The good news is that the PagerDuty Operations Cloud can support your Crisis Response Management Operations for those next level threats. We know this because it’s what we use to manage the unpredictability of the global operating environment and to keep our employees safe.

In this blog, we cover the evolving nature of global preparedness and the convergence of threats along with how you can enhance your crisis response management operations with PagerDuty.

We’re not in Kansas Anymore

PagerDuty runs an annual Global Preparedness campaign to provide its employees with the tools and resources they need to be resilient in a rapidly changing world. We want our employees globally to establish best in class personal and professional resilience so we can do our very best work in support of our customers. We do this by enabling our employees to act in moments of crisis. Throughout September, we deliver emergency response guides, CPR-certification classes, emerging threat training sessions and disaster response movie trivia. Our customary volunteering opportunity in partnership with our Social Impact team and our crisis response system tests followed by a functional drill are mainstays in our annual programming.

Business leaders should always plan for the company’s worst day before it becomes a reality and because we’re anticipating that future crises will require more complex responses and tools to resolve, we’re also highlighting perfect storm scenarios across categories of threats during this year’s campaign. For example, the intensity of cyber threats and extreme natural disasters that we’re seeing over the last year or so creates an opportunity to examine the effectiveness of our crisis response management operations against combined threats. 

One thing is certain when keeping in mind Murphy’s Law: if a crisis can happen, it will happen. However, it may not happen the traditional way you planned and prepared for it. In other words, buckle up because Kansas is no more.

PagerDuty for PagerDuty

PagerDuty’s Crisis Response Management Operations Guide was built to showcase how PagerDuty uses PagerDuty. In regards to preparedness, we leverage our platform for periodic functional exercises and crisis simulations to ensure our teams are ready as we scan the horizon for emerging threats. After these exercises or simulations, we complete our postmortems (i.e., after action report or hotwash) in the platform capitalizing on all of the “Incident Action Plan” information both we and the system captured/generated during the simulated response, i.e., timeline of events, responder requests, hand-off times, status updates, notes.

For operational resilience, when we do need to respond to a critical event, the operations side just works. Using PagerDuty, we don’t have to worry about contact information being out of date, which conference bridge we should be using and where the latest version of our playbook is stored. These problems slow mean time to respond and ultimately the speed at which a critical event can be resolved. PagerDuty supports 700+ native integrations and even more with our API so we never miss a notification or need to spend time punching in conference call numbers on a dialpad. With the ability to add documentation links into our services, our plans and playbooks also never get lost.

At PagerDuty, we’re empowering teams to build the future and using our own platform to respond to the increasingly complex crises that threaten our people and operations. If you want to learn how PagerDuty can help you modernize your crisis response management operations, read our Crisis Response Management Ops Guide and sign up for a free trial.

The post Building Trust with our Customers with PagerDuty for PagerDuty: Crisis Response Management Operations appeared first on PagerDuty.

But there’s another side to data—it’s everywhere. And when data is dispersed across various tools and silos, that poses enormous challenges for incident response teams looking to efficiently handle unplanned incidents. This leads to delays in resolving real-time incidents that can lead to lost revenue and eroded customer trust. Periodic data consolidation to a business intelligence tool further exacerbates the issue by providing stale information.

At PagerDuty, we seek to empower our customers to make data-driven decisions in their journey toward a resilient operational foundation that keeps costly downtime to a minimum. You can only improve what you measure. For teams looking to shift their approach to digital operations towards a more proactive and preventative state, access to the right actionable data is paramount. That’s why with the PagerDuty Operations Cloud^SM , we are opening access to a comprehensive suite of analytics capabilities specifically crafted to address the intricacies of modern digital operations.

So far, we’ve witnessed that users who interacted with PagerDuty Analytics observed a 26% enhancement in their mean time to acknowledge (MTTA). This improvement was accompanied by a more balanced allocation of tasks and consistent response times, resulting in a total annual time-saving of 100 hours (as per PagerDuty internal calculation based on product metrics).

