It’s been six months since I joined PagerDuty as the Vice President of Global Partner Ecosystem. In that time, we’ve been focused on evolving our partner ecosystem, programs, and processes to better align with our vision of an equitable world where we transform critical work with our partners so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.

At PagerDuty, our partner team is dedicated to cultivating a symbiotic and collaborative partner ecosystem. We recognize that our partners are integral to accelerating our customers’ time to value, and the strength of our technology and consulting partnerships fuels our collective success. Through joint efforts, we aim to provide exceptional value to our customers while enabling partners to unlock new opportunities and expand their market reach.

At the heart of PagerDuty’s success lies the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, a comprehensive platform designed to empower organizations with real-time digital operations management capabilities. This cloud-based solution acts as a central nervous system, enabling businesses to promptly detect, analyze, and respond to incidents. The PagerDuty Operations Cloud opens up opportunities for partners, allowing them to provide enhanced services, drive innovation, and optimize their customers’ operational resilience. By integrating their offerings with the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, partners are delivering a more comprehensive and efficient digital operations management experience.

PagerDuty has been recognized as a leader in Forrester Wave: Process-Centric AIOps. This acknowledgment reinforces PagerDuty’s commitment to driving efficient incident resolution and ensuring customer business continuity. This position places PagerDuty as a trusted partner in the AIOps space, providing organizations with the tools and expertise needed to effectively manage and resolve incidents, optimize processes, and improve overall digital operations. Download the report and learn more about PagerDuty’s leader position. 

GenAI: Shaping the Future of Incident Resolution

In our pursuit of innovation, PagerDuty has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning with our revolutionary GenAI capabilities for the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. GenAI leverages vast amounts of data and historical insights to provide intelligent recommendations and automate repetitive tasks, enabling organizations to resolve incidents faster and more effectively. This transformative technology empowers our partners to augment their service offerings, driving operational efficiency and delivering unparalleled value to their customers. Together, we are shaping the future of incident resolution and redefining what is possible in digital operations management.

PagerDuty & Partners are Better Together

This past year, we have been honored to receive two prestigious awards from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Firstly, we were named the AWS North America Rising Star of the Year, recognizing our remarkable growth and significant contribution to the AWS ecosystem. Secondly, we were thrilled to be crowned the AWS Canada Partner of the Year, showcasing our dedication to serving customers in the Canadian market and our ability to deliver exceptional value through our innovative solutions. These accolades testify to our commitment to collaboration, customer success, and continuous improvement.

We’re proud of and humbled by this recognition of our progress and are committed to enhancing our partner programs and engagement in service to our mutual customers. Learn more about our program and be part of our partnership ecosystem by clicking here. 

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud and our GenAI capabilities reinforce our commitment to innovation, efficiency, and excellence in digital operations management. With our recent recognition as a Forrester Wave Leader and our wins at the AWS awards, we celebrate our collective success and the incredible potential that lies ahead. Let us join forces, harness our strengths, and shape the future of digital operations management together.

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Datadog integrates with more than 500 technologies to provide deep visibility into a variety of systems and applications.  Users can set up monitors to automatically detect issues across any layer of their stack, and leverage the PagerDuty integration to quickly kick off a response.  For example, whenever a metric falls outside a designated range, Datadog sends a signal to both PagerDuty and Salesforce to alert the entire organization about a problem. This provides context with the relevant tags, data visualizations, and messages to help engineers identify and troubleshoot the issue.

PagerDuty and Datadog

As the central nervous system of an organization’s digital operations, PagerDuty collects those incoming signals, groups and correlates incidents, and when necessary creates a new incident.  PagerDuty assembles the right subject matter experts (SMEs), arms them with environment and situational information (related incidents, recent changes, etc.) so that they can resolve the incident in the shortest time possible. (See Datadog and PagerDuty diagram)

Datadog and PagerDuty Integration accelerates incident resolution

PagerDuty and Salesforce Service Cloud

At the same time, customer service agents (generally a separate team from the incident responders) engage with customers who are being affected by potentially the same incident.  While many DevOps and ITOps teams have adopted PagerDuty as a real-time digital operations platform, Customer Service teams generally don’t have real-time visibility into the DevOps and ITOps systems because traditionally they use different tools.

