Today, organizations aim to deliver flawless digital experiences because they recognize that one positive or negative interaction can make or break a brand. PagerDuty plays a critical role in helping companies become modern enterprises by allowing them to embrace new technology, while reducing time and costs, increasing productivity, and protecting and growing revenue. We are advancing our mission to revolutionize operations and build customer trust by anticipating the unexpected in an unpredictable world.

The focus for everything that PagerDuty creates is the Operations Cloud, the platform for mission-critical, time-critical operations work in the modern enterprise. Our platform is essential infrastructure for revolutionizing digital operations to compete and win as a modern digital business. The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is behind our customers’ success stories, enabling them to thrive in today’s digital-first era. From incident response to AIOps, process automation to CSOps, modern enterprises are placing their trust in PagerDuty to navigate the complex world of digital operations. 

According to Gartner, “Traditional approaches to IT service management aren’t suited to modern hybrid cloud environments and faster service delivery times. Infrastructure and operations leaders must understand the hype around new technologies, such as generative AI and process automation, and how they affect ITSM strategies and business value.”

Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Gartner Hype Cycle methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals. 

So where exactly have we been mentioned in the Gartner Hype Cycle reports? Here’s a snapshot:

• Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, 2023 (July 2023) [AIOps, Automated Incident Response, Site Reliability Engineering, Service Operations]
• Hype Cycle for Compute, 2023 (July 2023) [Infrastructure Orchestration]
• Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms, 2023 (July 2023) [Site Reliability Engineering, AIOps Platforms]
• Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, 2023 (July 2023) [Infrastructure Orchestration]
• Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2023 (July 2023) [Infrastructure Orchestration, Site Reliability, AIOps Platforms, SOAP, Automated Incident Response]
• Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2023 (July 2023) [AIOps, Automated Incident Response, Site Reliability Engineering, Service Operations, Swarming Support]
• Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering, 2023 (July 2023) [Infrastructure Orchestration, SLO Management, Automated Incident Response, AIOps Platforms, SLIs/SLOs]
• Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2023 (July 2023) [Site Reliability Engineering]
• Hype Cycle for IT Management Intelligence, 2023 (July 2023) [AIOps Platforms]
• Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Strategy, 2023 (July 2023) [Site Reliability Engineering]
• Hype Cycle for Operating Models, 2023 (July 2023) [Site Reliability Engineering, AIOps Platforms]
• Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 2023 (July 2023) [Site Reliability Engineering, AIOps Platforms]

In an always-on digital world, we’re here to optimize digital operations, expand our market reach through R&D, and, most importantly, solve tangible business challenges for our customers. We believe today’s announcement underscores our dedication to this optimization and transformation. We’re grateful for this recognition and for our loyal customers, but we know the best is still yet to come. Join us on our journey as we continue to empower enterprises worldwide and shape the future of digital operations management!

Gartner Research Methodologies, ” Gartner Hype Cycle”, “August 16, 2023”, https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Processes – from governance and measurement to training and communication – are a pivotal component of success. They should not be an afterthought. Processes play a critical role in facilitating new ways of working, helping to align people with new roles and responsibilities, driving uptake of new technologies, and accelerating the adoption of new operating models. All of which are critical to improving CloudOps maturity.

Processes Change is an Evolution

No matter where you are in the cloud transformation journey, your organization’s processes must be modified in tandem to support the new environment. Hybrid cloud environments are more complex and dynamic in nature. There are more moving parts, everything in the cloud moves faster, making observability more complex.

As organizations migrate to the cloud, IT operations roles will change as organizations adopt methodologies like DevOps and Agile. Processes must keep up with these changes and adapt to the new ways in which people are working. Legacy ITOps processes designed for a centralized, on premises world no longer fit. Organizations need new CloudOps processes for a decentralized, hybrid cloud world.