Our latest release of PagerDutyAnalytics introduces dynamic new reporting with simplified data filtering, enabling responders to achieve faster incident resolution with more intelligent insights. We’re excited to announce the general availability of a comprehensive list of analytics capabilities, including:

1. Insight Reports
2. Analytics API
3. Recommendations Report
4. Operational Reviews

These new releases are now accessible to all paying PagerDuty customers. With PagerDuty Analytics, you can harness the true potential of data-driven decision-making in your efforts to drive operational excellence, optimize customer experiences, and build resilience.

Gain visibility and control with PagerDuty Analytics

We’ve invested significantly in providing granular visibility and control in our newest reports. The new Insights Reports offer expanded metrics, providing extensive coverage of the incident response process and actionable outcomes to make better decisions. With enhanced customization and functionality, you gain access to interactive visualizations, drill-down capabilities, and detailed data on responder efforts. Additionally, copy, paste, and download options of incident data are available for sharing across teams. Users can easily compare current performance to past incidents, enabling better decision-making. Priority and urgency filters make it possible to focus on critical incidents.

With the Analytics API, you can now access incident response data directly in your preferred analytics platform, which includes detailed Responder data.

Getting to know the Insights Reports and how to use them

We are democratizing critical data and helping teams go beyond just responding to incidents to being able to easily measure the impact of incidents on their Response Teams and business. The Insights Reports give you valuable insights that help you answer key operational questions you may have about your digital operations, which may include:

• How many sleep/off-hour interruptions are my Responders receiving?
• What are my most impacted Services?
• Is our Team meeting our Incident Management SLA?
• How quickly are Responders acknowledging incidents?
• How much time are Responders spending on call resolving incidents?
• Are we improving over time?

Incident Activity Report

The Incident Activity Report provides an overview of specific incidents and allows users to dive into instances they want to investigate further. It includes summary metrics such as the number of incidents and response effort over time. Users can apply various filters, edit columns, and visualize incident volume to understand and analyze their incident management process effectively.

Service Performance Report

The Service Performance Report focuses on the health and performance of different services. It provides metrics related to MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve), MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge), interruptions, notifications, and the total number of responders for each service. The report enables users to evaluate service health, SLA adherence, and impact on the team’s workload.

Responder Report

The Responder Report is designed to help make better decisions regarding team management and responder health. It provides information on how many sleep-hour or off-hour interruptions responders are receiving. Users can identify responders who are frequently being interrupted during off-hours and adjust their schedules accordingly. The report allows users to analyze incidents assigned to each responder and their resolution times. With these valuable insights, team leaders can foster a healthier and more efficient work environment for their responders,  increase employee satisfaction, and avoid employee burnout.

Team Report

The Team Report offers insights into the performance and workload of different teams. Users can compare teams based on incident volume and make informed decisions regarding team assignments and scheduling. The report assists in ensuring equal distribution of incidents across teams and provides a comprehensive understanding of team performance and the effect of incidents on their operations.

Escalation Policy Report

The Escalation Policy Report provides metrics related to escalation policies, ensuring that they are set up correctly and efficiently. This report provides a deeper understanding of how incidents are handled, equipping users with information to make informed decisions about their escalation policies and schedule changes. Users can analyze the effectiveness of their escalation policies and optimize their incident response strategies more effectively.

Other additions to the analytics suite:

Analytics API

With the Analytics API, customers can access incident response data directly in their preferred analytics platform. The new API is available to all plans and now includes data from all the Insights Reports and detailed responder data.

If you want to continue using an API to collect incident information out of PagerDuty, you can continue to do so with the Analytics API.

Recommendations Report

The Recommendations Report is now available to Professional, Business, and Digital Operations plans. This report shows services that could benefit from AIOps’ Intelligent Alert Grouping for noise reduction. This feature can help teams reduce the number of alerts received, saving more time to be spent solving incidents instead.