Dev and IT Teams use Tools traditionally not integrated with Customer Service Systems

This lack of real-time visibility becomes a barrier to clear communication between the front-end Customer Service teams and the back-end technical teams.  This internal barrier in turn hinders the Customer Service Team’s ability to set accurate expectations with customers and that has a negative effect on customer satisfaction.

Based on hundreds of conversations with several of our customers we decided to integrate PagerDuty with Customer Service Solutions like Salesforce Service Cloud.  PagerDuty provides Customer Service teams with the visibility they need to solve customer problems faster.  This also shields Engineering teams from having to manage updates and communications that Customer Service Teams need to provide.

Customer Service Reps and other stakeholders gain additional visibility with PagerDuty

Customer as a Signal

Even with excellent monitoring and observability tools, a large percentage of companies are still finding out about customer impacting disruptions directly from their customers. Customers perceive technical problems differently, for example in an eCommerce scenario, they may say “Checkout Service is not working” or “I cannot complete my purchase” instead of “eCommerce database is down” or “router down preventing traffic to the eCommerce database pod”.

This reporting of an incident by customers is what we call “customer as a signal”. PagerDuty correlates and reconciles this signal from the customer with other signals from Datadog (e.g., triggered monitors that identified database or router issues that could be causing the disruption) and provides additional information to the customer service reps who are now important stakeholders on this incident. Customer service reps can also use Datadog to see customer pain points with Real User Monitoring and Session Replay, enabling them to set accurate expectations about targeted resolution times.

Our Joint Solution

PagerDuty can concurrently send updates to Datadog and all stakeholders, so that the teams that perform system monitoring are kept informed about who is working to resolve the incident, which customers are affected, along with environmental information, and resolution targets. Once the responders resolve the incident, PagerDuty enables documentation of any new learnings (postmortems) and conveys the resolution of the incident to both Datadog and Service Cloud.

PagerDuty Incidents and Status Dashboard embedded in the Datadog UI

The integration of PagerDuty, Datadog, and Salesforce Service Cloud allows each team to work out of the system they prefer with PagerDuty acting as the central nervous system.  PagerDuty distributes Incident Information and optimizes communication and collaboration processes between Customer Service and Technical teams.

Integration of PagerDuty, Datadog, and Salesforce Service Cloud

PagerDuty, Datadog, and Salesforce Service Cloud help Customer Service Agents, and Technical Teams avoid context switching through multiple systems that duplicate redundant information.  Leveraging our joint architecture, First Contact Resolutions increase, and at the same time Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) are reduced.  This results in delighted customers and higher morale amongst the different teams involved in the incident resolution process.

To learn more about PagerDuty and our integration with Datadog and Salesforce Service Cloud please click on the following links: PagerDuty and Datadog, PagerDuty and Service Cloud.  To learn more about Datadog’s integration with Salesforce Service Cloud please follow this link: Datadog and Salesforce Incidents.

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KubeCon and CloudNativeCon – Europe is here – and PagerDuty will be there live in-person and live online!

The main conference runs from May 16 – 19, 2022 in Valencia, Spain. Stop by our booth S79 in the expo hall and say hello! If you can’t make it, we’d love to chat in our virtual booth too!

In preparation for KubeCon, we’ve been using our Twitch channel to get into the weeds with some of our partners, who will also be attending the conference. As you may know, PagerDuty has an extensive ecosystem of partner integrations. Sure, you can run Kubernetes without PagerDuty, but why would you? 

Here are some examples and links from our Twitch Playlist on YouTube showing how our partner’s PagerDuty integrations work.

Dynatrace
Deliver perfect software experiences with real-time intelligence into customer satisfaction and behavior, your applications, and the performance of your hybrid multi-cloud. The AI-powered, root-cause analysis automatically identifies customer-facing performance issues and pinpoints the root cause within seconds. Open APIs allow ingestion of 3rd party metrics and enable complex system integrations. In this demo, Rob Jahn shares a sophisticated incident remediation workflow incorporating intelligence from Dynatrace, automation in Rundeck, and incidents in PagerDuty.  

Dynatrace’s: Twitch Video.