Take governance as an example. When services were delivered via on premises infrastructure, governance processes were only designed to deal with a single monolithic architecture. These legacy processes can’t support the complex mix of cloud vendors and dependencies that exist in hybrid-cloud environments. Beginner-level organizations can start here, by putting in place new governance processes among existing decentralized or partially centralized IT departments for the management of their hybrid cloud resources.

However, changing your organization’s processes won’t happen overnight. A big part of the reason for this is people. People can be resistant to change. Routines are easy, and the unknown often isn’t appealing to everyone. Changes need to be gradual and exploratory. This will give your teams time to get used to new ways of doing things and to see the benefits as process changes begin to have a positive impact on their work.

Giving people power and ownership over processes is another component of successful process evolution. Keeping changes flexible is also important. Every organization’s culture and technology will be different. Getting new processes right on the first go is unlikely. Processes should continue to evolve and modify over time, always changing and improving to fit in with your organization’s way of doing things.

The Practical Steps to CloudOps Maturity

As your organization matures its CloudOps position, you will be adopting new operating models, including DevOps, Agile, and Service Ownership. Successfully embedding new approaches means existing processes need to be evolved and new ones created entirely. Particularly those around how teams work together, interact, and communicate.

At the Beginner stage, organizations are taking their first steps towards maturity, including getting started with DevOps and Agile. To progress, organizations should also improve and clarify the governance framework and processes for the federation between the CloudOps and other IT groups.

For those at the Intermediate stage, they should look to further clarify and centralize the federation of both the CloudOps platform and the CloudOps organization. Another key process milestone here involves creating an acquisition, development, and integration pipeline for Agile, CloudOps, Cloud Architect, and DevOps resources. Measurement will also come into play; beginning to measure key behaviours rather than key process indicators like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Intermediate organizations must also experiment with service ownership, to develop the skills and processes that will become important as they transition to Advanced.

To then achieve the end goal of becoming an Expert, organizations need to fully and formally adopt Full-Service Ownership processes. They must also focus on expanding the remit of DevOps and CloudOps to include Chaos Engineering. One other critical process evolution here includes strengthening a blameless post-mortem process, and using incidents as a continuous training opportunity.

Finally, even for Cloud Native organizations, there are process improvements that can be made. For example, focusing on the development of a stable service ownership model, organizing existing IT operations tools into a single CloudOps platform, and applying 3D negotiation skills to internal governance and processes changes.

Top-Down Leadership is Key

As outlined above, reaching cloud maturity involves a huge amount of change and many moving parts. It is also a major corporate shift, rather than solely an IT change. Two of the most important drivers for change are “alignment with IT restructuring” and “alignment with corporate restructuring”.

Changes of this magnitude need strong leadership. Aligning IT with the business requires good communication, accurate measurement, and a shared understanding of goals. However, our study found that in every direction, there are communication barriers that hamper progress to CloudOps maturity. For Beginner organizations, “engaging IT leadership” was cited as one of the top three challenges to building and implementing cloud operating models. Equally for Expert organizations, “engaging line of business leadership” was identified.

Top-down leadership is critical in ensuring the right processes are in place two facilitate two-way communication and engagement. Without the buy-in of all stakeholders, process evolution won’t be successful. While change can be organic and employee-driven, it also requires commitment and a charter from executive leadership. Change must happen across the organization to take advantage of CloudOps at scale, create business results, and accelerate through the maturity phases.

To read the full IDC White Paper PagerDuty commissioned, download the whitepaper “Cloud Operations Maturity Assessment, 2021: Key Attributes and Behaviors that Differentiate Beginners from Experts”.

The post Process binds technology and people in cloud maturity success appeared first on PagerDuty.

However, this shift towards digital poses some key challenges if the technology, processes, and people are not aligned across the organization. Every organization approaches this differently. But what sets companies apart to set them up for long-lasting maturity for their cloud operations (CloudOps) investments?

A recent IDC White Paper, sponsored by PagerDuty, delves into this exact question, with the intent to better understand trends and behaviors of CloudOps organizations and what constitutes success to reach digital operational maturity.

