In this new world of digital everything, new application versions usually mean that you’re going to get bigger and better features, more capabilities, and an uplifted user experience, right? When I talk to customers, many can’t wait to upgrade the PagerDuty integrations that they depend on to test new features. If you’re a PagerDuty for Slack user, the next-generation version of our Slack integration will certainly be an exciting development.

Many sectors suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the travel and hospitality industry was struck particularly hard as the world went into lockdown and governments urged us to stay home. According to the International Air Transport Association, global air passenger demand in 2020 was down a record 65.9% from the previous year, and the tourism industry saw an estimated loss of 100.8 million jobs worldwide.

If you thought that the product announcements from PagerDuty’s largest event of the year, PagerDuty Summit 2021, was all we had in store for you, think again! We’re excited to announce that the July Release comes with a new set of updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty platform! You can learn about our latest capabilities via the Q1 PagerDuty Pulse or read below for the highlights.

CloudOps is on the up. This is in part due to the rapid acceleration of the shift to cloud that was caused by the pandemic. The shift allowed companies to innovate faster, enjoy greater flexibility and scalability, and become more cost efficient. Many organizations who rapidly adopted cloud or increased their usage now realize that they need to better manage their cloud investments in order to fully embrace these benefits.

Technical teams are under more pressure than ever to move faster, protect revenue and availability, and push mean time to resolve (MTTR) ever lower. However, teams frequently find themselves encumbered by complex, repetitive, and manual tasks, rather than innovating. When urgent incidents arise, organizations often have to wait for specific developers or subject matter experts (SMEs) to deploy a fix.

Software is eating the world. Digital Transformation is top of mind for companies looking to meet ever-growing consumer demands and digitize manual processes. This isn’t unique to the technology industry. Ecommerce, finance, healthcare, and other industries are all moving in this direction.

Security teams have the tough job of monitoring and securing every single workload in each cloud and for workloads in the development pipeline. Inevitably, these processes wind up being a bottleneck from the developer’s perspective, and developers get frustrated. Understandably, developers feel like security is simply making their jobs harder. But, on the other hand, security teams feel like they’re powerless to provide full coverage.

Major-incident war rooms are synonymous with stress. Pressure from executives, digging for a needle in a haystack, too much noise—it’s all weight on your hardworking technical teams. Incident responders clearly need a more effective way to collaborate across various technical teams. A method that both minimizes interruptions and keeps stakeholders up to date while ensuring everyone has the right level of context to do their job.

An observability solution should help any incident responder understand what changed and why. A lot has been written on the difference between monitoring and observability, but an easy way to understand how both are integral to incident response is to consider how customers use PagerDuty—with both monitoring and observability tools—to get to the right answer.

We are delighted to welcome you to another PagerDuty Summit and excited to announce a plethora of product developments designed to help you accelerate your digital transformation. And what an accelerator the COVID-19 pandemic has been for innovation. It really brought into focus the seemingly distant goal of becoming digital-first. Organizations who were truly prepared and benefited from the radical shift in how they did business thrived and rose to the top.