September 2019 Summaries

PagerDuty Summit introduced new features emphasizing its role as a platform for real-time work, focusing on integrating technology and people to enhance customer experiences. The company highlights the importance of seamless communication across all business sectors, especially in real-time incidents, by extending incident management beyond technical teams. PagerDuty has launched the PagerDuty Solution for Customer Service in partnership with Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, allowing broader accessibility and interaction through mobile and chat applications like Slack and ServiceNow. The company also unveiled a refreshed mobile app and announced the PagerDuty Developer Platform, inviting developers to create integrations that leverage real-time operations data. These developments aim to unify diverse teams on a single platform, emphasizing the human element in technological advancement to achieve meaningful outcomes.

At PagerDuty Summit 2019, the company introduced PagerDuty for Customer Service, a solution designed to enhance collaboration between customer service teams and engineering or IT departments, thereby improving customer experience and retention. The initiative includes new integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, allowing real-time information sharing and providing a comprehensive view of incidents across organizations. This integration enables customer service teams to quickly resolve issues by identifying whether they are isolated incidents or part of a broader problem, thus reducing customer call times and enhancing satisfaction. By uniting previously siloed teams, PagerDuty for Customer Service allows for improved incident management, faster ticket resolution through automation, and live call routing to on-call staff, ultimately helping organizations deliver timely and accurate solutions to customer problems.

PagerDuty's recent announcements at their annual customer event, PagerDuty Summit, unveiled two significant enhancements to their Event Intelligence and Analytics products: Intelligent Triage and Intelligent Dashboards. These innovations aim to provide greater operational visibility and intelligence by using machine learning to streamline incident response and decision-making. Intelligent Triage offers context for incidents, helping teams quickly identify and address issues by grouping related alerts and providing detailed insights into incidents, while Intelligent Dashboards deliver prescriptive insights and actionable recommendations based on operational data. These tools are designed to enhance the effectiveness of response teams by reducing cognitive overload and enabling real-time operations across organizations, aligning technical data with business outcomes to improve customer experience.

PagerDuty has announced the general availability of its Slack integration, following a successful beta phase where it became one of the most used integrations. This integration allows modern Ops and DevOps teams to manage incidents directly within Slack, eliminating the need to switch between different applications. Key features include the ability to create, escalate, and manage incidents, run response plays, and access on-call information all within the Slack interface. It also facilitates the creation of war rooms and other channels for collaborative incident management, enabling better communication across various ITOps teams. The integration enhances the workflow by allowing users to take action on notifications, trigger incidents directly from Slack, and align permissions easily between PagerDuty and Slack. This tool aims to improve agility and focus by providing rich incident context and connecting disparate teams within an organization under a common management framework.

PagerDuty's approach to incident response emphasizes a shift from a team-based setup to a service-based setup, which focuses on aligning incident management processes with the services that comprise a business. This strategy is designed to provide better visibility into service health and trends and to offer flexibility as teams and organizational structures change. By identifying top-level business services and the technical services supporting them, organizations can streamline communication, reduce downtime, and enhance the effectiveness of incident management. A services-first approach bridges technical and business services, providing context on the importance of each service and facilitating quicker, more coordinated responses to incidents. While initially more challenging to set up than a team-based approach, a service-oriented configuration ultimately supports scalability, clearer communication, and a better understanding of business impact, helping organizations prioritize responses and continuously improve their processes.

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, technology issues can significantly impact businesses by causing downtime, disrupting customer relationships, and stifling innovation due to reactive responses to incidents. A study commissioned by PagerDuty highlights the growing challenge of unplanned work, which diverts resources from planned tasks and hinders IT teams, who often lack adequate automation and find their response plans insufficient. The complexity of IT environments and the frequency of major incidents are increasing, exacerbating these issues and affecting organizational culture and processes. At the PagerDuty Summit, industry leaders will discuss strategies to improve cross-functional collaboration, automation, and incident response, with sessions focusing on innovation, HybridOps, real-time work management, and DevOps transformation. These discussions aim to equip organizations with practical approaches to address the challenges of unplanned work and enhance their digital transformation efforts.

PagerDuty Summit 2019 features a dedicated track for DevOps best practices, showcasing a diverse array of industry thought leaders discussing topics such as site reliability engineering (SRE), chaos engineering, burnout prevention, and machine learning (ML) in production. Notable speakers include Nathen Harvey and Stephanie Hippo from Google, who will delve into SRE principles and incident response strategies, while Ho Ming Li from Gremlin will offer insights into chaos engineering. Dawn Parzych from LaunchDarkly will address recognizing and recovering from burnout, and Sasha Rosenbaum from Microsoft will highlight the challenges of deploying ML models to production. Christine Yen, co-founder of Honeycomb.io, will explore the importance of observability in software development. The event also features keynote sessions from notable figures like NBA star Andre Iguodala, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, and PagerDuty's CEO Jennifer Tejada.

DevOps teams face growing stress and burnout due to the increasing pressure to rapidly release new products while maintaining reliability and quality, exacerbated by unplanned work such as application failures and outages. PagerDuty's commissioned research highlights the negative impact of unplanned work on hundreds of global technology teams, revealing that 71% of respondents report technology issues leading to customer dissatisfaction, and over 70% of tech staff experience stress, anxiety, and reduced work-life balance. Automation emerges as a crucial tool for alleviating stress and managing unplanned work, with teams employing it experiencing less stress and more focus on product development timelines. The upcoming PagerDuty Summit will offer insights from DevOps practitioners on managing unplanned work and mitigating burnout through improved automation and alerting practices, with sessions covering topics like Site Reliability Engineering practices and strategies for reducing on-call burdens to enhance customer experience without causing burnout.

PagerDuty, initially founded to improve the lives of on-call developers through a DevOps-inspired approach, has evolved its platform into a comprehensive solution for real-time operations, covering incident management and digital operations management. The company emphasizes its commitment to supporting customers during critical moments, ensuring seamless digital experiences and proactive incident prevention. As PagerDuty expands its reach to various teams like ITOps, SecOps, and Support teams, it introduces new branding elements, including updated patterns, colors, typography, and a streamlined logo, all reflecting the DevOps mindset. These elements aim to communicate the platform's capabilities and the human aspect of managing complex systems, while reinforcing PagerDuty's dedication to its users and their trust.

PagerDuty, a leader in the Digital Operations Management market, has announced the appointment of Julie Herendeen as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to strengthen its connection with customers and communicate the value of its offerings. Herendeen, who has been a member of PagerDuty’s advisory board for two years and played a crucial role in the company's transition to a public entity, brings extensive leadership and marketing experience from her tenure at companies like Uber, Dropbox, and Lookout. Herendeen is renowned for her ability to build integrated marketing teams on a global scale and her alignment with PagerDuty's core values. Her addition is seen as pivotal for PagerDuty as it continues to innovate and expand into new markets and use cases.

PagerDuty's Breakathon at Summit 2019 invites participants to engage in a problem-solving event resembling a hackathon, where teams work to identify and resolve escalating failure scenarios for prizes. Scheduled for September 23 from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, this free event offers an opportunity for professionals, especially those managing production web applications, to enhance their operational skills in a collaborative and fun environment. Participants are encouraged to RSVP, bring necessary equipment such as a laptop and power adapter, and be prepared to use a GitHub account. The event promises food, drinks, and enticing prizes such as a Nintendo Switch or an Apple iPad for the winning team.