Here at PagerDuty, we are dedicated to making sure that notifications reach their intended recipients and we’ve learned a lot about international SMS best practices along the way. In this blog, we delve into international SMS best practices and the critical factors that can make or break your SMS notifications game so that you know how to optimally configure your notifications to never miss a page from PagerDuty.

Navigating the Challenges of International SMS

Who better to share learnings than the woman behind the curtain, responsible for our notifications experience? We interviewed Abby Allen, Senior Product Manager of the Notifications Experience Team, to help shed light on the challenges of international A2P SMS and offer some insights for improving SMS deliverability. 

The Illusion of Reliability

Contrary to popular belief, Abby warns that “SMS is far less reliable than people think!” A2P SMS often faces disruptions due to network outages or planned maintenance, affecting message delivery. This unreliability is hidden behind the seamless communication we experience in person-to-person SMS, which is very opaque by design and helps prevent recipients from noticing issues with the underlying carrier networks. Imagine your business-critical alert going undelivered due to an SMS outage–the consequences could be detrimental. Therefore, PagerDuty “monitors our international deliverability and encourages everyone to have a backup channel to reach their users. If your system also offers SMS, make sure there’s a backup communication option for your users, too.”

Global Audience, Unique Needs

Expanding your SMS strategy beyond local borders is an opportunity to tap into a vast international market. Nonetheless, each region has its own regulations, carrier restrictions and user preferences.

Abby highlights some particularly challenging regulations. For instance, nearly every country requires opt-in to confirm a recipient actually wants SMS from you. An easy way to do that is to ask the recipient to “Reply Yes” or click a link to confirm. However…

• France, Vietnam, and many others require all A2P SMS to be sent from an alphanumeric sender ID. This kind of SMS sender ID is required in a growing number of countries but doesn’t allow replies at all. Your “Reply Yes” won’t work for millions of international users.
• Norway and other countries will actively block any URL from standard link shorteners like bit.ly. 
• China and Romania block all SMS with any URL. This makes a workflow with a link to click to confirm opt-in challenging.
• Singapore: to send SMS to Singapore, you must register your content templates with the Singapore government and pay substantial fees. Any content that doesn’t comply with your registered templates is subject to blocking and filtering. Even if you have a great workflow that doesn’t require replies or links, you still need to get it approved by a government entity. 

Neglecting the needs of your international audience can lead to missed opportunities and a less effective communication strategy.

Legal Compliance Matters

International SMS law is a complex web of regulations that can have financial repercussions for non-compliance. Sending unauthorized messages, violating content restrictions, or spamming recipients can result in penalties. Familiarize yourself with the regulations in your target regions to ensure your SMS campaigns are both effective and legally sound.

6 Best Practices for Optimizing Internal SMS and Notifications Settings

Understanding the challenges is only half the battle. Let’s explore actionable strategies to ensure your SMS notifications hit the mark–regardless of borders.

1. Default to Push, Keep SMS as Backup

Staying proactive is key. Regularly monitor the deliverability of your international SMS to identify potential issues. However, relying solely on SMS is risky. Consider SMS as a supplementary channel rather than your primary one. At the time of writing, push notifications are subject to far less international regulation and provide significantly more opportunities for engaging, interactive messaging. Abby recommends push notifications as one of the most reliable alternatives to ensure your message reaches its destination, along with email and phone calls.

If you’re a PagerDuty customer, why don’t you give the PagerDuty mobile app a go? This critical component of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud empowers our users with unmatched convenience, agility, and adaptability, ensuring a flawless orchestration of incident management and collaboration across borders. Better yet, push notifications within the app typically deliver 4 to 6 times faster than SMS.

2. Give Other Messaging Platforms a Go

Instead of sticking to traditional SMS, consider exploring other messaging platforms, like Slack, Microsoft Teams or WhatsApp. These platforms provide an international experience with fewer regulatory hurdles, making it easier to reach your global audience seamlessly.

PagerDuty is opening Early Access for Slack as an incident contact method to customers the week of September 20. If you’re interested in participating in the program, you can sign up here. Starting incident response in chat enables customers to immediately reap the benefits of improved MTTA and MTTR. The use of chat will directly tie collaboration to incident management, minimize context switching, and automate manual tasks thus enabling faster incident remediation.

3. Tailor Your SMS Content to Industry Regulations

Before hitting send, ensure your SMS content adheres to the regulations of the target region. Certain industries, such as banking, finance and adult content, face stringent content restrictions to protect citizens against spam. If you manage an application that supports any of these industries, involve your legal team to avoid violations that could lead to hefty fines and damage your brand’s reputation.

4. Plan for Change

SMS regulations are a moving target. What works today may not work tomorrow due to shifting requirements. Prepare for change by having backup communication channels in place and being adaptable to evolving regulations.

5. Optimize for User Experience

Put yourself in your users’ shoes. Craft SMS messages that are concise, relevant, and valuable. This user-centric approach enhances engagement and minimizes the chances of your messages being marked as spam.

6. Monitor Success at the Country Level

When conducting international SMS deliveries, it’s advisable not to depend solely on a single global SMS deliverability metric to validate the effectiveness of your campaigns. Instead, consider delving into insights at the country-specific level. This approach ensures that the achievements of larger and established markets with successful SMS campaigns don’t overshadow potential deliverability hurdles in your emerging ones.

As technology bridges global divides, international SMS remains a potent tool for businesses to connect with audiences worldwide. However, the path to SMS excellence is paved with challenges that demand proactive measures. By embracing best practices such as diverse messaging platforms, regulatory compliance and robust monitoring, you can unlock the true potential of international SMS and deliver unparalleled user experiences.

Ready to Dive Deeper?

Abby, along with PagerDuty colleagues Girish Shankarraman and Vivek Raj Saxena, joined Mandi Walls for a “How To Happy Hour” Twitch stream to share these learnings and more. Catch the recording to learn from their expertise and enhance your SMS strategies. Join in the discussion in the comments section.

If you’re interested in trying the PagerDuty mobile application, you can simply scan or click the QR Codes below and download it today.

iOS

Android

The post 6 Best Practices for Seamless Notifications with International SMS appeared first on PagerDuty.

