In a world of everything digital, teams are faced with increasing complexity. The ever-increasing dependencies between systems and processes jeopardize customer and employee experience, not to mention revenue.
To be ready for anything in the face of this increasing digital complexity and dependency, operations must be transformed from manual, rigid, and ticket queue-based to a continuously improving system that enables focus on customer experience, delivers operational speed AND resiliency, and is heavily automated and augmented by machine learning and AI. Only then can teams move to a more proactive stance to reduce the burden of manual toil, avoid burnout, and maintain focus.
PagerDuty’s mission is to revolutionize operations so that teams spend less time on reactive work and more time delivering innovation while meeting their desired resilience goals.
At Summit 2022, we announced several updates to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud that move teams toward this vision.
Automate everywhere
PagerDuty announced new automation capabilities for creating custom incident response workflows, where responders focus on issues that matter and more ways to accelerate MTTR through automated diagnostics and solutions.
Incident workflows: First, we are pleased to report that PagerDuty integrates the powerful Catalytic workflow engine to support customizable incident workflows. Incident Workflows define the workflow logic to configure common incident actions, such as adding a responder, subscribing to stakeholders, or starting a conference bridge to an orchestrated response.
Auto-Pause Incident Notifications: Responders can also use automation to avoid unnecessary disruption. PagerDuty Event Intelligence allows rescuers to suppress transient noise with Auto-Pause Incident Notifications. This feature applies machine learning to automatically detect and pause temporary alerts that have resolved themselves automatically in the past. Auto-Pause Incident Notifications broke over 350,000 fluttering alerts in the first three months of release. For customers experiencing these signs, it can make a big difference in helping teams stay more productive or, better yet, stay asleep when they don’t need to be woken up by something that heals itself.
Automation Actions… Everywhere: We’ve heard from our customers that they want to empower their first responders to diagnose and resolve common problems through automation. Last year we introduced PagerDuty automation actions to call automation directly from PagerDuty securely. We are making automation actions available through the PagerDuty mobile app and within Slack. Responders can now resolve issues faster wherever they respond. But why wait for a counselor to perform a general diagnosis? Event orchestration users can now proactively trigger the same automated diagnostics even before your first responders recognize an incident, giving them the information they need to act faster.
Finally, we extended this capability to automate your customer service teams. Your customer service reps can now use automated validation tests from PagerDuty Customer Service Ops to determine if a customer’s issue is related to a system issue and proactively receive information about known problems that could potentially impact their customer’s experience.
PagerDuty Runbook Automation: PagerDuty makes it easier for our customers to orchestrate automated diagnostics, recovery, and day-to-day operations through our recently launched SaaS offering PagerDuty Runbook Automation.
Connect everyone and everything.
The number of different systems in the modern digital landscape has exploded. Keeping systems and teams in sync is critical to having a complete picture of what’s happening and what needs attention. With APIs, webhooks, and more than 650 integrations, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud integrates with your tech stack, breaking silos so teams can collaborate better and provide a better customer experience.
Status update notification templates: PagerDuty has added new ways to keep internal stakeholders informed. Now you can standardize internal communications during incident response with HTML templates. For example, edit comments in a rich text editor and add images, screenshots, or charts.
PagerDuty for Salesforce Service Cloud Updates: Customer service reps are on the front line during an incident and shouldn’t be left in the dark. This is where PagerDuty Customer Service Operations comes in. With our deepening integration with Salesforce Service Cloud, PagerDuty for Customer Service Operations creates a real-time link between DevOps, ITOps, and Customer Service teams with Salesforce Incident Objects and cases. This makes a single source of truth that brings all groups together.
CollabOps Updates: CollabOps has become how many teams work and communicate in real-time. We’ve simplified our integration with Slack with a single connection manager page.
Deliver speed and flexibility.
Regarding incident response, it often feels like nothing can happen fast enough. Time is often wasted switching back and forth between systems to get information, manually reviewing notifications, and scouring interfaces to find what you need. Helping teams focus their work faster and arrive at a solution.
Custom Incident Fields: It starts with information popping up where you need it most. Today, PagerDuty announces Custom Fields for Incidents. Custom fields give rescuers access to critical contextual information from any surface, whether API, web, mobile app, or SMS. Responders can assess and resolve issues faster with more information in custom fields.
PagerDuty updates for mobile apps: We’ve also redesigned the home screen of the PagerDuty mobile app. With a single tap, rescuers can view details and take action. The carousel shows all options for rescuers to gain insight on the go. The concerns of key responders are now at the forefront, further accelerating incident resolution.
Terraform support for event orchestration: Event orchestration helps teams reduce manual event processing by using complex logic and rule nesting. Customers are replacing ten event rules with one orchestration – 90% more efficient! You can now configure orchestrations in Terraform to easily create, manage, and modify orchestrations at scale.
Improve continuously
An incident does not end with a solution. Teams can build resilience by investing in culture, implementing best practices, and learning from past incidents.
Service standards: As customers mature their digital operations, they often want to standardize what “good” looks like in teams. Service Standards allow sections to configure services according to best practices.
Next Generation Reports: Developing a more proactive operational stance starts with understanding how things work today. New, improved reports in PagerDuty help teams make better data-driven decisions. From there, teams can identify opportunities for fine-tuning and improvement.
First, the Service Performance Report has new interactive visualizations, intuitive service drill-down capabilities, a new Response Effort metric that measures engagement time to resolve an incident(s), and more filtering options to help prioritize your incidents.
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