Welcome to the first State of Digital Operations Report, an aggregated view of the volume of real-time work, its growth over time, and the increasing burden that it places on technical teams.
By sharing an aggregated view of what we’re seeing across the PagerDuty platform, we want to help digital and business leaders understand the effect of good operations practices on business impact, operational health, and human factors.
On this page you will find some of the key platform insights we’re highlighting in the report. We will continue to refresh the metrics on this page regularly and look forward to reporting on trends that we’re seeing.
Average Daily Metrics (as of October 2021)
44M
events
1.4M
alerts
667k
interruptions
70k
critical incidents
On average, users worked 2 extra hours a day in 2020, adding up to 12 extra weeks worked in a year!
Our data showed that working hours in 2020 were considerably less consistent than in 2019. Humans ultimately sit at the center of incident response, so staying cognizant of overwork that might be happening at organizations is critical for business and technical teams alike.
19% growth in critical incidents YoY from 2019-2020
Critical incidents are defined as those from high urgency services, not auto-resolved within 5 minutes, but were acknowledged within 4 hours, and resolved within 24 hours.
98% noise reduction overall using PagerDuty
Using a variety of noise reduction techniques —including machine learning— events get compressed down to about 1 million alerts, which translate into roughly the same number of actual incidents per day.
Interruptions in the U.S. in 2020 compared to 2019
9% more
off-hour interruptions
7% more
holiday/weekend hour interruptions
5% more
business hour interruptions
3% fewer
sleep hour interruptions
Not managing burnout can result in attrition
Our data science team looked at the relationship between users leaving the platform and how often they were involved in off-hour incident resolution. We found a statistically significant correlation: the more frequently users are involved in fixing problems off hours, the more likely they are to quit.
In the U.S., Overworked and Burned Out Responders Are Bearing the Burden of Non‑Working Hour Interruptions
Teams are getting better at incident response over time
Looking at accounts that have been using PagerDuty over five years, it’s clear that they are getting better at incident response as they continue using the platform with MTTA and MTTR both trending down over time.