Meeting users where they work is a key part of the PagerDuty experience. Whether it’s desktop, ChatOps, API, or mobile, we invest heavily in making it as easy as possible to access the information you need, when you need it. Even as we’ve evolved our product offerings over the years, the PagerDuty mobile application has been a critical component of the platform. Our goal is to provide our users with unparalleled convenience, responsiveness, and flexibility to ensure seamless incident management and collaboration across your organization. We’ve made significant investments in iOS and Android to help your teams resolve critical work from anywhere, anytime.

In this blog post, we’ll cover some of the key improvements we’ve made to the app in the past year to enhance your mobile experience. These include a new and modernized home page, incident workflows and custom fields for mobile, maintenance windows, and the latest OS requirements for Android and iOS.

Experience modernized navigation in your PagerDuty App

We’ve modernized the navigation experience for our mobile app to make user experiences faster and more efficient. Now you can navigate more easily between screens without having to return to the hidden hamburger menu. And, you can relaunch screens! This means you can move from one screen to another quickly and without any extra steps. Your user history will be preserved even while simultaneously navigating multiple screens. Make sure to read our Knowledge Base article about this update.

Trigger Incident Workflows – even on the go

Incident Workflows are now available on mobile! You can trigger a preconfigured Incident Workflow with just one click, directly from your incident detail screen. That means, if you always run through the same 5 actions every time you have a P1, such as creating an incident-specific Slack channel, starting up a conference bridge, or adding responders–all those steps can run automatically and immediately from a manual or conditional trigger.  Automating these manual steps gives valuable time back to the responder so they can jump right and start resolving the incident. Learn more about triggering Incident Workflows from your mobile device in the Knowledge Base or from our blog post.

Easily create, update, and delete Maintenance Windows

Maintenance Windows are now available in the PagerDuty mobile app, enabling responders to temporarily disable services and their integrations during maintenance. This reduces unnecessary interruptions when the team needs to focus. Read this blog on how to create and manage Maintenance Windows on mobile. Learn more about this feature by reading this Knowledge Base article.

Access Custom Fields on Incidents on your phone

We’ve introduced more flexibility by adding Custom Fields to incidents. Custom Fields allow teams to pull in important incident data from any system of record and provide responders with additional contextual information. This enables teams to triage and resolve incidents faster.

You can now configure, view and edit Custom Fields through both our web UI and APIs. And when you’re on the go, the PagerDuty mobile app allows you to view Custom Fields, so you can have more context around the incident. You can learn more about Custom Fields in our Knowledge Base. Also read about the top use cases for using this feature in our blog.

Important: Ensure your mobile experience is secure

Security is important. As such, we’ve been implementing updated minimum OS requirements to ensure that your mobile experience is up to date with security standards. As of April 10, 2023, the PagerDuty mobile app required Android 10.0 and iOS 15.0 or later versions. Hopefully you’ve upgraded by now, but if not, this is an important reminder to do so to guarantee seamless access to forthcoming mobile app updates.

Demo: Improving the PagerDuty mobile experience for you

To see all the features mentioned above in action, Senior Product Manager for Mobile, Vivek Saxena, demos all these features in this video.

There’s more to come on Mobile

At PagerDuty, we work hard to provide you with the best possible experience for your digital operations, no matter the device you use. This year we modernized and added new features to the PagerDuty mobile app to enable responders to adapt their work style according to their preferences without compromising efficiency. 

But that’s not all! We are already thinking about new fantastic features that will make your incident response process even better.

Stay tuned for our upcoming releases, including:

• Status Widget on the Home Screen: empowers users to quickly grasp the status of selected Business Services.
• Home Screen Customization: allows users to select and prioritize the widgets that are important to them.
• Analytics on Mobile: helps you understand how your organization is performing.
• Slack Information: provides the ability to join Slack channels associated with the incidents.

If you aren’t a PagerDuty customer yet, try it free for 14 days and explore how PagerDuty can enhance your incident management process.

For the mobile app, you can simply scan or click the QR Codes below and download it today.

iOS QR Code

Android QR Code

The post What’s New in PagerDuty iOS and Android Mobile Applications appeared first on PagerDuty.

Flexible work models have become a competitive advantage in a strained labor market. According to the latest Future of Work report from Accenture, 63% of high-growth companies have adopted a “productivity anywhere” workforce model. This flexibility, however, presents a new challenge: ensuring that workers have the tools and access they need to succeed. 

This is especially true for incident response, where every second matters. Minimizing downtime and keeping critical digital services available requires real-time notification and mobilization of the right responders, and subject matter experts to quickly resolve issues. 

Since we were founded in 2009, PagerDuty has understood and prioritized our customers’ need for a seamless mobile experience. Our app can send a push notification guiding responders to the latest incidents. They can immediately acknowledge the incident and work on the problem at hand or assign the incident to another responder available to help – all processed within the palm of their hands. That’s why our mobile app has consistently ranked almost five stars in iOS and Android app stores. 

We continue to invest in improvements to our mobile app capabilities and enhanced experiences, so our users can work and respond from anywhere. We are excited to announce that an updated PagerDuty Mobile Home Screen is now generally available. 

Better incident response with a revamped mobile home screen

The new PagerDuty Mobile Home Screen experience puts “My Open Incidents” front and center, so the top recent incidents and related details are easily seen. Responders who want a broader awareness of the digital operations can also easily access non-incident information like on-call shifts and impacted technical services.

My Open Incidents

Determining the task at hand can be complicated when your list of open incidents is long and hard to prioritize. With “My Open Incidents,” the three most recent, open incidents assigned to you are revealed right away. If you need more detail, simply tap the incident cell to navigate to the details page, where you can find additional information like the latest note, change events and past incidents. If you want to take action, you can acknowledge and resolve from the app.

Tap “view all incidents” and you’ll get a list of all your incidents.  The incident screen will remember your previously viewed tab so you can access them faster, reducing the number of navigation taps.

On-Call Shifts

Responders often want to quickly check when they are on call next. The “on-call” section displays your current top three shifts so you can plan accordingly. If you want more information or would like to take action, click on the dotted button and you can view your schedule, escalation policies, overrides, and on-call shifts.