This blog series dives deeper into each of the key findings. The first blog in this series defined the four phases of CloudOps maturity and identified three accelerators that help organizations evolve from “beginner” to “expert” on the CloudOps journey.

This second blog will explore how technology choices can impact and influence the journey to CloudOps maturity. Technology is key to aligning and enabling cloud infrastructure and management with the greater business. Let’s see what trends IDC uncovered when they pulled the 800+ survey responses into cohorts and compared their approaches to technology.

Consolidation and federation can help with visibility across complex systems

As companies shift to the cloud in order to shorten development cycles, to push more code, and to build faster, they also typically observe infrastructure and processes becoming more dynamic and subject to change events. The changes hitting (and testing) the production system are greater in volume and coming from more decentralized teams, which also opens the door to more potential for more untangling required to get to the root cause when things go wrong, as well as more security challenges.

To handle this increased complexity, teams are observed to begin to use more observability tools to gain visibility across hybrid infrastructure and teams. However, using too many tools at once can also make it challenging to manage your cloud operations with complete visibility and a single source of truth. To be successful, organizations should standardize on a CloudOps platform early during this organizational change, using the platform as a key tool in their federation efforts and later in their centralization efforts. Respondents in the Expert cohort displayed a trend for using a single platform for improved observability, orientation, and decision making.

As shown below, 74% of Expert organizations are using a single platform, as opposed to just 18% of Beginners and 24% of Intermediates.

Mature CloudOps organizations display a “hybrid by design” approach

The report showed that mature organizations are overwhelmingly displaying a choice of hybrid infrastructure, which is unlikely to change. CloudOps, like the underlying technology, are a catalyzing force for hybrid and matrix management structures, which present an opportunity for leaders and employees alike to modernize leadership within the organization, and to create a new, more flexible information technology architecture.

Technically, only 24% of CloudOps adopters (BEGINNERs) report that they utilize a hybrid cloud architecture, with 59% saying they have no plans to deploy a hybrid cloud architecture. Meanwhile, 64% of CloudOps innovators (EXPERTs) are already using a hybrid cloud infrastructure for production activities, with an additional 6% using it for testing activities. The remaining ~30% of innovators (EXPERTs), are “cloud-first” companies that have minimal or limited private cloud/bespoke hardware setups.

Rules-based and hybrid approaches persist in face of AI/ML availability

Most Expert level organizations have reached maturity by primarily using rules-based observability tools. Experts are also far less likely to use a hybrid rules-based and AI/ML approach than Beginners. In contrast, Beginner organizations tend to use a combination of both AI/ML and rules-based platforms. In fact, 30% of Beginner organizations indicated they were using a hybrid approach (AI/ML and rules-based) as opposed to only 11% of Expert organizations.

However, this is likely because most Expert organizations began their journey around four to five years ago, when AI and ML had not yet matured. These technologies have developed considerably today. For Beginner organizations, this means they can harness both AI/ML and rules-based tools, adopting a hybrid approach to accelerate their CloudOps maturity journey. Using this combination of best practices could even enable them to become Experts in a shorter time than it took those already at Expert level.

As the industry shifts towards greater availability of more sophisticated AI/ML use cases for incident response and digital operations management, we expect the uptake of AI-first offerings to increase as organizations seek out new ways to help reduce toil for the frontline digital responders.

Don’t forget the cultural investments required for changes to tech and processes

Switching technology platforms alone cannot occur in a vacuum – in order to reach digital operational maturity you also need to transform your processes and culture alongside new technology.

Service ownership is an operational and cultural model where developers own code end-to-end. By bringing developers closer to their code and the customers, you’re creating tighter feedback loops and with ownership and accountability, empowering faster innovation. By defining your entire service hierarchy by relating technical services to business impact you ensure all systems have clear ownership which helps streamline the incident response process.