Lacework
Lacework delivers complete security and compliance for the cloud. While the cloud enables enterprises to automatically scale workloads, deploy faster, and build freely, it also makes it increasingly difficult to maintain visibility, remain compliant, stay free from known vulnerabilities, and track activity in both host workloads and ephemeral infrastructure within their environments. Integrate Lacework with PagerDuty to route Lacework Events to responders on your team. Manage and resolve configuration issues, behavioral anomalies, and compliance requirements in a timely manner across your cloud infrastructure. Learn more about Lacework’s integration. 

Lacework’s Twitch Video.

HashiCorp Terraform

Manage your PagerDuty account objects with Terraform! Reap all the benefits of infrastructure as code and give your teams the flexibility they need to manage their services in real-time. As infrastructure stacks grow increasingly more complex and involve an ever-growing number of services and systems, teams have looked to abstract configuration to its own layer of code. This concept of configuring infrastructure as code is gaining traction throughout the industry for a variety of reasons. Tools such as Terraform from HashiCorp have emerged as one of the leading ways to declaratively configure technology stacks. With benefits like saving significant time, keeping settings consistent, reducing the chance of introducing errors, and mitigating deviations between deployments, engineers can focus on building rather than configuring. Check out HashiCorp’s Terraform integration to get started

 HashiCorp’s Twitch Video.

Teleport

Teleport is a just-in-time solution for system access and role escalation. Teleport provides secure access for cloud applications and infrastructure that doesn’t get in the way. When implementing strict zero-trust rules you sometimes need to escalate and elevate privileges. By leveraging PagerDuty, you are able to alert the request and approve or deny system access. Using PagerDuty’s schedule feature, you are able to dynamically assign administrative privileges based on who’s on call. Teleport has some great features, like recording sessions and providing real-time session sharing among responders. Check out Teleport’s integration for more information. 

Teleport’s Twitch Video.

InfluxData

InfluxData is an Open Source Platform built for metrics and events. This platform was purpose-built for time series data. It’s the essential time-series toolkit — dashboards, queries, tasks, and agents all in one place. InfluxDB is even more programmable and performant with a common API across OSS, cloud, and enterprise editions. Send events to PagerDuty to keep your teams informed. Check out InfluxData’s integration.

 InfluxData’s Twitch Video.

LogDNA

LogDNA is log management at any scale. LogDNA’s Cloud logging platform helps your DevOps teams find and fix production issues faster so your teams can get back to doing what they do best: building amazing products. Send incident alerts from LogDNA directly to PagerDuty. Check out LogDNA’s integration to get started.

 LogDNA’s Twitch Video.

Honeycomb

Honeycomb delivers observability for modern engineering and DevOps teams to observe, debug, and improve production systems efficiently. The PagerDuty + Honeycomb integration uses Honeycomb Triggers to notify on-call responders based on alerts sent from Honeycomb. This integration is maintained and supported by Honeycomb. Check out Honeycomb’s integration for more information. Honeycomb also recently joined us on our podcast, Page it to the Limit. SeeCheck out our episode featuring Liz Fong-Jones, Charity Majors, and George Miranda.

Honeycomb’s Twitch Video.

Gremlin

Improve reliability and reduce alert fatigue with Gremlin and PagerDuty. Microservices and DevOps allow for rapid innovation and continuous improvement. However, these new approaches exponentially increase the complexity of systems. This means critical applications are failing today, causing financial loss, customer dissatisfaction, and employee burnout. As traditional quality assurance struggles to keep up with this complexity, innovative organizations have embraced controlled Chaos Engineering to proactively test for failure. With Gremlin and PagerDuty, you can safely run and automate real-world failure scenarios to build confidence that complex distributed systems will deliver an uninterrupted customer experience. Check out Gremlin’s integration. 

Gremlin’s Twitch Video.

There are additional integrations listed in our directory such as Fairwinds, GitLab, Sysdig, and many more.

What is Happening at KubeCon – Europe?

Enter to win an entertainment prize pack! Stop by our booths at KubeCon-Europe in person or virtual to enter.

We’ve partnered up with Dynatrace (G12), GitLab (P4), and Sysdig (P7) this year to provide one lucky attendee with an excellent prize. Stop by our booths, in person or online, to enter to win a prize pack featuring a Kodak Luma 350 Smart Projector, Bose Bluetooth Sunglasses, Apple Airpod, and a portable Sonos speaker. You can register to attend KubeCon Europe HERE.