Recently Impacted Technical Service

Whether it’s while looking into an open incident or checking the on-call schedule, responders often want to scan for what’s happening in the environment. By placing Recently Impacted Technical Services on the home screen, responders can keep a closer eye on any impacted services. Tapping the cell provides the service’s progress detail, escalation policy, and change events.  

This is just the latest in a series of new mobile app enhancements we’ve rolled out this year. You can learn more by reading our knowledge base article. 

New to PagerDuty?

If you have never used PagerDuty and want to try it out with your team, sign up for our free 14-day trial and learn how PagerDuty can help your digital operations to manage better incident response with our Web UI and mobile app.  

The post What’s New: PagerDuty Mobile Home Screen Experience appeared first on PagerDuty.

But when on-call responders become overwhelmed with alerts, they often just “ignore them” because they cannot tell the difference between a real alert and a false one. For example, when there is a down service due to maintenance or upgrades, this event could trigger multiple incidents, meaning the responder could receive false alerts that do not pertain to a real incident. Other times, however, a service triggers critical incidents and requires the responder to dive into the problem and solve the matter fast. 

On-call teams need a better solution that is more intuitive and flexible–one that allows them to disable a service as well as pause incident alerts on their mobile device, so they can focus on what matters: solving an incident without interruptions. 

We believe effective incident management empowers teams to do their jobs more efficiently while minimizing interruptions. That’s why we are excited to announce the general availability of Maintenance Widows through the PagerDuty Mobile App. 

Maintenance Windows help responders temporarily disable a service, including all of its integrations, while it is in maintenance mode. When a service is in the maintenance window, all of the service’s integrations are effectively “switched off” so that no new incidents will trigger. 

Easy to create, update and delete maintenance windows from anywhere:

Creating Maintenance Windows within the mobile app takes just a few simple steps: 

1. Choose the Service Directory from the hamburger menu and select your preferred service.
2. Tap on settings and tap “create maintenance menu.”
3. Enter a description to explain why this maintenance is happening.
4. Schedule the beginning and end date (and time) for the maintenance. 
5. Once the maintenance window expires, the service exits the maintenance mode, and new incidents can be triggered again.

You can delete an existing maintenance window by going to settings and tapping on “end maintenance window.”

A maintenance window for multiple services:

• PagerDuty’s mobile experience allows for the creation of a maintenance window on one service at a time. Users who want to create a maintenance window covering multiple services can be done through the web application.
• Updating and deleting options for a maintenance window covering multiple services can be done through the mobile app. 

This latest addition to PagerDuty Mobile empowers on-call teams to manage and respond to incidents without sacrificing time and work-life balance. We’re continuing to improve the PagerDuty mobile experience by giving teams the trusted information to continue serving their customers better. 

You can learn more about PagerDuty Mobile and the Maintenance Windows through our Knowledge Base Articles. Or try it out using the following QR code to download:

iOS

Android

Want to learn more about PagerDuty Incident Response and how it works with our mobile app? Participate in the free 14-day trial and experience how PagerDuty can empower your teams with faster time and efficiency, and drive innovation across your Operations Cloud.

The post Create and Manage Maintenance Windows Through PagerDuty Mobile App appeared first on PagerDuty.

One of PagerDuty’s values is Champion the Customer – and we take this very seriously. When building and improving features, we aim to keep a pulse on what’s going on with our customers: what’s keeping them up at night? What do they need today? How have their circumstances changed recently? And how can we help them scale their goals for tomorrow?

I sat down with Dan McCall, VP of Product for Incident Response, to learn more about his philosophy for building on the legacy of PagerDuty’s best-in-class incident response solution. To hear about all the features that Dan’s team is building at PagerDuty, check out his session, “Incident Response Keynote: Automated, Flexible, Proactive”. Registration is easy, just click here. 

Q:  So Dan, are there any patterns that have emerged from speaking with customers? What’s top of mind?

I’m hearing customers talking a lot about maximizing efficiency, minimizing toil, and generally becoming more data-driven so that they can build resilience at scale. What’s interesting is that this is the case whether they’re just getting started on their DevOps journey or have been at it for years. This makes sense – complexity is increasing and incidents are happening more often across the board, but it impacts customers differently. For some, just getting the right person at the right time is the goal, while others prioritize fine-tuning response to streamline ongoing processes and contain impact to responder health. 

But there’s one thing that I hear most, and it’s that while building resilience and scaling efficiency are challenging to solve in the best of times, everything has become a whole lot harder because of the “Great Resignation.” In fact, in our most recent customer survey, 64% of our respondents said that they’re experiencing increased turnover this year. It goes without saying that attrition puts added strain on teams – it takes resources to hire and onboard new people, and running understaffed can lead to a vicious cycle of even more manual toil and burnout. And this situation drives even more urgency for getting operations into a healthier, more mature state. 

Q: What do you mean when you say operational maturity? 

Operational maturity is about providing a better, more predictable experience for your teams so you can address and get ahead of the underlying issues behind attrition and burnout, with process and behavior to turn the corner on some of that potential turnover. 

We created this digital operations maturity model after looking at teams and organizations across our platform, codifying the behaviors that we observed. 

For those of you who might be newer to operational maturity, customers often ask us what ‘good’ looks like to help organizations measure their operational maturity, we developed the Digital Operations Maturity Model. The model gives organizations a way to define operational maturity, learn how to identify where they fall on the spectrum, and understand where to focus their efforts to improve.

To take this a step further and make it even more tangible, our product analytics team modeled the operational maturity model with data on our platform. We see that reactive teams consistently experience higher turnover than preventative teams – just last quarter, the delta was over 2x! When you think about that against the backdrop of the Great Resignation, it’s clearer than ever before that our products can make a big difference in helping our customers with their most pressing operational challenges. I’d highly recommend you check out this talk, “Getting from Reactive to Proactive (and Beyond!)”, from Scott Bastek and Tejere Oteri, which you can access by registering here. 

Q: How does what you’ve been hearing from customers shape your vision for the future of our incident response solution? 