With service ownership in place, you can engage the right responder right away when things break, which can help improve incident response and reduce MTTR. The report showed that implementing full-service ownership is a hallmark of CloudOps maturity, with 60% of Expert organizations indicating they had a service ownership model compared to 29% of Advanced and just 8% of Beginners.

As mentioned in the first blog, introducing new tools or processes without organization-wide agreement can lead to siloed teams and a tool stack that’s not integrated for the entire organization.

Next up: Streamlining processes for CloudOps maturity

In the next blog post of this series, I’ll look at the role that organizations’ processes play in reaching CloudOps maturity. To read in full, download the IDC White Paper, “Cloud Operations Maturity Assessment, 2021: Key Attributes and Behaviors that Differentiate Beginners from Experts.”

** IDC White Paper, sponsored by PagerDuty, Cloud Operations Maturity Assessment, 2021: Key Attributes and Behaviors that Differentiate Beginners from Experts, 2021, Doc. #US47638121, June 2021.

The post How the technology you choose influences CloudOps maturity appeared first on PagerDuty.

PagerDuty commissioned a study with IDC to assess the current state of CloudOps. The survey of 802 global enterprises explored CloudOps and incident management, their impact on IT, and how organizations can develop their maturity when operating in the cloud. The study identified four distinct CloudOps maturity phases organizations evolve through as they begin to operate in a cloud model: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert (read a full definition of each here).

In this blog series, we will dive into some of the findings and explain the key changes that occur as organizations progress through the stages. We’ll begin with a look at one of the most critical elements in making CloudOps a success: the people involved.

Creating a CloudOps Culture

The IDC study found that there are multiple drivers towards CloudOps. These drivers included the need to save costs, achieve greater agility, and align with wider corporate and IT restructuring (fig.1). Whatever the specific driver (or combination thereof), the common factor is people. People are at the center of any successful digital transformation journey that enables organizations to be more resilient, adaptable, and innovative.

Adopting CloudOps is no different. It represents a significant cultural shift that goes beyond simply implementing new tools to requiring a new way of operating and making decisions. To be successful, there needs to be strong leadership and a clear vision from the top to engender the support of those on the ground. Two of the study’s key findings were that, “a mandate for leadership-driven cultural change is needed” and, “collaborative leadership skills are necessary.”

Building a Team for Success

Just as leadership must make changes for success at each phase of the CloudOps maturity journey, the team and people dynamics must also evolve. The study states that, “The degree of organizational, personal, and cognitive change required to achieve a high level of CloudOps maturity should not be underestimated.” It goes on to say, “Logically, as the technical environment becomes increasingly complex, the organization that supports it needs to be able to both specialize in specific skills and make decisions quickly.”

It’s vital to build knowledge across the organization, invest in training and development, and have the right mix of experience in place. In this blog, we discussed the three main accelerators for CloudOps maturity. Let’s look at how each accelerator impacts people and teams:

• Take a hybrid approach: To accelerate their maturity journey, organizations can reap the benefits of rules-based automation combined with the intelligence of AI supported by ML. However, it’s important to ensure that this change does not move so fast that the rest of the organization is left behind. Organizations must take teams on an incremental journey, investing in people and training to enable that hybrid approach. At the Beginner level, we found that initial efforts include creating CloudOps positions (41%) and training in CloudOps software (32%). At the Intermediate level, this is joined by DevOps training (31%) and, at the Advanced level, the creation of a CloudOps (44%) or DevOps (41%) Center of Excellence.
• Pursue top-down cultural change: Reaching digital maturity is not just an IT change, but a corporate change, and requires a major top-down shift driven by people. Advanced organizations have created a dedicated CloudOps team, and have staffed teams with experienced CloudOps, DevOps, and Cloud Architecture Specialists. At the Expert level, this goes further; CloudOps is a strategic differentiator driven by leaders and permeating the entire organization.
• Implement full-service ownership: A common characteristic of Expert organizations is a culture of accountability. This is underlined by the prevalence of full-service ownership (FSO). FSO enables software teams to build increasingly reliable and efficient applications, while also deploying code even faster and more frequently. FSO is designated by our IDC study as a “hallmark of CloudOps maturity.” Sixty percent (60%) of Expert organizations said that encouraging people to adopt an FSO mindset helped to support their cloud operating models.

