September 2021 Summaries

PagerDuty University has launched a special Get Certified Event in partnership with Credly, offering free certifications and digital badges until October 20th to celebrate its new digital credential program. Participants can attend training sessions, such as PD101, PD201, and the Incident Responder Masterclass, to prepare for exams and boost their technical and theoretical knowledge. Successful completion of exams earns digital badges that can be displayed on platforms like LinkedIn, enhancing professional visibility. The event also supports the Go Give One global vaccine initiative, with PagerDuty donating $10 for every certification earned during this period. The certifications include incident response and foundational practitioner programs, emphasizing skills in managing technical incidents and using the PagerDuty platform. Credly's digital badges provide verifiable credentials that are valued by employers, allowing professionals to share their achievements widely.

Digital operations management involves leveraging data to respond promptly to critical situations and requires meticulous processes to support teams under pressure. The transition to mature digital operations is gradual and demands dedication, but it offers significant advantages, such as improved service reliability and customer satisfaction. Implementing service ownership is a key strategy in this evolution, where teams assume responsibility for the software they develop throughout its lifecycle, enhancing accountability and service quality. This approach brings developers closer to customers and business objectives, enabling quicker incident response and resolution. Successful adoption of service ownership necessitates organizational-wide cultural change, and it involves steps like defining service ownership, setting up on-call rotations, and maintaining documentation and runbooks. The evaluation of service performance through metrics like Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and open dialogue within teams is essential to understanding success and fostering a supportive environment. Embracing service ownership as part of broader digital operations maturity efforts can lead to more innovative and competitive business practices.

PagerDuty has introduced a series of updates to its platform, focusing on enhancing automation, collaboration, and customer service operations. The updates include a new Runbook Automation GUI, expanded cloud infrastructure plugins for better cloud automation, and a UI-based ruleset designer for visualizing job pathways. Improvements in accessibility are also highlighted with a new color palette for Rundeck. The platform now supports real-time operations and incident management through integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce Service Cloud, allowing for streamlined collaboration between customer service and engineering teams. Additionally, PagerDuty is promoting service ownership and reducing downtime through automated incident response. The company is also hosting webinars and events to engage with its community and demonstrate these new features, while announcing upcoming product deprecations and inviting users to explore new integration guides and demos.

As companies increasingly rely on digital services, managing real-time, unplanned work becomes crucial to maintaining business success and reputation. PagerDuty's research underscores the importance of achieving a mature digital operations approach to enhance organizational performance, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. The PagerDuty Digital Operations Maturity Model, developed from over a decade of industry experience, provides IT organizations with a framework to assess and improve their operational maturity. This model categorizes organizations into different maturity levels, from manual processes to highly automated systems with predictive capabilities. As organizations progress through these levels, they embrace automation, increase knowledge sharing, and adopt continuous learning and improvement practices, ultimately leading to better incident management and streamlined operations.

PagerDuty is emphasizing the importance of preparedness for black swan weather events, such as wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes, by training its global workforce during National Preparedness Month. The company is teaching employees, known as "Dutonians," about safety and emergency response through educational sessions and exercises, culminating in participation in the Great ShakeOut earthquake drill. PagerDuty leverages its platform, with over 500 integrations, to coordinate teams during crises, ensuring employee safety and operational continuity. The platform enables real-time communication and triage through tools like Slack, Zoom, and email, while crisis teams focus on disaster recognition, personal safety, and situational awareness. By practicing digital operations principles and running tabletop exercises, PagerDuty aims to ensure its workforce is informed and ready to respond to emergencies, highlighting the importance of preparation in mitigating the impacts of inevitable disasters.

Retailers face significant challenges in maintaining uptime, as any downtime can result in considerable financial losses. At a 2021 summit, representatives from Hudson’s Bay Company, Bunnings, and Loblaw highlighted how PagerDuty assists in improving digital operations by enhancing incident response and management. Hudson’s Bay Company tackled alert fatigue by prioritizing alerts, implementing warnings, grouping alerts, and standardizing language, which reduced alerts by 61% and improved acknowledgment times by 38%. Bunnings integrated PagerDuty to streamline its incident management amid complex technological ecosystems, reducing alert noise and improving response times, especially during high-demand periods like marketing campaigns. Loblaw transitioned to a full-service ownership model with PagerDuty's help, allowing teams to manage incidents independently, which proved crucial during the pandemic when online traffic surged. Collectively, these companies demonstrate how leveraging PagerDuty can optimize operational efficiency, improve team satisfaction, and ensure robust, scalable digital infrastructure to meet the challenges of modern retail environments.

PagerDuty, a platform with over 600 integrations, enhances incident response capabilities by partnering with Teleport, which provides secure, temporary access to applications and infrastructure without disrupting compliance or security protocols. This integration allows team members to request and receive access to necessary systems during live incidents, streamlining the process by eliminating the need for helpdesk intervention. Teleport's integration ensures that access is granted only when required, with credentials limited in scope and duration, thereby maintaining security. It also offers comprehensive logging and video recordings of activities, beneficial for postmortem analysis and compliance audits. PagerDuty highlights these capabilities in their Twitch streams and YouTube recordings, demonstrating the potential of integrations to improve incident management, and invites users to explore these features at industry events and on their platform.

In an increasingly digital world, the newly introduced PagerDuty App for Salesforce Service Cloud is designed to empower customer service teams by providing real-time updates and quick resolution of critical customer-impacting issues. By integrating PagerDuty's real-time operations solution with Salesforce Service Cloud and Slack, the app offers a seamless, native experience for customer service agents, enabling them to collaborate effectively with technical teams and respond to incidents proactively. This integration features an incident command console for instant updates and a status dashboard within Service Cloud, facilitating end-to-end case resolution and direct lines of escalation to the appropriate technical teams. By breaking down silos between customer service and development teams and centralizing essential data, the app reduces context switching and enhances customer satisfaction by allowing agents to manage the entire customer response lifecycle efficiently. Now available on the Salesforce AppExchange, the application aims to improve customer service operations by providing a proactive approach to incident management and resolution.

The State of Digital Operations Report by PagerDuty highlights the significant changes in incident response experienced by technical teams from 2019 to 2020, driven by a 19% increase in critical incidents. Despite the rise in incidents, teams successfully reduced the mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), indicating enhanced accountability and efficiency through prolonged use of PagerDuty. The report emphasizes the importance of optimizing the incident response lifecycle, which includes stages such as detection, preventing customer impact, diagnosing issues, resolving them, and learning from each incident. By posing critical questions at each stage, teams can refine their operations to respond more effectively and mitigate cognitive toil. Furthermore, the report discusses the necessity of efficient collaboration and communication, both within teams and with external stakeholders, to minimize business impact. It also stresses the value of post-incident learning and continuous improvement to handle the increasing volume of incidents, especially amidst challenges like the Great Resignation, urging teams to work smarter instead of harder.