User Onboarding Report

In the realm of operational efficiency, organizations seek to streamline their incident management processes. The introduction of the User Onboarding Report serves as a pivotal tool in this pursuit. This report empowers leadership and administrators with a comprehensive overview of PagerDuty’s utilization, facilitating well-informed decisions that resonate with optimized resource allocation. By harnessing the insights from the User Onboarding Report, organizations can seamlessly navigate the dynamic landscape of incident management, ensuring that resources are judiciously allocated while maintaining the highest standards of service delivery.

Operational Reviews

The Operational Reviews are now also available to Business plans. The Operational Reviews feature offers metrics for different types of reviews. Each review type includes scorecards intended to help facilitate operational review meetings:

• Team On-Call Handoff Reviews for weekly reviews
• Service Performance Reviews for monthly reviews
• Business Performance Reviews for quarterly reviews

Demo: Improving the PagerDuty Analytics experience for you

To see all the great capabilities of PagerDuty Analytics in action, Senior Product Manager for Analytics, Anojan Gunasekaran, demos newly launched and upcoming features in this video.

Get started today

PagerDuty Analytics empowers teams with comprehensive insights on incident response performance, enabling quick identification of top-priority incidents and understanding the number of responders involved. With key metrics like MTTA and MTTR, teams can make informed decisions, design guardrails, and achieve faster resolutions, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and reducing employee burnout.

Learn more about the Insights Reports in this Knowledge Base article. To leverage the power of Analytics and improve your incident response process, try the PagerDuty 14-day free trial.

The post What’s New: Enhanced PagerDuty Analytics for Faster Insights and Smarter Recommendations appeared first on PagerDuty.

When incidents happen, protecting customer experience and minimizing downtime starts with bringing the right subject matter experts in to fix the problem. For many organizations tackling agile methodologies, embracing service ownership (you build it, you own it) into the incident response process is key to success. However, this cultural transformation to putting developers on-call for their services in production is no small feat. Having the right platform to assign responders with dedicated on-call schedules that can mobilize the right people at the right time when seconds matter makes all the difference. 

As the best-in-class solution for incident response, the PagerDuty scheduling experience  continues to be a focus area for ongoing iteration to ensure that the customer workflow is as seamless as possible.

Therefore, we’re proud to launch a number of highly requested updates to scheduling. Highlights include the ability to rename layers and manage users associated with a schedule. Keep reading to learn all the details.

Consolidated Schedule View

The new schedule details page brings the most relevant information about each schedule front and center. This way, both on-call users and admins / team managers can quickly get an overview of current and upcoming rotations. Here are the details you can easily see on this page: 

• Who’s on call
• Who will be next on call
• Calendar feeds
• Collapsible menus to check which users, teams and escalation policies are associated with the schedule

Dynamic Schedule Creation

By listening to our customers feedback on usability, we were able to design a more fluid and dynamic schedule creation experience. New capabilities include:

• Mandatory schedule names: every new schedule created requires a name to give teams more clarity about the existing schedules – both users and team managers / admins. 
• Dropdown time picker: instead of manually typing a handoff time, you can now use a time picker, also available when adding restrictions to a schedule.
• Relocated buttons: the cancel and save buttons are now on the right hand side of the page and they follow the user’s page scroll, making them easier to find.

Flexible Editing

More than ever, change is the only constant for organizations and their teams. So it’s important that their schedules can quickly be adapted to reflect their current structure and process. Check these three new functionalities that improve schedule editing:

• Manage teams associated with a schedule: admins can now add or remove teams directly from a schedule.
• Change a schedule layer’s name: users and admins can edit a schedule layer’s name to give it a more descriptive title and adjust it in a way that makes more sense to the organization – it even supports emojis. E.g.: You can create an East Coast layer and a West Coast layer. 
• Reorder and collapse schedule layers: the new drag and drop functionality allows users to reorder layers easily in both the schedule layer creation and editing pages.
  

Deep Dive on the New Scheduling Experience

Want to see these new capabilities in action? Watch the below video where Senior Product Manager Kara Smith joins Developer Advocate Mandi Walls to show off all the scheduling UI enhancements.

We’ve launched these updates to make the scheduling experience easier, but we’re not stopping there. Stay tuned on how we’re continuing to build out the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to help scale teams with the power of AI and automation to transform the entire incident management process. Try for yourself with our free 14-day trial. 