When thinking about where we can steer our product to best help our customers achieve this transformation and level up their operational maturity, my team’s vision is to make incident response more:

• Automated to eliminate waste and inefficiency
• Flexible to address a multitude of unique business needs at scale
• Proactive to anticipate and prevent business disruption

And we’re going to do this while staying true to the core of what our customers know and love about PagerDuty.

Q: Automation can mean a lot of things to a lot of people – when you think about Automated Incident Response, what does it mean to you? 

Automated Incident Response to me is humans and machines working better together. To help illustrate this, I often think about the concept of Centaur Chess. The TLDR version is: AI can beat a human at the game of chess, but a human paired with AI can beat pure AI. 

Automation as the first line of defense empowers teams to balance critical workloads between humans and their machines, helping humans work smarter when they’re needed, and removing the burden when they’re not. There’s plenty in the incident response process that involves manual toil or well-understood tasks – our goal is to remove that unnecessary burden from your humans, so that the humans you have can stay focused and do better at their jobs. 

One example of how we’re enabling this is by making it possible to call Automated Diagnostics right from your mobile app, so that your responder doesn’t have to manually run through a rote set of tasks associated with standard diagnostics when they get to their desk. With automation, it’s already run and ready to go by the time your responder gets to the incident. 

At its best, automation and AI can take care of things that your teams shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Helping people do less repetitive, manual work helps them stay more engaged, which reduces burnout and helps with attrition. More time to think and focus on how to innovate also means having the extra cycles you need to learn from incidents and improve processes to build the resilience that you want. 

Q: PagerDuty has been actively investing in several acquisitions – how has this tied into your roadmap? 

We’re thrilled to harness really strong partnerships with our most recent acquisitions, Rundeck in 2020 and Catalytic earlier this year, to spin out better experiences for our customers. 

For Incident Response, we’ve been working with our colleagues from the Rundeck acquisition to take their product (now known as Process Automation) and embed Automation Actions deeply within our Incident Response experience –starting from ingest and Event Orchestration, to Mobile, and even our web experience. 

First-line responders often find themselves actioning the same, recurring diagnostic steps when it comes to incident triage and remediation, which takes time away from high-value work, keeps specialists firefighting instead of innovating, and prolongs MTTR. So making it as simple and light as possible for teams to start leveraging automation in their incident response lifecycle was really important to us. With the ability to call Automated Diagnostics in any number of ways, teams can save time that they would’ve had to spend on rote, manual tasks. Instead, they can have the results ready by the time the responder gets to their desk. 

With Catalytic, we’re taking a different approach. When an incident strikes, organizations typically have a checklist of important steps to run through, which are often manual and hard to remember, especially in the heat of the moment at 2 a.m.! Finding and remembering these steps can distract the response team from its main focus: resolving the incident. We’ve had lightweight response plays for a few years now and have been asked by customers for more ways to automate steps of their incident response processes with more flexibility, which is why we’re excited to introduce Incident Workflows. 

Coming later this year, we will be upgrading our lightweight response plays into powerful Incident Workflows based on the new workflow engine from our Catalytic acquisition. These workflows will allow you to define an orchestrated response using “if-this-then-that” logic, which will make it effortless to configure a sequence of common incident actions—such as adding a responder, subscribing stakeholders, or starting a conference bridge—into an orchestrated response. 

You can customize your Incident Workflows to reflect your organization’s unique processes for any number of use cases, such as by incident priority, status, or urgency. And as you learn from an incident, you then can encode that learning back into your workflows to automate those repetitive and mundane tasks for the next time an incident occurs.

Q: Which of these announcements do you think our customers will be most excited about?

It’s hard to pick just one, so I’ll tease two and you’ll have to check out my session to hear about all the goodness we’ve got in store for you. First, I think customers are going to be really excited about where we’re taking the future of Response Plays. We’ve already been getting some amazing feedback on how Incident Workflows will deliver a step-function-level improvement on Response Plays with the powerful UI and modular flexibility based on things like priority. I’m personally really excited to see what customers will do with Incident Workflows and how they make them their own. One of the beautiful parts of building this “in a platform way” is that, although we’re showcasing how it can be useful in major incidents, it can be used in a multitude of other ways. You can hear more about this in my session at Summit where Stephanie Gridley, a Resilience Manager from Wayfair, details how their team might use the functionality for both P1 and P5 incidents. 

Customers will also be very happy about seeing some updates on some core features that they’ve wanted for a long time, such as Status Update Notification Templates. What’ll get even more interesting is when these features eventually start feeding into each other to do even cooler things. It’s the nexus of these features working in context with one another that provides a multiplier impact greater than the sum of the parts.

If you want to learn more about what else is on the Incident Response roadmap for this year, check out Dan’s virtual keynote session: “Incident Response Keynote: Automated, Flexible, Proactive.” It’s not too late to register for PagerDuty Summit – register here.

The post The Future of Incident Response is Automated, Flexible, and Proactive appeared first on PagerDuty.

• Better control the noise and reduce the amount of manual event processing across your systems with powerful Event Intelligence
• Improve Automation security with several recent Rundeck Releases.
• Reduce responder burnout, ensure that responders are always available to address critical incidents quickly and more effectively with improved On-Call Management capabilities
• View critical context and access important incident response features via the latest updates to PagerDuty’s Mobile App
• View product demos of our PagerDuty App for ServiceNow and a recap of our Event Intelligence capabilities from 2021 from our Webinars & Events
• Learn from peers in the industry about how to integrate PagerDuty with Rundeck and Lacework over Twitch Streams

We also welcome you to join us as Design Partners for new features and hope you’ll discover more about how different teams across your organization can embrace and benefit from the PagerDuty Operations Cloud through our collection of Solution Guides.

Solution Guides

Did you know that PagerDuty can be used by departments outside of IT? That’s right! Check out the Solution Guides we’ve shared that help teams like marketing, sales, finance, human resources use PagerDuty to handle critical business functions.

Event Intelligence

Event Intelligence (EI) is a ML-powered solution helping organizations reduce downtime and deliver on customer experiences. The latest EI features provide teams with actionable insights to help reduce noise, drive to root cause, and automate manual processes for fewer incidents and faster resolution.

