Software is not perfect. And ultimately, it’s not a matter of if you will have an outage, but of when. With the increasing complexity and frequency of IT incidents, is your organization prepared to respond and recover when each second counts? Here at PagerDuty, we’ve compiled a list of best practices to keep your systems up and running.

When it comes to Incident Management, having the right tool can make all the difference between a swift resolution and prolonged downtime. While PagerDuty has long been a staple in the industry, many teams are finding more effective alternatives that better align with their needs and offer significant advantages. Here, we explore five compelling reasons to consider switching from PagerDuty to more efficient alternatives.

Incidents can happen anywhere at any time. They can be small, well-defined, and easily contained. They can be large, messy, and complex, like the major outage we saw recently. Or they can be somewhere in between. When incidents occur, mobilizing and coordinating responders is crucial to restoring service, protecting the customer experience, and mitigating business risks.

For better or worse, most companies—including their execs and developers—see SREs as superheroes who’ll save them from the evils of downtime and service degradation with their boundless superpowers. SREs are expected to constantly perform dangerous stunts like production debugging or communicating highly technical issues to angry VPs. They must also be able to manage infrastructure, networks, databases, pipelines, operating systems and much more.

Just ten days after the last major Microsoft 365 outage, Microsoft reported another incident at 8:48 am on July 30, 2024. The message on X was vague, offering limited details about the scope and impact of the problem. This left many IT teams preparing for what they anticipated would be another rocky day.

Most IT leaders realize that automating repetitive, low-level incident response actions is vital to multiple benefits. To name just a few, these include: In IT, incident response refers to addressing any event that disrupts normal service, application, security operation, or performance. Using AI and machine learning, automation addresses incident analysis, detection, investigation, triage, and response. The question is often identifying where to start or the best approach.

Back in the day, IT teams often spent countless business hours manually sifting through logs, diagnosing issues, and identifying the root cause of a system failure. This painstaking process frequently led to prolonged downtimes and frustrated users. Today, organizations can’t afford such inefficiencies. Keeping systems running smoothly is key, and that’s where critical metrics like Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) come into play.

As organizations increasingly rely on complex digital infrastructure, they must be ready to move rapidly when major incidents occur. The recent global outage has shown just how fragile IT systems can be. With mounting pressure to deliver seamless customer experiences, GenAI and automation present an opportunity to manage risk more effectively, by ensuring responders have the right information to restore services quickly.