At PagerDuty, we continually innovate every month (check out our What’s New page for the latest updates). But while we ship product continuously, we also save a plethora of new and improved capabilities to share with our customers at PagerDuty Summit, our annual customer event.
When PagerDuty’s VP of Product Management Rachel Obstler announced the beta version of our new Slack integration in April in her “Anticipating, Monitoring, and Managing Incidents via Slack” panel at Slack Frontiers, we expected significant interest in the integration among our customers.
How is the incident response process set up at your organization? At PagerDuty, our approach is to holistically look at your infrastructure, your customer-facing applications, and your products. We distinguish these by describing these items as “services” that roll up to and make up a “business service.” This setup allows teams to better manage these services so that when incidents do happen, responders can gain context much faster. But how?
Today, technology problems can alter the trajectory of a business. Minutes of downtime or latency (slow is the new down) cost organizations dearly in lost revenue and can jeopardize customer relationships. However, there’s an even more important consequence of technology problems than top-line risk: reduced innovation as teams are forced into reactive fire drills that take time away from product development.
Going on call and being awakened at a moment’s notice to put out fires when reputation and revenue are on the line is incredibly stressful. And with DevOps teams under increasing pressure to simultaneously release new products faster while ensuring reliability and quality, burnout is a rapidly growing problem. It’s why #HugOps and empathy are becoming so central to the culture of DevOps.
Our founders created PagerDuty with the simple goal of making the lives of on-call developers better—and in doing that, we’ve championed a new way of working, inspired by the DevOps mindset. From that starting point, we’ve evolved our on-call product into a platform for real-time operations that enables our customers to grow from on-call rotations, to incident management and response, to full digital operations management.
PagerDuty is proud to announce our latest release, which provides a new set of product capabilities and enhancements that further enable you and your teams to securely work in real time—anytime and from anywhere. With this release, we continue to respond to our customers’ needs to build a better platform to help them best manage their digital operations. Enhancements include new innovations for our mobile app and increased platform security by adding email domain restrictions.
Technology and digitization are disrupting every industry—and healthcare is no exception. In this time-critical industry, patient care needs to be efficient and convenient. This is increasingly evidenced by the rise of individualized healthcare via direct-to-consumer (D2C) and convenience care models such as telemedicine to find doctors, pay bills, schedule appointments, order prescription refills, receive consultations, and more.
Continuous improvement is one of the fundamental tenets of Agile methodology that PagerDuty’s product development teams emphasize. This already works fairly well at the individual team level via retrospective meetings and postmortems but sometimes we don’t notice larger or systemic issues that are outside the control of a single team. This blog will share the process that we use at PagerDuty to uncover those issues, the outcomes we have seen, and how we have evolved that process.
Most technical incident response plans typically account for stakeholder communications—for both internal teams and external customers. But at PagerDuty, what we’ve learned from our customers is that there’s still a painful and expensive gap in alignment between IT and business teams. To close that gap, we need to focus on what incident response means for business teams.