The post 3 New Updates to the PagerDuty Scheduling Experience appeared first on PagerDuty.

Incidents are a costly burden on businesses. Despite assembling the right people and teams, the manual work, tool setup and prolonged tasks can negatively impact customer experience. The need for adaptable processes to address diverse incident types further complicates the situation.

This is where the PagerDuty Operations Cloud steps in. It streamlines and automates all the various manual steps in the incident response process. The result is a cohesive and end-to-end incident management experience that frees up responders to focus on the critical thinking requirements to resolve the incident.

At the heart of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud lies Incident Response–the backbone for effectively managing an orchestrated response to address customer-impacting incidents. To help our customers build a resilient approach to digital operations, we aim to deliver a solution that is:

• Automated to eliminate inefficiencies
• Flexible to accommodate each team’s specific processes
• Proactive to learn from failure and repeat incidents

This year, PagerDuty has introduced Incident Workflows, Custom Fields on Incidents and Status Update Notification Templates. These latest additions work in concert to further streamline incident management processes, enabling you and your team to focus on resolving incidents and delivering exceptional digital experiences to your customers. With every minute mattering in incident response, saving time during every step of the process becomes crucial, leading to a positive and impactful transformation in your business operations.

Here are Three Ways to Cut Down Incident Time

Experience significant time savings with Incident Workflows

Incident Workflows, a powerful capability within PagerDuty, empowers you to easily customize workflows for different incidents and automate manual steps by integrating them into a unified process. With Incident Workflows, actions can be orchestrated based on the incident type via a customizable, user-friendly no-code/low-code builder. 

For example, let’s say your incident process requires five manual steps. With Incident Workflows, you can automate the entire process. 

Responders no longer need to worry about manual steps once the Incident Workflow is configured. Instead, they can initiate the appropriate incident workflow (Eg., P1, P2), allowing the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to coordinate the right teams to promptly address and resolve incidents.  This gives teams more time back to focus on the task at hand: resolving the incident.

Take advantage of our latest generally available Incident Workflow Templates, which enable you to quickly operationalize best practices for managing major incidents, standardizing collaboration tools and ensuring the right stakeholders are informed with the latest updates. These templates are designed to empower responders, who have not previously used Incident Workflows, to quickly adopt and implement this functionality, leading to faster incident resolution.

Better context for faster incident resolution

Context is key for responders during incidents. Having the right information is essential for sharing with other responders and helps guide their actions, such as sending status updates or writing a postmortem. Details such as “data regions” or “customer impact” help teams prioritize efforts effectively. To assist with this, PagerDuty introduced Custom Fields on Incidents.

This new feature allows teams to easily extract important incident data from any system of record and place it where responders can access it, whether on the incident details page or in a status update. PagerDuty empowers responders to save valuable time during triage and make more informed decisions by including relevant critical data.

Simplify stakeholder updates with notification templates

Effective communication with key stakeholders during incidents is crucial. However, crafting these notifications can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. By using Status Update Notification Templates, you can leverage customizable templates that alleviate the strain of writing communications, streamline the process and reduce the time and effort required to share critical updates.

These templates eliminate the guesswork in formatting updates by providing pre-designed templates tailored to your organization’s needs. With Status Update Notification Templates, you can streamline the process of sharing incident updates, ensuring clear and consistent communication with stakeholders.

Get 1+1=3 with the PagerDuty Operations Cloud

These features work great alone, but together they provide a better end-to-end incident management experience. With Incident Workflows, sending templated status updates becomes effortless, and soon, you’ll be able to include Custom Fields directly in those updates. For instance, imagine using a custom field to add an object like “data region” and seamlessly launch an Incident Workflow that includes a status update with the same custom field. In the near future, a responder will be able to automatically populate the same information to a Jira ticket or reassign the incident to the right regional responder. 

This powerful orchestration across a unified platform allows you to streamline work across the entire incident lifecycle for maximum time savings, resulting in faster resolution and better customer experiences without impacting revenue.  

