Incidents are costly. It’s not just revenue that takes a hit every time you have an outage–brand reputation and client satisfaction are also on the line. To protect current and future revenue, companies have to deliver on customer expectations. Innovation alone is no longer enough: digital experiences must also be fast, flawless, and highly available. This means teams have to get more proactive with real-time, unplanned work. Only then can they account for the 1 in 3 customers who would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience (PWC).
If that wasn’t hard enough, you now need to do all of this with less. 98% of CEOs are preparing for a recession in the next 12 to 18 months (The Conference Board). Teams have to get more efficient, because costs are high, resources are low, and skills are scarce. Teams can’t afford to work harder–they have to work smarter. Instead of five tools to manage event correlation, diagnostics capture, incident workflows, incident communications, and customer status pages, you need one solution for end-to-end incident response.
Today, PagerDuty is announcing new ways to drive efficiency across your digital operations. With expanded noise reduction, workflow automation, and stakeholder communication capabilities, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the only solution on the market that delivers end-to-end automated incident response from ingest to resolution. If you’ve only been using the platform for on-call and alerting, it’s time to consider how you could achieve your cost-optimization goals with PagerDuty.
Earlier this year, you heard about how the PagerDuty Operations Cloud is revolutionizing operations for a world of digital everything. Over 21,000 organizations rely on the PagerDuty platform to react, respond, and resolve issues quickly in real-time by:
– Using APIs and webhooks to understand what’s happening in your environment with over 700 integrations
– Applying machine learning to help reduce the noise to signal ratio and keep teams focused on what’s important
– Automating repetitive, manual processes to deflect manual work and avoid costly escalations
– Mobilizing business-wide response for faster resolution and better customer experiences
– Learning continuously to better anticipate and prevent repeat issues
In this blog, we’ll highlight four of the key innovations coming to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, before summarizing the full list of new capabilities.
Design and automate Incident Workflows to reduce manual toil and save time spent per incident
The more that automation can remove toil and take care of rote tasks in incident response, the faster teams can focus on problem identification and resolution. And the faster they can resolve an incident, the sooner they can get back to building new products and services.
Today we’re thrilled to announce that Incident Workflows is entering Early Access for PagerDuty Business and Digital Operations customers soon. Incident Workflows give teams more flexibility and control over what types of responses they want to configure for different types of incidents. This takes Response Plays to a whole different level by offering full end-to-end workflow automation, tightly integrated into ChatOps and the rest of the incident response platform. This is just the first step in our journey towards offering more extensibility for our customers to configure responses for their specific use cases.
Users can rapidly design incident process automation via an easy-to-use, no-code interface that configures workflows that can automatically trigger based on changes in urgency, priority, or severity. For example, you can customize a major incident workflow that automatically opens a conference bridge, adds responders, and starts an incident-specific Slack channel to keep everyone in sync.
You can also design a separate workflow for handling smaller bugs and routing them into a backlog for a team to look at later. This takes the cognitive load off the response team and makes incident response processes smoother and more consistent.
Join the early access program now.
Proactively manage customer relationships with real-time updates via PagerDuty Status Pages
The most important stakeholder in incident response is your customer. Mishandling external stakeholder communication around operational updates erodes trust and harms customer relationships. Without timely updates via a status page, support teams are flooded, which drives up costs.
Today, we’re happy to announce the Early Access of PagerDuty Status Page. One of our top-requested features, PagerDuty Status Page will keep your customers informed about critical operational updates happening in your system. It also saves time, reduces support volumes, and avoids context switching with a single source of truth without requiring additional third-party infrastructure. Providing this level of visibility helps to maintain trust and transparency with valued accounts and external stakeholders.
More focused engineering time and fewer incidents with more flexible Intelligent Alert Grouping
Teams can’t focus on triage if they’re bombarded by an alert storm. PagerDuty has seen event data grow at nearly 3x the rate of users, outpacing technical teams’ ability to manually process and correlate it all across silos.
We’re happy to announce a new enhancement to our AIOps-powered noise reduction suite: Flexible time windows for Intelligent Alert Grouping. A configurable time interval provides teams with more flexibility and granularity when tuning system noise on services in their specific environment. The feature is currently in Early Access for Event Intelligence and Digital Operations customers. Customers in the Early Access program saw up to a 45% increase in the average compression rate on their noisiest services in a matter of weeks.
