In order to keep digital services running around the clock, teams need to be able to solve problems faster—or, ideally, in real time. Many vendors claim to provide value and help organizations bolster their digital operations management.

Digital transformation may be the largest shift the IT industry will experience in a lifetime. It’s a term used throughout the tech industry and in various contexts. Gartner defines it as “…anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models,” which has massive implications for almost every organization.

Did you know ringtones in the PagerDuty mobile app are one of the most-requested features customers contact us about? And have you ever wondered what makes a good ringtone and how we come up with them? Imagine the following: You’re on an on-call rotation with no end in sight. There might be a trusted responder you can page in for help, but they’re already burnt out. The Incident Commander won’t be any assistance, because you are the Incident Commander.

When we announced the launch of our Retrospectives Guide, we wrote about the value of scaling the continuous improvement mindset to beyond Product Development at PagerDuty by establishing the RetroDuty community. In this installment of our blog post series on retrospectives, I highlight the differences between postmortems and retrospectives. You might have heard of postmortems and/or retrospectives before reading our guides.

Back in the good old days of monolithic applications, most developers and application owners relied on tribal knowledge for what performance to expect. Although applications could be incredibly complex, the understanding of their inner workings usually resided within a relative few in the organization. Application performance was managed informally and measured casually. However, this model falls apart in a microservices world.

It’s a new world order: Skynet has taken over. Just kidding. But it sometimes feels that way, doesn’t it? In the words of Marc Andreessen, software is eating the world, and technology problems are now business problems. This means developers are now the architects of the digital experience and, by extension, the customer experience—and when said developers are unable to innovate quickly, companies are more exposed to competitive threats.

If you’ve worked on a team that has adopted Agile techniques, you’ve probably heard of a retrospective. If not, here’s the TL;DR: A retrospective is a meeting in which a team connects regularly to reflect on what happens throughout a project and continuously improve how they work moving forward.

Many organizations today are dealing today a lot of complexity and disconnected tools. Teams and departments are running in parallel but siloed from each other. People are burned out from a lot of manual work, and everyone is crunched for time. This is not a happy ecosystem to live in. If this digital ecosystem doesn’t work together, your teams don’t know what’s going on and they lack the right information.

I’m going to assume most people who read this blog are familiar with PagerDuty. But just in case anyone isn’t, PagerDuty is a tool we use in IT to notify us if some predefined check has failed. Maybe a key process has died or maybe we’re not seeing our expected traffic volume or maybe our server has stopped responding to ping. Whatever it is, PagerDuty will relentlessly, remorselessly, and loudly notify whoever is on call that something needs attention.