Watch a demonstration of how these features work together.

Dynamic Digital Ecosystem

PagerDuty brings all of these capabilities to a desktop web interface, mobile application, chat experience and API so you can work in a way that suits you best. Therefore, we are making these capabilities available in all four of these services to enable you to do so.

Don’t Wait, Try it Out

PagerDuty empowers you to streamline your incident response process by leveraging the PagerDuty Operations Cloud with Incident Workflows and integrating various tools and templates. This integration optimizes your incident management, ensuring fast and effective response. As a result, your organization can experience reduced operating costs while freeing up resources to prioritize innovation and growth. 

Curious to see these features in action? Embark on our Product Tour or try our free 14-day trial to witness the power of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud firsthand.

The post How to Maximize Time Savings and Reduce Toil During Incident Response 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.

Intrigued? Here are the top 5 use cases of ways PagerDuty customers use Custom Fields: 

1. Label incident impact 

The most common use case for Custom Fields is to capture and assess incident impact. One enterprise SaaS company is using Custom Fields to identify the region, components, and customers impacted by an incident. When their responders open up an incident record, Custom Fields aggregate this critical information from across different systems in one clear and consistent place. This enables responders to quickly understand the downstream implications of the incident at hand. 

2. Sync with important ITSM data 

Many organizations use both PagerDuty and an ITSM ticketing system. Sometimes, it’s necessary to work with data from both at the same time. Rather than flipping between tabs to search for information, one financial institution is using Custom Fields to add the relevant ITSM fields to the incident details page in PagerDuty. For example, you could attach an ITSM incident or problem ID number to your view in PagerDuty. 

3. Attach links to third-party or homegrown tools 

It’s often useful to link to supporting tools directly from a PagerDuty incident. This could be a homegrown tool or a third party vendor for documentation, for example. One travel company is using PagerDuty Custom Fields to append third-party postmortem links to the associated incident. This makes it easy to track and cross-reference information. It also helps the organization enforce adherence to their 2-week SLA for postmortems on incidents. 

4. Connect conference bridges for different regions

One multinational financial institution is using Custom Fields to attach different conference bridges for their operations centers and stakeholders that are spread across multiple geographical regions. In particular, they are using this new flexible field to capture the ‘stakeholder bridge’ which happens to be a URL. Now that the different groups no longer have to chase down links and phone numbers from separate sources, it makes bringing everyone together faster and simpler than ever. 

5. Assign incident response roles

There are several roles that need to be assumed during an incident response. These include, but are not limited to, incident commander, deputy, scribe, and subject-matter expert. To make those role designations clearer and keep the team operating smoothly, one automotive services company is using Custom Fields to add response roles. Now the team never has to question roles and responsibilities for a given incident, whether they are actively working on a resolution or reviewing past data. 

Conclusion

These use cases are a starting point to understand how Custom Fields can bring value to your organization, but the sky is the limit for other ways you might apply them. Whatever your use case, Custom Fields will help you utilize PagerDuty as a single place to manage incidents end-to-end. Custom Fields on Incidents are generally available via web, mobile and the API for customers on Business and Digital Operations plans. If you are an existing customer, you can try out Custom Fields today. If you’re a prospect or on a lower-tier PagerDuty plan, check out the product tour to see Custom Fields in action.

The post Top 5 Use Cases for Custom Fields on Incidents appeared first on PagerDuty.

The work resulting from urgent incidents cannot be postponed because it impacts a company’s revenue or ability to service customers. Often, this work is repetitive and could be delegated to first responders. However, the deeper context needed to make accurate diagnosis and remediation of these incidents is locked away in production environments and requires knowledge, skills and access privileges from specialists. Responders frequently have to escalate the incident to already overworked specialists—a time-consuming process that can be disruptive, frustrating and repetitive.

By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks from your incident resolution process, you can free up your engineers to focus on higher-value activities that require creativity and critical thinking. This, in turn, can lead to shorter MTTR, better customer experiences, faster innovation, revenue protection and improved profitability.