Passport Program at KubeCon-Europe: Enter to win a Nintendo Switch by participating in our passport program at KubeCon. Stop by the PagerDuty booth (S79) at KubeCon and we will stamp your passport.

Join us at the Official Observability Party at KubeCon-Europe:  We have joined forces with GitLab, Dynatrace, Polar Signals, and Isolvalent for some live music, Spanish Tapas, and Sangria at Abre Los Ojos at 8pm CEST.  See you there. Sign up: Eventbrite Link. 

Looking for your next event! Sign up for the in-person and virtual PagerDuty Summit in June, 2022 (in-person in San Francisco, Sydney, and London) and learn more about our new features, and get certified with PDU.

Keep in Touch with PagerDuty

We’d love to hear from you! If you’d like to be featured on our channel, email our Community team. To learn more about PagerDuty’s integrations, the full listing is on our website – and if you’d like to develop your own integration, check out our developer portal. We’ll be inviting more of our partners onto our Twitch channel, so follow us at twitch.tv/pagerduty and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Join our community to stay up to date with what’s happening around the PagerDuty ecosystem.

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AWS is a trusted cloud provider for many financial service organizations, whether they are cloud-native or operating hybrid-cloud infrastructures. Becoming a trusted partner is no small feat. PagerDuty demonstrated AWS expertise within the financial services industry and met a number of requirements, including successfully completing an audit of our financial services solution.

Now, PagerDuty together with AWS can help more financial service organizations take full advantage of cloud-scale while up-leveling their digital operations management through automation, DevOps, service ownership, and streamlined communication. 

Change Was Imminent

Digital transformation has swept across all industries and geographies regardless of company size, helping pave the way for delivering new customer experiences, enabling faster innovation, and taking advantage of cloud scale and agility. The cloud has also made it much easier for new cloud-native organizations to quickly deliver services that consumers have been asking for.

The financial sector was especially primed for change, as consumer demands were ever-growing. New incumbents entering the market drove all organizations towards faster innovation to stay competitive. Combined with the shift to remote in 2020, the timing has never been better for digital transformation. 

Migrate to Modernize

The road to modernization has its hurdles for established financial organizations that operate as monoliths. These companies needed to change so they would not just survive but thrive. 

The move to the cloud isn’t just about technology, it’s about operations and, most importantly, the people who make it all possible. Driving a huge organizational shift in the way financial service companies work requires an alignment across people, tools, and processes. 

Financial service organizations found themselves faced with additional challenges as they began their cloud migration journeys. Mitigating and reducing risk and meeting compliance requirements in a highly regulated market added to the complexity of cloud adoption. This means they need to select secure tools that have guardrails and controls already baked in so they can meet compliance and regulatory requirements, while taking full advantage of cloud scale and agility so they can innovate faster for their customers. 

PagerDuty + AWS 

Financial services impact millions of people and billions of dollars in revenue when they are down. Outages can also become more complex in the cloud, with hundreds of services all being interconnected and dependent on each other. When every second counts, you need a digital operations platform that will help you streamline and automate incident response and help align people, tools, and processes. 

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud manages all aspects of urgent and mission-critical work for a modern, digital business. It’s a scalable, secure, flexible platform built on AWS that integrates into and across enterprises, people, and technology to identify, escalate, automate and resolve urgent and time-sensitive work for these businesses before customers, employees, or the business’s reputation are impacted.  

Our industry-leading set of AWS integrations enables organizations of all sizes to harness the power of the cloud as teams transition from siloed and centralized approaches to multiple, distributed teams and hybrid infrastructure driving faster digital transformation, securely, at scale. 

With PagerDuty + AWS, financial service organizations can: 

• Streamline and automate incident response across the entire enterprise and hybrid-cloud infrastructure to deliver customer value
• Automate threat response processes for security issues that could impact AWS infrastructure and ensure the right people are immediately notified with PagerDuty’s integration with Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub 
• Ensure everyone has complete visibility and clear ownership across your technical and business services as you shift to a microservices architecture

With PagerDuty and our industry-leading AWS integrations, financial service organizations can accelerate their cloud migration and enterprise modernization initiatives by aligning people, tools, and processes. Financial service organizations can begin to break down the monolith and transition to a microservices architecture to gain cloud scale and agility. All this results in faster innovation and happier customers. 

To learn more, check out our recent webinar and presentation at re: Invent to learn more.

