July 2019 Summaries

PagerDuty Summit 2019 promises an array of engaging sessions across four main tracks: Innovation, Business Value, Best Practices, and Ecosystem, each offering unique insights into various aspects of the tech industry. The Innovation track will explore developing on PagerDuty’s platform and automating incident response, featuring speakers like Anu Jain from Salesforce and Amit Juyal from Sky Betting and Gaming. The Business Value track will delve into the impact of Hybrid Operations and strategies to improve customer service without causing on-call burnout, with insights from Cox Automotive and Flatiron Health. Best Practices will cover topics such as software observability and chaos engineering, with sessions led by experts like Christine Yen from Honeycomb.io and Ana Medina from Gremlin, including a hands-on workshop. Finally, the Ecosystem track will focus on the cultural and technical aspects of adopting DevSecOps, featuring discussions with PagerDuty and its partners. Attendees are encouraged to explore the full list of breakout sessions and register for the event to gain comprehensive knowledge and network with industry professionals.

PagerDuty's Solution for Business Response addresses the gap between technical and business responses during major incidents by providing tools that automatically share real-time, actionable status updates with relevant stakeholders without disrupting technical teams. When incidents occur, this solution enables both technical and non-technical stakeholders to take coordinated actions to mitigate negative business impacts, such as preparing media statements or assisting customers. The solution incorporates features like status dashboards that display the health of business services, allowing employees to quickly assess the situation and prepare a response. By offering customizable notifications through various channels, PagerDuty ensures stakeholders are informed promptly, thereby improving productivity and maintaining customer confidence in the brand. The solution is integrated with PagerDuty's Modern Incident Response product, requiring no additional costly add-ons, and enhances the ability to initiate swift business response activities alongside technical responses when customer-impacting incidents arise.

PagerDuty's transition from Scrum to Kanban across nearly all its delivery teams was driven by a culture that supports autonomy and flexibility, allowing teams to choose their own methodologies based on evolving needs. While Agile Coach Andrea Roberts initially coached Scrum teams, the noticeable success and satisfaction of teams using Kanban prompted a broader shift within the organization. The change was not immediate and required addressing misconceptions about Kanban, such as the idea that it eliminates estimation and commitments. The correct motivations for switching included Kanban's flexibility, which accommodates high-urgency tasks better than Scrum's structured approach. However, successful adoption of Kanban still demands discipline, communication, and estimation, similar to Scrum. The experience underscores the importance of aligning process choices with team dynamics and goals, rather than viewing one methodology as inherently superior.

Muriel Gordon, a Solutions Consultant at PagerDuty, exemplifies versatility and resilience through her eclectic skills and experiences. Her journey from working at Peet's Coffee to entering the tech industry during the challenging 2008 financial crisis highlights her determination to become indispensable by acquiring diverse skills such as learning multiple languages and playing six instruments, mostly self-taught. At PagerDuty, she transitioned from Customer Support to a Solutions Consultant role, allowing her to connect closely with clients, although the role's demands can be taxing. Muriel is also a proactive force for inclusivity, having co-founded RainbowDuty, an Employee Resource Group supporting the LGBTQ2+ community, and helped launch SisterDuty, which supports women in traditionally underrepresented fields. Her commitment to personal growth is evident in her dedication to fitness, having competed in a triathlon, and her philosophy of "kindness-forward" interactions, which she believes fosters reciprocal positive relationships.

DevOps principles, typically associated with software development, are applied by organizations like PagerDuty to foster diversity, inclusion, and belonging within the workplace. The principles emphasized include investing in automation and tooling to reduce repetitive work, setting measurable goals, and encouraging continuous learning and improvement through blameless postmortems. PagerDuty invests in diverse hiring practices by using tools like Textio to ensure unbiased job descriptions and partnering with organizations to source diverse candidates. They also foster inclusion through employee-run programs like Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which support underrepresented groups. The company sets clear diversity goals, measures progress, and adapts strategies based on feedback and experiences, such as refining company values through employee insights. The journey parallels the iterative nature of DevOps, emphasizing that change requires effort from both leadership and employees, and that learning from failures is crucial for continuous improvement.

At the AWS Summit in New York, AWS introduced Amazon EventBridge, a new service that enables the creation of event-driven workflows integrating native AWS services with third-party SaaS solutions like PagerDuty. This development enhances AWS CloudWatch Events by allowing AWS SaaS partners to inject events for customer processing, thereby simplifying configurations and integrations. As a launch partner, PagerDuty customers using AWS infrastructure can immediately benefit from EventBridge, allowing them to create event-driven workflows triggered by PagerDuty events without complex webhooks or manual configurations. EventBridge leverages AWS Lambda to automate responses to events, such as security remediation and compliance violations, by triggering functions that can take direct action, such as closing open ports or adjusting access permissions. This partnership enables a seamless integration of PagerDuty alerts with AWS, facilitating faster issue resolution and enhancing the customer experience, as evidenced by use cases like resource deployment and customer service automation.

PagerDuty University, launched at the PagerDuty Summit 2018, is a training program designed to help users maximize the capabilities of the PagerDuty platform through hands-on classroom training. Since its inception, it has educated hundreds of participants on optimizing their use to reduce downtime and enhance the quality of on-call life, while also sharing best practices globally. Returning to the Summit 2019, PDU offers new and updated courses including "Mitigating Business Disruption," which delves into PagerDuty's decade-old incident response process, and "Managing Incident Response Teams," focusing on managing team health and aligning responder needs with executive stakeholders. Another new course, "Mastering Digital Services," guides attendees through setting up services effectively within PagerDuty, emphasizing full-service ownership and mitigating alert fatigue. These courses are suitable for on-call responders, admins, and those involved in incident response processes, with some tailored to users managing services and integrations.