PagerDuty Automated Incident Resolution provides pre-built and customizable diagnostic and remediation capabilities that help first-responders determine the cause and initiate remediation within their production environment, which saves time and requires fewer individuals to assist with the response. Automating this repetition can speed up MTTR by 25% and reduce costs and interruptions by at least 50%.

In order to make it easier for our customers to realize how Automated Incident Resolution can speed up their MTTR, we rolled out the In-Product Trial of Runbook Automation for Incident Resolution last month. This trial is exclusively available to our Business and Digital Operations customers. PagerDuty users can request a trial from the automation tab using the Web UI:

The account owner will see an approval request via email. Upon approval, the account owner can set up a trial for Automation Actions and get a fully functional Runbook Automation instance in just a few minutes. Users will see a visual guide to help them get started authoring automation, including: Creating a Runbook Automation (RBA) Instance, Adding a Runner (a program that allows you to execute automation jobs in your environment), Adding Automation Actions (which allows you to invoke automation jobs and workflows from PagerDuty), Running Actions (from the PagerDuty incident details page), and viewing the output from the automation.

We encourage you to fully take advantage of this trial to further automate and optimize your incident response process. We are looking forward to hearing your Incident Resolution Automation Success story.

The post Take Advantage of the New Product Trial of Runbook Automation for Incident Resolution appeared first on PagerDuty.

The number of tools used by distributed teams to manage incidents has multiplied over the years, leading to a valley of tool sprawl. Throw in manual processes and you’ve got too much toil and multiple points of failure. Maintaining disparate tools and systems isn’t just unwieldy, it’s expensive. 

Our latest capabilities add to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to make it easier than ever for teams to consolidate their incident management stack. New innovations coming to Incident Workflows, Custom Fields on Incidents, and Status Update Notification Templates will further help organizations shift from a manual, reactive state towards a more proactive, preventative approach to incident response.

When used together in an integrated fashion, these features create a multiplier effect, delivering an unparalleled level of operational efficiency and business acceleration. This interoperability is core to what allows the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to empower organizations to manage incidents from ingest to resolution on a unified platform, without the need for third-party tools and homegrown solutions. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new, or check out the updates for yourself in the product tour.

Custom Fields to enrich incident data

No more chasing information across disparate systems–capture incident context in one centralized place with Custom Fields on Incidents! Custom Fields allow teams to pull in important incident data from any system of record and put it at the fingertips of responders so they have the information needed to resolve incidents faster. Custom Fields on Incidents will be available on web, mobile, and through the API. Sign up for early access. 

Enhanced templates for stakeholder communications 

Automate how status updates are created to drive efficiency and consistency, rather than manually crafting update messages from scratch. Response teams now have access to an expanded set of fields in their templates, including “Business Impact,” “Conference Bridge,” and “Slack Channel.” Templates will soon also support Custom Fields (sign up for Early Access). These new fields help response teams add important context about the incident at hand to their communications to stakeholders. They can also create communications from templates as part of an Incident Workflows workflow action.

Integration between Incident Workflows and ServiceNow and Jira Server

Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your ITSM tools. PagerDuty customers can now run PagerDuty Incident Workflows from ServiceNow incident records and Jira issue records. This means customers can access powerful workflow automation from the places they already work. This functionality is now available in v7.9 ServiceNow application (Utah certified) and v4 Jira Server. To learn more, check out the KB articles for ServiceNow and Jira Server integrations.

Expanded Incident Workflow actions 

Reduce operating costs by automating manual steps of the incident response process using Incident Workflows. Today we’re announcing a new set of actions planned for launch in Q2 which further expands the range of PagerDuty features that can be automated through Incident Workflows. These actions include run Automation Actions, use Status Update Notification Templates to send a status update, create a Microsoft Teams meeting or channel, add a note to an incident, reassign an incident, and change incident priority. 

Conclusion

Today’s announcement summarizes a few of the ways that PagerDuty is designing our products and features to help our customers mitigate risk to revenue and minimize toil by helping them manage incidents end-to-end. In building our products cohesively as a platform for action, we can enable teams to automate and accelerate critical work–to ultimately transform operations and move business forward faster. The power of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud lies in the synergies provided through the seamless integration across the entire product suite, and these features work together in concert, lowering the barrier to adopting more proactive, preventative processes. 