Event Orchestration

Event Orchestration helps teams reduce noise and cut down on manual event processing to both improve operational efficiency and reduce toil. The event orchestration decision engine enables teams to create custom logic to enrich, modify, and control the routing of events to the right teams based on event conditions at scale!

Combine nested event rules with machine learning and targeted automation to trigger actions, including diagnostic and remediation actions (including retrieving system health stats, implementing self-healing, or automatically rolling back a deployment and restarting a server).

View the demo to learn about Event Orchestration.

On-Call Management

The health, happiness, and overall well being of teams is key to every organization’s success. Our on-call management capabilities strive to help protect an organization’s most valuable asset—the people.

Round Robin Scheduling

Now generally available on Business and Digital Operations plans, Round Robin Scheduling allows teams to equitably distribute on-call shift responsibilities amongst multiple team members. It works by automatically assigning new incidents across different users on a team to ensure that teams can resolve incidents as efficiently as possible with less risk of burnout.

View the demo:

• Learn more in the knowledge base
• View the demo
• Read the blog: Equitably distribute on-call responsibility and streamline incident response with Round Robin Scheduling

Automation

Rundeck 3.4.7, 3.4.8, 3.4.9, and 3.4.10 Releases

Check out the latest Rundeck features and enhancements for Rundeck Enterprise and Rundeck Community:

• HashiCorp Vault Plugin includes more logging and supports authentication to a different namespace from where passwords are stored for enhanced security
• Bump Spring Security version from 5.1.11 to 5.2 for enhanced security
• Update log4j to 2.17.0 for both Rundeck Enterprise and Rundeck Community addresses recent Log4J vulnerabilities
• Password Reset feature on Rundeck Enterprise enables the ability to reset Local User passwords by sending an email with a reset link rather than resetting a password directly on an account

Learn more about these updates and other core product updates and bugfixes from the release notes for 3.4.7, 3.4.8, 3.4.9, 3.4.10.

Incident Response

Mobile Incident Details Refresh

The new and improved mobile Incident Details screen now provides easier access to all of your favorite features during the incident response process from one place. Run a play, add a priority or note, post a status update, and more with the new carousel.

Learn more in the knowledge base through the latest mobile release notes

Product Deprecations

• Please take note and keep your teams informed of our upcoming product deprecations listed by the nearest date:March 31, 2022 – Webhooks V2 will be replaced by Webhooks V3 which is now generally available.

Webinars & Events

Join us for the following webinars and events to learn more about PagerDuty’s recent product updates and how they benefit customers.

• How to Reduce Noise and Manage Event Routing with PagerDuty – Hear from Frank Emery, Senior Product Manager at PagerDuty as he guides you through how you can deal with unmanageable levels of noise and complexity with PagerDuty Event Orchestration. View the webinar on demand
• What’s New in Event Intelligence – 2021 Roundup – Catch the latest updates in Event Intelligence available on demand in a product demo and Q&A led by Vivian Chan, Frank Emery, and Vera Chan. View the webinar on demand
• Event Intelligence 101 with PagerDuty University – Hannah Lodise goes in-depth to demonstrate how Event Intelligence features can help teams reduce system noise, quickly troubleshoot issues, and remove manual toil for faster resolution. View the webinar on demand
• Integrate ServiceNow with PagerDuty to Improve Major Incident Management Response Times – Enjoy a product demo of the ServiceNow integration and Q&A by Laura Chassagne and Vera Chan to learn more about leveraging CMDB data, gaining more visibility and context, incident response, as well as automated diagnostics and self-healing to help drive down incident resolution times. View the webinar on demand
• PagerDuty Pulse Q3 – Catch up on all of our latest product demos combined on demand within a playlist via the Q3 PagerDuty Pulse. View the Q3 PagerDuty Pulse Today!

PagerDuty Community Twitch Stream

Join us on our Twitch channels, PagerDuty Twitch Stream and PagerDuty Community Twitch Stream to catch up on one of our latest streams led by our Developer Advocates!

• Subscribe and get notified when we’re live and view previous recordings

• Missed one of our broadcasts? Watch any of these recent Twitch streams or YouTube videos:

• • Jan 14, 2022 with Scott McAllister & Mandi Walls – PD Garage (Custom Change Transformer for Change Events)

• • Nov 16, 2021 with Mandi Walls & Rob Jahn (Dynatrace) – Partner Integration – Dynatrace with PagerDuty and Rundeck

• • Nov 11, 2021 with Mandi Walls & Jeff Fry (Lacework) – Integrate PagerDuty & Lacework

If your team could benefit from any of these enhancements, be sure to contact your account manager and sign up for a 14-day free trial.

The post What’s New: Updates to Event Intelligence, On-Call Management, Automation, Mobile, and More! appeared first on PagerDuty.

This month’s release includes updates that will help our customers:

• Improve response time through automation
• Streamline communication and collaboration during incident response via enhanced ChatOps integrations
• Reduce cognitive load and richer context through machine learning and AIOps

You can learn about our latest capabilities via the Q1 PagerDuty Pulse or read below for the highlights.

Runbook Automation

PagerDuty Runbook Automation helps reduce toil and escalations and improve response times through automating repetitive or manual tasks.

The Rundeck 3.4.0 and Rundeck 3.4.1 updates include a redesigned user interface and new Rundeck Enterprise capabilities. These capabilities are all designed to improve user experience, streamline configuration management, and tighten and provide more granular security controls.

To learn more about the release, watch the “What’s new in Rundeck 3.4” session from PagerDuty Summit 2021. You can also read about all the features in the release blog or the 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 release notes.

Event Intelligence & AIOps

PagerDuty’s Event Intelligence enables better noise and complexity management. The following new capabilities help save time by leveraging AIOps and machine learning to deliver centralized context. This allows teams to act rapidly when issues arise by accelerating root cause and contributing factor identification.

Outlier Incident: You can now use historical incident and alert data to identify incidents that are anomalies, rare occurrences, or happen frequently. See these patterns more easily than before without having to manually compile information in one-off dashboards or sort through operations spreadsheets when every second matters.

View the demo or learn more.

