More Powerful than Ever: PagerDuty’s Revamped Mobile App is Primed for Even Better Incident Response
2020 revolutionized how we work. Many went from full-time office work to 100% remote overnight. And now that in-office is once again on the horizon, companies are thinking of ways to continue to work flexibly. However, this comes with increased challenges, and a need for tools that match this working style.
The PagerDuty mobile application is well recognized, with a 4.8 stars rating on the App Store and Google Play. We understand how important it is to reach the right people immediately – that’s why we’ve made significant investments in iOS and Android to help responders resolve critical work from anywhere, anytime.
This blog post covers some of the most exciting improvements, such as a new navigation interface to find the information you need most; improved incident intelligence through past and present incidents; and leverage automation to trigger automated diagnostics and take remediation actions.
Easily navigate to find the information you need most
For responders, you need to know when you’re on call and what services you’re on call for. If and when you do get called, it’s crucial that you can identify how the technical services you’re responsible for are performing. And most importantly, you want to be able to see all this information at a glance from your mobile app – not navigate through multiple screens and digging for information buried deep within an app.
With the new PagerDuty mobile home screen experience, the most important information that responders need is readily available. This redesign puts the top open incidents, on-call shifts and impacted technical services front and center, reducing the number of taps needed to navigate through the app.
The redesigned home screen is now available for early access. If you’d like to try it out, you can fill out this early access form and choose the New Mobile Home Experience selection, and we’ll send you instructions.
Part of working flexibly means having critical incident context at your disposal during the moments that matter most. When an incident begins, you need to get up to speed as quickly as possible to begin making decisions on how to best mitigate impact.
One way to do this is with the new mobile incident details screen. This screen provides you an easier visual experience and access to all your most important features to help you address incident response faster. The most important information about an incident is available to you immediately, such as notes from other responders working on the incident, change events, past incidents, and the latest alerts.
A new carousel on the updated version of the mobile incident details screen also allows you to run a play, add a priority or note, post a status update, and more.
Gain critical incident context through the past or present
When you experience an incident, one of the biggest hurdles to jump is answering the question, “Have we seen this before?” If you have, resolution might be as straightforward as running a play or executing an automation sequence that worked before. But it often can be difficult to find that historical context, and that’s time wasted that nobody can afford.
- The Past Incidents feature on the PagerDuty mobile app displays incidents with similar metadata that were generated on the same service as the current, active incident. This additional context facilitates accurate triage and reduces resolution time. For example, you can see whether you, or someone on your team, has been involved in a similar previous incident, and dive into details to discover what remediation steps were taken.
- Change Events – Changes within the system are often the culprit behind incidents. They are often overlooked because it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what change caused the incident, especially when many organizations are shipping new code dozens or even hundreds of times per day. However, “Gartner estimates that approximately 85% of all performance incidents can be traced.” Change Events will enable you to look at changes impacting your environment and help you establish the potential root cause. Change Events can be easily viewed in two areas of the mobile app: the new mobile incident details screen and service details. Either tap on a desired incident and scroll to Change Events, or navigate to the Service Directory to select a service to view a maximum of two Change Events. Event details displayed include the date and time, summary, service, type, links, and source.
- Another important piece of information during incident response is understanding the impact radius of an issue. One way to glean this information is by understanding Service Dependencies. If a large, customer-facing business service is experiencing problems due to the technical service incident, you’ll need to respond faster and with more contextual intelligence to better understand the scope of the problem.With Service Dependencies in the mobile app, you can view what services are affected to better understand scope. Service Dependencies are listed within each particular service’s profile in the Service Directory.
Leverage automation for faster response
As technology environments become more complex, it’s more important than ever to conserve people’s time and cognitive resources. This means ensuring that machines, not humans, serve as the first line of defense.
Automating repetitive manual tasks and well-understood incidents can divert unnecessary toil away from responders so that they can focus on their day jobs, and are only called for the incidents where they’re needed most. One way to do this is with automation that you can run with the tap of your finger.
PagerDuty Automation Actions is now generally available within PagerDuty mobile, empowering you to trigger automated diagnostics and take remediation actions from anywhere, anytime. It improves productivity by automating repeated diagnostic and remediation steps, replacing the toil of manual tasks. In addition to running the scripts, you can view previously run scripts and output reports directly from the mobile app. These update in real time, meaning you never miss a thing.
These latest additions to the PagerDuty mobile application help responders work in the way you want without sacrificing time, quality, or customer experience. Flexible work is here to stay, and PagerDuty’s powerful mobile application is committed to helping you make the most of it. If you haven’t tried our mobile application in a while, it’s time to take a second look. Use the QR Code and download either.
or Android.
Important: Ensure your mobile experience is secure
With so many new great features added to PagerDuty mobile, we are introducing the new minimum OS requirements to ensure the mobile app continues to be innovative and secure and improve the user experience. Starting June 27, 2022, the future versions of the PagerDuty mobile app will require Android 9.0 and iOS 14.0 or higher. Please ensure your device is upgraded to continue receiving mobile app updates.