If you’d like to learn more about the latest release, register for our launch webinar. Our product team will be diving into and demoing these features. 

To see the latest features in action, check out our product tour.

The post PagerDuty Launches New Innovations to Reduce Tool Sprawl and Optimize Operations appeared first on PagerDuty.

PagerDuty delivers clear value for any organization at any stage of operational maturity. 

• $356K savings/year per team of ten.¹
• 70% faster time to resolve.¹
• 795% return on investment.¹
• 2 month payback period.¹

But you don’t have to take our word for it – the real-life experiences of our customers speak volumes. Here are a few examples of how PagerDuty creates value for global industry leaders. 

The Value SAP Receives from PagerDuty

SAP is a market leader in enterprise application software. And with more than three quarters of the world’s transaction revenue touching an SAP system, uptime is critical. 

SAP needed to digitally transform its business and move customer-facing services to the cloud. They also needed to ensure that there were fewer and less impactful incidents that could impact the customer experience and put revenue at risk. 

The task initially appeared easier said than done, especially given SAP’s size. Many teams were using custom in-house tools that weren’t scalable across the organization. There were “islands” of automation where certain sub-processes were moving quickly, but this acceleration wasn’t happening at scale. The exceptionally wide variety of tools and processes across business units and global theaters also made collaboration particularly burdensome. 

SAP’s Global Cloud Services team now uses PagerDuty to orchestrate their major incident response. We helped improve communication between teams and stakeholders, providing real-time information about the status of an incident and often reducing response time from hours to minutes. 

PagerDuty helped SAP achieve incredible results in just a couple of months, including: 

• 25% reduction in the number of responders needed for major incidents.
• Reduced response times by 30%.
• Resolution times reduced by 26%.
• Greater cross-team collaboration and ownership of services. 
• Seamless integration with various commercial and in-house tools. 

Read here to learn more about how SAP’s Global Cloud Services team improved operational excellence.  

The Value Brink’s Receives From PagerDuty 

Brink’s is a well-known leader in cash management, operating more than 16,000 secured trucks serving customers in more than 100 countries. Technology keeps the money moving—but a few years ago the company realized that to grow the business, its technology needed an upgrade.

Teams were managing workflows manually and spending too much time and money on repetitive, mundane tasks. Moreover, attempts to deploy changes in the IT environment were both time consuming and inconsistent. That’s when Brink’s decided to turn to us for help. 

PagerDuty Process Automation quickly demonstrated its value by reducing toil and facilitating faster deployments and migrations. This made employee’s lives easier while delivering agility, scalability, and savings to the business. The company further expanded PagerDuty-powered automation to other stakeholders and services, such as reducing the time it took engineers to provision virtual machines. By choosing an easy-to-use solution and automating well-documented processes, the Brink’s team realized immediate value and saw a fast return on investment, including: 

• 99% less time spent on manual tasks while reducing risk of manual errors. 
• More than 500 FTE engineering hours are saved annually.
• Developer’s waiting time reduced from two weeks to 3 minutes via self-serve automated workflows. 

Read here to learn more about how Brink’s successfully used automation to drive constant, iterative improvements to the business and, in turn, to its customers. 

Reduce Costs and Accelerate Growth

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the platform for action that empowers organizations to anticipate, automate, and accelerate critical work and to transform operations. It’s essential infrastructure that allows teams to focus on high-priority work, substantially reduce operating costs, and radically accelerate innovation and growth. 

The results from SAP and Brink’s showcase how PagerDuty helps them save time and money, and the value is true for customers of all sizes and industries.

Learn more about how PagerDuty can help you save time and money, or sign up for a free trial.

¹IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by PagerDuty, PagerDuty Helps Organizations Optimize Their Digital Operations Management, doc #US47011820, January 2021

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One of the most highly anticipated announcements from our November launch was Incident Workflows to automate manual steps of incident response. Today, we are excited to share that this feature is now generally available. If you’re a PagerDuty customer, you can start using them today!