Change Correlation: A majority of incidents are caused by changes to code or infrastructure, but it can be difficult to identify which changes could have potentially caused an incident. Change Correlation surfaces changes that most likely caused an issue based on time of occurrence, related service, or machine learning analysis of similar incidents.

View the demo or learn more.

Custom Change Event Transformer: The custom change event transformer capability enables you to send change events from any system to PagerDuty. Convert an event in any format into a PagerDuty change event via javascript and view recent changes both in PagerDuty’s Recent Changes feature and as additional context in the incident’s details.

View the demo or learn more from the knowledge base!

New Service Create Flow: Enjoy the simple and intuitive guided flow to set up a well-configured service. New users can feel confident that service setup is completed according to their needs and that their service is ready to go.

View the demo or learn more from the knowledge base!

New Service Profile Updates: The new service profile will fully replace the service details page on August 31, 2021. Users with access to the previous service profile page can now view the new one. Updates include the ability to view recent change events, add and view dependencies, and add runbooks or a communication channel to streamline incident response.

Learn more here.

Partner Ecosystem & Integrations

This release includes updated ChatOps integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams. These capabilities help teams collaborate and communicate more efficiently, perform incident actions at the click-of-a-button, and enhance context to triage and remediate incidents faster. Responders can stay in their preferred apps without context-switching while the entire organization benefits from enhanced visibility into current business-impacting issues.

Stakeholder Updates in ChatOps: New to the PagerDuty Slack integration and PagerDuty Microsoft Teams integration is the ability to communicate and provide status updates to business stakeholders across the organization directly within Slack and Microsoft Teams. This involves less context-switching and results in fewer interruptions.

To learn more:

• View the Microsoft Teams Integration Guide or Slack Integration Guide
• Complete the Slack Webhook Migration through a guided process

Incident Context and Actions in Microsoft Teams: With incident context in Microsoft Teams, responders are equipped with clear, actionable data to help them quickly triage and coordinate effective incident response.

After an incident notification has been posted in a channel, channel members can perform the following incident actions: Acknowledge, Resolve, Add Note, Add Status Update, and Create a Meeting!

Webhooks V3

Improved webhooks delivery now provides standardized, flexible, and reliable webhook payloads, even for larger amounts of data. A Webhooks V3 subscription will send a webhook to an endpoint every time an event occurs during an incident within a desired scope, such as a service or team. This update supports secure webhook signing for better authorization as well as additional event types including: priority_updated, responder.added, and responder.accept/decline events.

Webhooks V1 and V2 are being deprecated on November 13, 2021 and March 31, 2022 respectively.

View the demo or learn more in the knowledge base!

PagerDuty Where You Are

The following mobile app and PagerDuty Analytics updates embody the benefits of working anywhere while collaborating and communicating with team members or stakeholders across the organization.

Past Incidents on Mobile: View past resolved incidents in the PagerDuty mobile app that have similar metadata and were generated on the same service as the current active incident. This additional context facilitates accurate triage and also reduces resolution time. Responders can see whether they, or someone on their team, have been involved in a similar previous incident and dive into details to discover what remediation steps were taken.

To learn more, you can:

• View the past incidents on mobile demo
• View the recently released past incidents API demo
• Review the knowledge base and mobile release notes

Slack Insights Previews

PagerDuty Analytics offers pre-built metrics and prescriptive dashboards. Users can paste a curated Insights URL from PagerDuty Analytics into Slack and see the link preview directly within Slack (in both #channels and direct messages). Allowing the link to unfurl a visual directly in Slack makes report sharing easier and empowers more data-driven decision making.

View the demo and learn more here.

We’ve consolidated all of the latest product demos into a playlist that you can watch on demand in the Q1 PagerDuty Pulse.

If your team could benefit from any of these enhancements, be sure to contact your account manager and sign up for a 14-day free trial.

The post What’s New: Updates to Event Intelligence, Integrations, and More! appeared first on PagerDuty.

With this release, we continue to respond to our customers’ needs to build a better platform to help them best manage their digital operations. Enhancements include new innovations for our mobile app and increased platform security by adding email domain restrictions. We also made our analytics scorecard capabilities more flexible and added a new partner ecosystem integration with Amazon EventBridge.

Mobile Platform

Longer Snooze (iOS)

We know that not all incidents can be resolved within 24 hours, so we’ve added an option for user to snooze alerts for more than 24 hours, providing more flexibility for managing alerts during off-hours. Longer snooze is available now in our iOS app and will be coming soon to Android.

Configuration Warnings

Users can now find best practices in the Settings menu that will help them optimize the setup of their PagerDuty instance. Tap on the warnings to update contact methods and notification rules. For example, if a user forgot to add contact methods such as SMS or email, a warning will pop up recommending that contact methods be added.

Status Updates for Business Services

We recently launched the PagerDuty Solution for Business Response, which is built on top of Modern Incident Response. The new solution includes an updated Status Dashboard that provides business stakeholders with clear and concise information so that teams can better collaborate and orchestrate real-time business and technical response when incidents happen.

Users can now assign priority levels to incidents and associate them with business services right from the mobile app. This update allows technical responders to notify business subscribers and ensures the information appears in the right place on the Status Dashboard.

iPad Layout Improvements

New iPad specific layouts make better use of the bigger screens, and users can tap an incident to view more details. There is also support for split screen, which allows users to use the PagerDuty app alongside other apps like Calendar, Slack, and more.

Enhanced Platform Security With Email Domain Restriction

We’re adding another layer of security for our customers with email domain restrictions, which ensures that only users with authorized email domains have access to PageDuty sessions. Admins and account owners can now choose to restrict users to only use domains that are in their Email Domain Allow List when users create or change their login information or contact email addresses.

New Analytics Scorecard Search and Subscribe/Unsubscribe Features

The new Analytics scorecard search allows users to quickly find specific scorecards from a list of available scorecards by searching for a team name or custom scorecard name. Previously, users had to visually scan lists of scorecards to find the one they wanted—a time-consuming and frustrating task, particularly for users that are on many teams, leaders that have subscribed to many scorecards, or larger organizations.

