought leaders focused on real-time operations. The event features a keynote by PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, exploring the impact of digital operations on team dynamics during critical moments. Attendees can expect a variety of talk tracks and training sessions covering DevOps best practices, digital transformation, and the integration ecosystem of PagerDuty, with insights into how customers utilize the platform to drive action and solve challenges. PagerDuty University returns with hands-on training for both current and prospective users, offering role-based best practices for digital operations management. The summit will also provide a preview of PagerDuty's latest innovations and future developments aimed at enhancing real-time operations.

In response to the growing complexity of digital operations, PagerDuty announced its Spring 2019 release, featuring enhanced products designed to streamline digital service management for enterprises. These updates aim to help teams manage operational complexity, accelerate incident response, and improve communication across organizations by leveraging data, intelligence, and automation. Key enhancements include improved machine learning-driven PagerDuty Event Intelligence for better noise reduction and triage, PagerDuty Modern Incident Response for efficient stakeholder communication and incident resolution, and PagerDuty Visibility for shared context into digital disruptions. Additionally, PagerDuty Analytics now offers in-depth operational performance reviews, and new capabilities for automated communication and integration with various platforms enhance the user experience. These updates reflect PagerDuty's commitment to providing an enterprise-class experience that caters to both technical responders and business stakeholders, facilitating real-time work and ensuring digital service reliability.

PagerDuty Vacations is an innovative feature designed to improve the on-call experience by predicting when engineers need a vacation and suggesting the best times and destinations for their breaks. Utilizing machine learning, it analyzes data such as alert timestamps, incident resolution, and responder participation to calculate a HALP score, which indicates an individual's risk of burnout. This feature considers personal preferences and activities, leveraging geolocation and wearable fitness data to assess how on-call duties impact team members' lives. Despite the unpredictability of incidents, PagerDuty Vacations aims to minimize disruptions by recommending vacation times with the least likelihood of interruptions and proposing destinations in favorable time zones to enhance the vacation experience. During its beta phase, the feature offers basic time zone-based recommendations, with plans for more comprehensive integrations with travel platforms in the future.