Reaping the Rewards

As outlined in this blog on CloudOps, reaching Expert-level maturity is a challenging process. It takes time and requires significant investment in people and teams. But the hard work pays off. Over a sustained period of two years, Expert-level organizations reap considerable rewards such as:

● 44% improvement in downtime avoidance and revenue protection,
● 40% improvement in employee productivity, and
● 39% shorter time to market for new products and services.

In the next blog post in this series, I’ll look at the technology developments required to evolve CloudOps maturity. To read the full report, download the IDC White Paper, “Cloud Operations Maturity Assessment, 2021: Key Attributes and Behaviors that Differentiate Beginners from Experts.”

** IDC White Paper, sponsored by PagerDuty, Cloud Operations Maturity Assessment, 2021: Key Attributes and Behaviors that Differentiate Beginners from Experts, 2021, Doc. #US47638121, June 2021.

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451 Research Senior Analyst Nancy Gohring knows the difficulty of defining AIOps as well as anyone—she has been conducting a series of surveys with IT operations and developer professionals to understand how they view AIOps and how they may apply it. We asked Nancy to dive a bit deeper with some interviews with said professionals, and what she found was that responses were all over the place.

From her research on this topic, one thing she could declare is that AIOps can be broadly defined as any tool in the monitoring and incident response tool chain that uses artificial intelligence and/or machine learning (AI/ML).

With this definition in mind, Nancy offered some suggestions as to what to look for when evaluating AIOps tools and solutions.

Embrace Potential Benefits From AI/ML, but Don’t Be Distracted by AIOps Marketing

Look for solutions that make it easier to adopt AI/ML for alerting noise reduction, such as tools that:

• Have pre-trained machine learning models that allow you get started within days instead of months
• Can work with on-premise, cloud-based, and hybrid infrastructures
• Standardize data formats from multiple sources to integrate a disparate set of monitoring tools
• Use machine learning in addition to rules-based approaches to ensure useful results

Look to the Past

Evaluate tools and solutions that leverage data from past actions of responders to better inform future actions and responses. Additionally, look at solutions that enable auto-remediation to more rapidly resolve incidents.

It’s Not Just About Technology: Don’t Forget That People and Processes Are Key

Getting the right person to respond at the right time is becoming more difficult with increased complexity introduced by the use of microservices and DevOps practices, so having a solution that can alert the right person at the right time is critical.

Think Big to Make the Business Case

Reducing mean-time-to-acknowledge (MTTA) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) incidents are great goals for an IT operations team, but what does that really mean for the business? When making the business case for an AIOps solution inclusive of incident response, be sure to address the improved business outcomes as well. Outcomes include things like downtime avoidance or downtime reduction that translates to improved customer experiences and revenue protection, in addition to increased productivity from developers and operators who can now spend less time on unplanned work.

Unifying Data and Processes Can Improve Incident Response

Centralizing alerting data from monitoring tools on a single platform allows distributed teams to better orchestrate an effective incident response and drive a more collaborative approach, resulting in improved staff morale and productivity.

Embrace Automation

Automation is not only about remediation—which may take time to adopt for many—but it is also useful for removing the toil of incident response by automating specific tasks in the incident response process. These tasks include alerting the right person at the right time, setting up a response team teleconference, accessing the right runbook, communicating status updates to business stakeholders, and generating incident postmortem reports.

PagerDuty agrees with Nancy’s conclusion in this paper that just buying the right set of AIOps tools is not a silver bullet. To make the most of what these tools have to offer, you need to make them part of a comprehensive strategy for addressing event management and incident response.