Users can also now subscribe/unsubscribe to scorecards, which allows them to see the operational metrics of any team, even if they aren’t on the team. By adding the subscribe/unsubscribe feature, users can decide what scorecards show up in their UI, providing them with a customized and less-cluttered user experience—they see only what they want to see. For example, managers of managers and executives can subscribe to see the data they care about without having to join the various team groups.

Partner Ecosystem Integration: Amazon EventBridge

The PagerDuty + Amazon EventBridge integration allows teams to easily create event-driven workflows that connect native AWS services with PagerDuty. With Amazon EventBridge, PagerDuty customers are able to leverage the full breadth of AWS-supported integrations and functionality.

“AWS EventBridge, combined with PagerDuty, helps us generate event-driven workflows in real time,” said Ed Kozlowski, Lead Software Engineer at Cox Automotive. “When we detect an issue, PagerDuty can generate an alert that triggers an AWS Lambda function to grab runbooks and post details back into PagerDuty, helping us resolve issues faster and create the best experience for our customers.”

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If you’re interested in getting started with the new capabilities from this August release, reach out to your account representative and check out our Knowledge Base for more information.

Want to see these new enhancements in action? Then join us at PagerDuty Summit 2019, our annual global user conference happening September 23-25 in San Francisco. For more information and to register, please reach out to your account representative or visit https://summit.pagerduty.com.

The post August 2019 Release Overview: New Mobile Features, Enhanced Security and Analytics, and Amazon EventBridge Integration appeared first on PagerDuty.

With this in mind, we wanted to work on features that enable you you and your responders to do more from anywhere with the PagerDuty mobile app. Read on for the best mobile incident management innovations we’ve released this year!

For Responders

For technical responders, it’s absolutely essential to rapidly triage issues and take action quickly. During wartime scenarios, the mobile app now live updates so you have real-time context at your fingertips at all times.

If an incident resolves because the server has recovered, you’ll automatically and immediately see the update. This feature includes the powerful, adaptive machine learning PagerDuty supports by automatically grouping related alerts* into a single incident to minimize noise while centralizing important data to provide context.

*Note: Intelligent alert grouping is available for customers with the PagerDuty Event Intelligence product.

The refreshed schedules experience makes it easy to see when you’re on call and is available to all users on all plans. Schedules are great for operations reviews, knowing who is on call next week, and trading shifts. You can directly book overrides for yourself or your teammates with just a few taps. It’s never been easier to view past, present, and future on-call schedules and responsibilities.

“PagerDuty’s mobile app lets our team quickly take action in real time so we are always-on and bringing the world’s football stories to our customers. The new mobile schedules experience helps me know when I’m going on and off call, and see our team’s on-call schedule at a glance—plus my team is happy since it’s never been easier to trade shifts when we need to.” – Tiago Queiroz, OneFootball

Mobile for Incident Response and Major Incidents

For major incident scenarios, we’ve designed the mobile experience with best practices in mind. Now, you can tag an incident’s priority* to classify the severity of incident, helping accelerate triage and awareness across a team around what kind of response is required.

We’ve also made it easy to design the ideal response in peacetime, so anyone can go from triage to orchestrating the ideal, cross-team response, as well as execute tasks and custom logic in third-party systems—all with just a few taps.

Users can easily run response plays,* which provide advanced automation to run multi-stage response scenarios. The functionality supports tasks such as cross-team responder mobilization, status updates/templates to business stakeholders, and more.

*Note: Priority and response plays are available for customers with the PagerDuty Modern Incident Response product.

Additionally, with custom incident actions, you can execute additional tasks, such as creating a ticket in ServiceNow or Jira, running diagnostics, rebooting a server, and much more.

Finally, we’re incredibly excited to share that our mobile apps now also support other capabilities, including tap to dial/join a bridge and tap to join a Slack channel, directly from the incident. This facilitates faster mobilization, leading to faster resolution.

Mobile for Business Stakeholders

Technical incidents tend to have a significant business impact since digital business services are supported by underlying technical services. But for business stakeholders, it’s not helpful to know that the Kafka service is down—instead, they need real-time situational awareness about which business service is affected (e.g., checkout cart service), the impact and scope (how many customers affected, dollars lost per minute, etc.), who’s owning it, and the current status.

Typically, this information lives across different systems or simply doesn’t exist at all, creating a lot of manual work and pain when the clock is ticking. Our newly released PagerDuty Visibility product eliminates this gap by bringing this information into a mobile-first experience.

The mobile business impact dashboard surfaces critical context within the incident, such as real-time business impact metrics, point of contact, incident status, priority, duration, and much more. Critical updates can be automatically shared to business stakeholders. Business impact becomes a shared language through which technical responders and business stakeholders can collectively prioritize and take the right coordinated actions on customer-impacting incidents.

*Note: The business impact dashboard is available for customers with the PagerDuty Visibility product.

This Is Mobile-First Real-Time Operations

In a digital world, real-time operations need to be mobile, work flawlessly, and meet you wherever you are. That’s why we’ve designed PagerDuty to be mobile-first, with a brilliant user experience that puts PagerDuty’s unique intelligence, automation, and best practices in the palm of your hand.

Our mission is to help you and the teams you collaborate with across the organization to easily gain critical insights and take the right action anytime, anywhere. To quickly recap, here’s the list of exciting functionality we covered in this blog:

• Live updating
• Automated alert grouping
• New schedules and overrides experience
• Incident priority
• Advanced response automation (response plays)
• Custom incident actions
• Tap to dial/join a bridge or Slack channel
• Business impact dashboard

There’s much more in the PagerDuty mobile app, and we’re constantly evolving the experience to get you the right insights and tools you need when it matters most. Please share any feedback on how we can continue to make the mobile app better to support@pagerduty.com.

Finally, be sure to stay up-to-date on what’s new for mobile by checking out our mobile incident management page or release notes.

The post The PagerDuty Mobile App: Do More From Anywhere appeared first on PagerDuty.