What are incident workflows?

Think about all of the manual steps in your incident response process–paging subject matter experts, setting up a conference bridge, establishing a Slack channel, sending out status updates… the list goes on. Remembering to take each of these steps every time an incident strikes adds unnecessary cognitive load to an already stressful process. These repeatable, manual tasks are perfect candidates for automation. 

Incident Workflows automatically orchestrate the actions you already know you’ll need to take based on the type of incident at hand. Serving as an upgrade from Response Plays, now you can use a no-code/low-code builder to create customizable incident workflows that will reduce the manual work required to escalate, mobilize, and coordinate the right incident response for any use case. You can automatically trigger common incident response actions using if-this-then-that logic, such as adding a responder, subscribing stakeholders, or spinning up a conference bridge. 

Here’s a short demo that showcases how it works:

Let’s take a closer look at the functionality that makes Incident Workflows so powerful. 

Conditional Triggers

Different incident types require different remediation steps. Conditional triggers allow you to create logic to kick off a workflow when criteria for certain incident fields are met–like changes to priority, urgency, or status. For example, you can now define a major incident workflow that is automatically triggered for all P1 and P2 incidents. And for the users who would like to double down on automation, you could even set priority using Event Orchestration and have your Incident Workflow pick up that priority change as a trigger for the major incident workflow.

You can also utilize manual triggers that allow a responder to start a workflow directly from the incident details page. When a manual trigger is added, Incident Workflows can be triggered from the PagerDuty web app, mobile app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or directly through the API.

Enhanced CollabOps Actions

Save time setting up collaboration channels by configuring your workflow to do it for you. Use workflow actions to spin up a Zoom conference bridge or create a per-incident Slack channel that includes all incident responders and incident updates. P.S. If you’re a Microsoft Teams user, we’re working on comparable functionality–stay tuned. 

Easy Communications & Coordination

Communicating to internal and external stakeholders in a timely and transparent way is essential to effective incident response. As my colleague, Hannah Culver, explained, having a prepared business response plan in place can help internal cross-functional teams work better together, while also helping customer-facing teams preserve customer trust through proactive communications. Incident Workflows make this piece of the puzzle easier by allowing users to automate adding responders to the incident, subscribing stakeholders, and posting status updates, so you can keep everyone who needs to know about the incident informed in real time. 

Resolve On-the-Go

Incident Workflows are also available for PagerDuty Mobile on iOS and Android devices. Whether walking your dog or away from your desk, PagerDuty Mobile alerts you about the top open incidents you need to take action on. You can manually trigger a preconfigured incident workflow of custom response steps, from your incident detail screen, and start working with the right teams to resolve the incident from your preferred mobile devices. Learn more about triggering Incident Workflows from your mobile device in the Knowledge Base.

End-to-End Automation on a Unified Platform

Incident Workflows were built to pair with other automation features on the PagerDuty platform to help teams resolve faster and minimize impact to revenue. For example, Event Orchestration can simultaneously change priority to automatically trigger an Incident Workflow, while also kicking off automated diagnostics via Automation Actions so that the script is already run by the time the right responders are called and get to the incident-specific Slack channel that the Incident Workflow has spun up. 

Conclusion

During Incident Response, responders should be free to focus on their core responsibility – resolving the incident. Incident Workflows give them the gift of being able to automate those other essential, yet tedious tasks in a standardized, repeatable way. By standardizing your incident response processes, you can ensure the right actions are taken across teams to reduce your time to incident resolution. Given that Incident Workflows are already included in Business and Digital Operations plans, it makes sense to utilize this great new functionality at no additional cost. Why piece together your tech, when you can achieve end-to-end incident response all in one place? Your management team asking about tool consolidation will certainly appreciate it. 

This is just the first step in PagerDuty’s journey towards offering more extensibility for our customers to configure responses for their unique use cases. To learn more about Incident Workflows, check out our KB article and try it out today. For more in-depth learning, you can also sign up for the Incident Workflows PDU course on-demand.

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