PagerDuty is known as the platform for driving real-time work, and with the current global spread of COVID-19, many of our customers have been asking how we leverage PagerDuty internally to intelligently coordinate a response to emergency situations (such as this) as they arise. PagerDuty customers primarily leverage our platform for coordinating an incident response process when technical issues happen, such as a bad deployment, network degradation or failed hardware.

Incidents come up quickly and tracking critical tasks to be done in the moment and after an incident is resolved it can be challenging to keep up with what was done by who during an incident and what tasks still need to be completed. In an effort to continue simplifying your incident response process today we are happy to announce an overhaul of ticketing and task tracking on FireHydrant along with a major overhaul of our JIRA integration.

In response to recent events, many organizations are implementing social distancing programs such as remote work. Successfully transitioning to remote work does come with challenges, but the right practices and attitudes can make it much less painful (and safer for you than heading into the office). We like to think of incidents as “unplanned investments,” and a sudden switch to remote work could be considered an unplanned investment of its own.

Information technology (IT) never slows to a standstill. Technological change disrupts current processes or operations, requiring organizations to make alterations to IT spending. Deviating from legacy technology to 21st century advancements isn’t an option, it’s a requirement! Through automation and powerful integrations, organizations can breathe freely.

As we are all adjusting to this new reality of living and working in the time of COVID-19, the coronavirus, there is so much that we need to take into consideration. Clearly, the health and safety of our family and colleagues is priority number one – and the local authorities have provided guidance on how to maximize protection.

As reported cases of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continue to rise around the world, many companies are increasingly shifting to using remote work as a way of minimizing exposure for their workforce. But even if some of these companies have been remote-friendly in the past, many organizations are currently struggling to figure out how to shift their operations to becoming entirely remote.

With remote work becoming more common, and distributed teams the norm, incident response has become even trickier. Years ago, everyone would gather in a war room and sort through the issue together, boots on the ground. Now, things have shifted. Remote work is only projected to increase, and teams need to be able to adapt in order to resolve incidents quickly and efficiently, even if team members are a thousand miles away. But how can we make great incident response a reality?

“Servcies&Systems” category subscriptions provide a highly flexible way of routing alerts to specific user groups. This can for instance be used to route alerts based on responsibilities or skills. But other scenarios are possible too as the category subscription mechanism is extremely powerful. SIGNL4 currently provides two fundamental ways of routing alerts. The first layer is the routing of alerts based on the “on duty” status.

In this blog, Danny Mican, a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, outlines how to implement SLOs from scratch using the IIDARR process. He also states it is extremely crucial for your SLOs to be actionable and is always following a feedback approach as it will play an important role in the debate of Features Vs Technical Debt.

As COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) cases start to challenge norms around what makes a healthy and safe workplace, more and more companies are leaning in or fully jumping in to embracing remote work. At PagerDuty, over 20% of our workforce is remote—so we are well set up to distribute if the time comes. Beyond the logistical aspects, we also have a strong culture of inclusivity when it comes to remote colleagues.