The machine learning-driven engine will also surface recommendations for optimal time windows based on historical analysis of time between alerts. This helps teams not only maximize noise compression and minimize manual alerting grouping, but also reduce the guesswork needed by the operator and improve efficiencies.
Try Event Intelligence today: If you’re an existing PagerDuty Incident Response customer, you can start a 30-day free trial of Event Intelligence from the PagerDuty product under Account Settings. If you’re new to PagerDuty, simply start a free 14-day trial to get started today.
Higher uptime with fewer communication snafus with best practices for streamlined communication and stakeholder management
True to our DevOps roots, PagerDuty aims to pay it forward to our customers and the industry by sharing best practices. That’s why we’ve invested in Ops Guides for anything from Service Ownership to Business Response.
We’re thrilled to announce that we have updated the Incident Response Ops Guide with new learnings that we’ve codified from our own incident response experiences. We’ve now expanded the section about communications and how to streamline stakeholder management during incident response.
When the wrong people are tasked with an urgent, unplanned issue, escalations will drive up the resolution time and cost. When critical stakeholders and customer service are not informed, customer experience is put at risk. New updates across the Incident Response and key partner integrations help to streamline incident response to make sure all teams have the information when and where they need it to drive to next best action.
- Custom Fields on Incidents: Populate custom fields on incidents to provide responders with more contextual data for faster triage and resolution. This feature is planned for Early Access in early 2023. Sign up for early access now.
- Microsoft Teams: Coming soon for general availability, the integration will feature additional incident management actions, including: changing priority, reassigning, adding responders, escalating, and performing PagerDuty Automation Actions. Learn more.
- Updates to Status Update Notification Templates: Teams can now use flexible templates to format the content and context they need for better standardized internal communications during incident response. The Rich Text Editing functionality is generally available (Learn more), while the templates functionality recently entered Early Access. Sign up for early access now.
- PagerDuty for ServiceNow CSM: Agents using PagerDuty Customer Service Operations now have a direct line of escalation and communication with engineering on incidents in PagerDuty from the application where they work. General availability is coming soon. Learn more.
- Mobile Updates: A new home screen experience in Early Access that streamlines the navigation to help responders access their most important incidents. Also, mobile service maintenance windows are now generally available. Temporarily disables a service, including its integrations, for a set period of time while it is in maintenance mode, right from the mobile app. Learn more.
But wait, there’s more:
More Automation: Automation has the added benefit of distributing expertise and scaling processes to avoid overloading contributors with unplanned work and constant disruptions. Codifying and distributing subject matter expertise in the form of runbooks reduces the number of escalations required, minimizing the total number of people needed to triage, diagnose, and resolve incidents. That’s why we’ve been introducing more integrations both across our automation products and other products in the portfolio. Learn more about PagerDuty’s Process Automation portfolio here.
- Automation Actions to Runbook Automation Integration: Now generally available, Customers can now seamlessly connect to their production environments and implement diagnostic and remediation jobs in the cloud. Learn more.
- Automation Actions in CSOps for Zendesk: Now generally available, agents are now empowered to validate customer-impacting issues and by running automated actions directly from the PagerDuty app in Zendesk. This will reduce resolution time, as well as the number of incidents escalated to the back-end teams.
More Enhancements to Access Controls and Analytics:
- More than 700 integration partners: With 80+ new integration partners introduced this year, PagerDuty snaps seamlessly into any stack. Learn more about our integration partners.
- Webhooks v3: Managing webhook integrations is easier than ever. Generally available Webhooks v.3-based integrations will be visible and editable under the Service Directory UI under the Integrations tab.
- API Scopes: Securing access to PagerDuty resources is becoming more granular, so you can grant the right level of access for every use case. Planned for Early Access, Scoped API access provides more flexibility with application credentials that control access and available actions on PagerDuty resources, such as account level access credentials with differentiated read-only versus read and write permissions on PagerDuty Incidents.
- Updates to Login experience: Planned for Early Access, this feature provides a single, streamlined login experience for PagerDuty no matter where you’re using it: web, mobile, Slack integration. Keep an eye out for this new experience on mobile and web later this year.
- Updates to Service Performance Report & Incident Activity Report: Surface actionable insights and opportunities for continuous improvement with new reports featuring new visualizations, more interactivity, intuitive drill-down capabilities, and additional filtering options. These reports are currently in Early Access for Digital Operations and Analytics customers. If you are a Professional or Business Incident Response customer, reach out to your account team to try this out for your team.
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