I was a member of the Mobile team, which is responsible for maintaining and improving PagerDuty’s Android and iOS applications. The team’s aim is to deliver features and functionality that enable users to interact with the PagerDuty platform seamlessly while they’re on the go. It’s a small yet rapidly growing team—when I joined in January 2018, there were only five people on the team. Three months later, the team had grown to 11 people: two engineering interns (myself included), a product management intern, five full-time developers, an agile coach, a product owner, and an engineering manager. I learned more than I could have ever imagined in those four months, met many incredible and talented individuals, and grew extensively as an engineer in the making.

People: Diversity and Inclusivity

The people at PagerDuty are nothing short of amazing. They are truly passionate about their product and the work that they do. They work extremely hard to ensure the best experience for their users and have fun while doing so.

PagerDuty is also a community of individuals who strongly believe in inclusivity and diversity—it’s an environment that embraces the differences of others and where you can truly be yourself. For example, during International Women’s Day, the company’s Toronto office hosted a discussion panel that featured four local female professionals from companies like Salesforce and Procter & Gamble. It was a valuable opportunity for me to learn more about the career path of women in comparison to other gender orientations and the contemporary challenges faced by women in various professions.

At PagerDuty, I’ve never felt like an intern—I’ve always felt like another full-time employee. During the first week of my internship, I had the privilege of attending the Company Kick Off (CKO) event in Napa Valley, California! CKO was an opportunity for employees both remote and across the offices of Sydney, London, Seattle, Toronto, and San Francisco to come together and celebrate the success of PagerDuty and to align on key priorities going into the new year. The event featured lots of social functions, where I had the opportunity to meet people from different teams and parts of the world. I also met the members of the Mobile team who work in the San Francisco office. It was really cool to learn about the backgrounds and experiences of different employees at the company. It’s clear that each person at PagerDuty brings something unique and special to the table.

The Mobile team and me at one of the social events during CKO. (I’m in the back row on the left.)

Mentorship

At the beginning of my internship, I shied away from asking for help because I wanted to avoid “bugging” the other developers. However, as my term went on, I quickly realized how eager and excited people were to help and how beneficial it could be to pair up to solve a problem.

In previous internships, I had only done Android development. So when I was assigned my first iOS task, I was nervous as I had never worked on an iOS app or had any experience with the Swift programming language. The task was related to live updating—a new feature in our apps that dynamically updates content in real time. The foundation of this feature was already in the app, making this a fairly simple task that didn’t require too much code, but I didn’t really know where to start.

When I reached out for help, I was amazed at the support I received: I paired up with a full-time senior iOS engineer on my team, and we worked through the solution together. Along the way, we stopped and discussed the intricacies of Swift and the fundamentals of the iOS framework, including best practices, common paradigms, and design decisions that were made in the PagerDuty app.

In addition, there was a lot of useful mentorship I received on-the-fly. Our mobile apps harness some powerful libraries and technologies that have steep learning curves. Yet my team members were always happy to pause what they were working on to give me a hand. They took the time to explain in detail why something was the way it was and were always open to having a discussion around how something could be improved or optimized.

Along those same lines, I didn’t think that I’d be in a position to “call the shots” as an intern—but I was wrong. After being at the company for a little over a month, I partnered with a full-time Android engineer to draft a proposal on how we should re-architect our Android application to improve its testability and scalability. As a team, we decided on which architecture we were going to use, but not how we were going to use it for our app. I was responsible for writing up the technical details of how we’d integrate the architecture into our app. It was a lot of responsibility but I was up for the challenge. Following a thorough review by the other developers, the proposal ultimately got approved and now serves as the standard for our app.

The process of carrying out the proposal fully will take a long time. But we’ve laid down the foundation for the new architecture and all the new features that will be implemented with it. It feels awesome to know I played a major role in revolutionizing the future of the PagerDuty Android app.

Small Team, Major Impact

Relatively speaking, the Mobile team is still small in comparison to other teams at PagerDuty. And as a small team, we had a lot of autonomy—it was up to us, for example, to figure out something as simple as the format of a pull request all the way to which code architecture our app should use. We decided when to release our apps and how often we should release them. The team takes this process very seriously—they distribute new versions of the apps internally to PagerDuty employees before releasing to the public to ensure the highest-quality app is delivered to users. I paired up several times with a senior engineer on the team to release the mobile apps to users. This experience gave me insight into the process of shipping an app to a massive user base, and I learned how to monitor a release to ensure everything went smoothly.

Opportunity for Growth

PagerDuty has a lot of cool projects in the pipeline and none of them are off-limits. When I initially joined the company, I had expressed the desire to do iOS development and/or backend development. Not only was I given the opportunity to sink my teeth into both, but right off the bat, I got to work on meaningful projects that would be shipped to our users—a prime example being the aforementioned live updating feature.

Another really useful opportunity to learn something new was during the Mobile team’s weekly co-working sessions, where team members would work on something valuable to their personal development. It was a really useful chance to explore something new and have the support of the senior developers on the team whenever I had any questions. I used this time to expand my technical knowledge. I learned more about Swift and even developed a small iOS application to learn more about the iOS framework.

I also learned about Agile methodologies, which really improved my workflow. When I joined the Mobile team, they were employing the Scrum Agile methodology. Essentially, this meant the team would plan to complete chunks of work in fixed increments of time known as sprints. For our team, each sprint was two weeks long. At the end of each sprint, our team would get together (in what we called a retrospective) to discuss the sprint—what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what actions could be taken to improve our process.

During these exercises, I learned how to identify and fix bottlenecks and how to coordinate work effectively with other developers. Compared to when I first started at the company, I definitely noticed my throughput had increased substantially while still completing high-quality work. Another thing: Something that PagerDuty takes very seriously is that everyone’s opinions matter, and retrospectives were an opportunity for each team member to provide feedback on how the team could improve as a whole and everyone’s suggestions were taken into consideration.

Looking Ahead

Overall, my experience interning at PagerDuty was amazing. It’s bittersweet knowing that my internship is over and that I’m back at school. I feel lucky to have met so many awesome people and established so many long-lasting relationships. I can confidently say that the skill set I’ve acquired over the course of my internship will allow me to succeed in future engineering endeavours. My time at PagerDuty and on the Mobile team is an experience that I’ll never forget.

If you’re interested in what it’s like to work at PagerDuty, consider applying on the careers page.

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