PagerDuty practices and believes that such a strategy should include an assessment of how your organization’s teams own and operate their services. It’s especially important when considering new technologies like AIOps to understand how it fits into your existing operating models. As businesses have increasingly moved to the cloud to capture better scale and agility, technical organizations have been evolving to support more and more applications and microservices in increasingly hybridized environments.

This uptick in complexity across technology also means changes to people and their corresponding processes. Teams are increasingly taking on a decentralized form, where lines of business often staff their own technology teams, each with their own culture, velocity, and toolchain. IT leaders looking to purchase AIOps solutions should ensure that they keep both centralized teams and decentralized teams (where developers individually own and maintain their code in production) in mind to ensure they will get the right return on investment with utilization.

Download this report from 451 Research to read more about the lessons you can learn from Nancy Gohring and how PagerDuty AIOps can help you and your organization make the transformation to DevOps and full-service ownership.

The post What Is AIOps and Why Should I Care? appeared first on PagerDuty.

The survey focused on identifying current practices and challenges of responding to customer-impacting technology issues. Specifically, it examined how time-critical, unplanned work impacts digital operations across a number of business and health factors, such as productivity, innovation, customer experience, and employee well-being and retention.

It found that more than 3 out of 10 companies experience at least one major technology issue per week—and in North America and EMEA, 51% and 73% of respondents, respectively, said they find out about customer-impacting issues from the customers themselves. And in the APJ region, over half of respondents indicated that they have experienced a major technology issue that wasn’t covered by their company’s documented response plan.

As Matty Stratton, one of our DevOps Advocates points out, “Customer experience is the new competitive battleground for business, where service uptime and reliability are critically important. Responding to major technology issues after customers have already been affected creates unnecessary stress for employees, as well as revenue and reputational damage for the business.”

But it’s not just business revenue and reputation that suffer consequences.

Unplanned Work: Impact on Culture and Employee Retention

The report shows that IT professionals globally have experienced an increase in unplanned work of over 100 hours per person per year—which can have dire implications for the business, especially when you take into consideration a large majority respondents indicated that diverting resources to unplanned work makes them less able to innovate and deliver on business priorities.

Additionally, more than 1 in 3 employees in North America have considered leaving their job due to unplanned work. Nearly the same number of survey participants in EMEA (29%) indicated that they had also considered leaving their jobs due to unplanned work. Those numbers are worse in the APJ region: nearly two-thirds of those respondents said they had considered leaving their jobs as a result of unplanned work due to increased stress and anxiety (59% of respondents), reduced work-life balance (53%), and less time to work on important items (56%), in addition to other reasons.

Using Automation to Reduce Unplanned Work

With all this talk of time-critical, unplanned work, most companies are still unprepared to deal with it. In North America, 90% of participants indicated they implement little or no automation in their incident response processes, with 40% reporting that their entire response process is manual. In APJ, 30% of respondents said their organizations have no automation in place for resolving major technology issues while over half (55%) say just a few of the actions are automated. In EMEA, the numbers also paint a dire story, with 81% of respondents saying that their companies have little or no automation for IT issue resolution.

While it’s often common knowledge that automation benefits the business, the report provides direct evidence that the value of automation is keenly felt by employees. For example, in North America, teams that employ more automation in their response processes state they suffer less from reduced work-life balance and are 15% more interested in their jobs versus those that employ little to no automation. They also suffer from health issues up to 10% less frequently and are 20% less likely to seek other employment.

The same trend holds overseas: Companies that have implemented automated response processes have over 16% less unplanned work, and employees experience 15% (EMEA) and 23% (APJ) lower stress and fewer work-life balance issues.

This research finds that technology disruptions occur far more frequently than expected, and employees are often too busy fighting fires to establish proper resolution and prevention processes. This lack of planning generates more unplanned work, which is growing by hundreds of hours each year. Companies that are unable to address this crisis will experience growing top-line and bottom-line costs, including higher employee turnover and loss of customer trust and business.

Interested in learning more? You can read the global report here, or check out the EMEA and APJ reports to find out what your organization can do to mitigate the negative impact of unplanned work.

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