Running a city government requires consistent, reliable protocols for managing digital services. This major city was looking for ways to resolve issues faster and reduce the impact on staff and the citizens of the community.

Inefficient Operations

The city spent too much time reaching the right people during major incidents. It lacked central visibility into IT systems, and was overwhelmed with noisy alerts when issues occurred. An IT System Admin shared, “Our Solarwinds networking and Nagios infrastructure alerts weren’t correlated, causing us to get flooded with noise when there are issues. There was no way to look at this data at once to understand the root cause or impact of these issues.” Without the full context of necessary steps to resolve issues, it was common for up to 20 people to become involved in response efforts.

Further, there was no documentation for who owned what services, meaning pages were sent to everyone. This created even more noise and toil, and overburdened team members. “After-hours, it could take up to 45 minutes just to get someone involved. No one responded 95% of the time and I had to hunt them down,” said an IT Systems Consultant. It became clear that the city needed to improve operations after the main website went down for 15 minutes without any response. They couldn’t risk any more customer-impacting downtime.

Reducing Noise and Prioritizing Alerts

The city selected PagerDuty to orchestrate the right response for every incident, integrating PagerDuty with the city’s IT ecosystem including Solarwinds and Nagios. With PagerDuty, the city has real-time visibility into their technical and business services through a unified platform. Now, notifications, schedules, and escalations are all automated through PagerDuty.

If the main website goes down, PagerDuty will help identify and reach the right people needed to resolve the issue, provide insight into the greater business impact, and offer actionable insights on steps to take to drive resolution. The city has reduced the mean time to acknowledge an incident and estimates that 25% less people are needed during a major incident. “PagerDuty allows the Service Desk to focus on supporting end users during an outage since they’re no longer contacting people to fix it,” said the IT System Admin.

Also, using PagerDuty AIOps, the city expects to reduce alert volume by 55% during the next year—a projected cost savings of over $50,000. With limited resources, this built-in automation reduces toil by helping responders focus on triage and resolution.

“PagerDuty is a great solution for the city, especially with how fast our IT department is growing.”

– IT System Admin, City Government

Optimizing for Cost and Operational Efficiency

PagerDuty has helped this city improve employee morale, productivity, and accountability. With less interruption and a greater sense of ownership from PagerDuty’s self-service capabilities, staff can focus on more productive work and quickly resolve issues when they arise.

The city calculates that they’ll save over $650,000 in total benefits annually, or a 250%+ return on investment (ROI). The payback period is projected to be just over 3 months. “PagerDuty is a great solution for the city, especially with how fast our IT department is growing,” shared the IT System Admin.

To learn how PagerDuty can help your team provide better service, contact your account manager or try a 14-day free trial today.