The post PagerDuty Receives Financial Services Competency From AWS appeared first on PagerDuty.

If memory serves (it was over 20 years ago), that’s what the free t-shirt that Microsoft gave me for being an official Windows 98 beta tester said. And yes, being a beta volunteer required me to haul my desktop PC to Redmond, WA (from Seattle)…because…I guess that’s how it was done back then? I remember they gave us pizza, and I needed to install more RAM. As I said before, it was a while ago; however, the whole “change is inevitable” thing is still valid today.

When you’re dealing with complex digital systems, the only real constant is change. Changing microservices and cloud infrastructure. New software releases and rollbacks. Any time a configuration changes, services can be impacted. If you’re dealing with a new digital incident, it’s helpful to know what changed so you can get a jump on your incident response. Better yet, find out when something changes that could lead to a digital incident.

We launched Change Impact Mapping to help teams quickly identify where changes have—and could—cause failures. This real-time, contextualized information helps DevOps teams identify the service causing problems as promptly as possible. By fully integrating change events from the software delivery process (CI/CD pipelines) and code repositories, we give teams complete visibility across these changes to better understand their impacts.

We’ve partnered with many of the software companies you depend on to collect these events, giving you an even more accurate view of your digital landscape. Below are some of the tools that PagerDuty can integrate with for Change Impact Mapping.

Pro tip: We recommend mapping your events to the PagerDuty service representing what you are changing. That way, responders can quickly identify recent changes to their service when they get notified of an incident. Here are some of our partners whose tools allow you to ingest change events.

GitHub

We partnered with GitHub to allow PagerDuty users to ingest change events from GitHub or GitHub Enterprise. New pull requests and commits can be fed into PagerDuty to provide even more context. Users can quickly review—in PagerDuty—change events from the service’s Recent Activity timelines during incident triage or hypercare. Any recent changes to a service are surfaced for the responder to see. You can navigate across all changes via a comprehensive list of Recent Changes among your services.

GitLab

PagerDuty’s GitLab integration helps teams send notification-free events from GitLab to PagerDuty services. Users can ingest merge request events to help provide context for anyone using PagerDuty. We recommend mapping your GitLab events to the PagerDuty service that represents what you are changing. By doing so, you’ll make it easy for responders to quickly identify recent changes on their service when they get notified about an incident.

Evolven

PagerDuty’s integration with Evolven FIRST helps prevent incidents by delivering actionable alerts on risky changes. When an incident does occur, teams can dig deeper into them and associate the changes that may have contributed to it.

Granular change data is gathered and analyzed by Evolven to enrich and provide context to automated remediation. This functionality also lends itself nicely to hypercare.

Ansible

Ansible is a powerful automation engine that makes systems and applications simple to deploy. PagerDuty’s Change Event integration for Ansible allows teams to ingest and track any code or infrastructure change as a PagerDuty change event.

Buildkite

Integrating Buildkite with PagerDuty ensures you’ll be able to configure your Buildkite pipelines to send change events to your services whenever a build completes—pass or fail. Need to filter signal from noise? Support for conditional notifications ensures you’re only sending the data that matters to you. PagerDuty provides the Event Intelligence, Buildkite delivers the events.

JFrog

With the JFrog Pipelines integration, events can be sent to PagerDuty during the software delivery process to reveal valuable information like what software is being built, what versions are being delivered, what environments are being provisioned, what builds are failing, and much more. This allows teams to correlate production issues with potential software issues, understand software delivery workloads, and understand how teams are delivering their software.

Jenkins Change Events

The Jenkins Change Events integration allows users to send Change Events and trigger post-build incidents via PagerDuty. When teams do this, they can see all of their build events in just a few steps. Recent change events in Jenkins will appear on relevant incidents to help users troubleshoot more effectively. Users can view all recent changes in Jenkins based on team, service, and date.

Have you embraced the inevitability of non-vending machine changes? Ready to get started with Change Impact Mapping? PagerDuty’s integration library can be sorted by “changes” to give you the latest information on which tools you can ingest events from. You can also send your events to PagerDuty through the Change Events API.

From your PagerDuty account, head to Incidents > Recent Changes from the top navigation, or learn more about it here.

The post Change is Inevitable: Just Ask GitLab, Buildkite, GitHub, Jenkins, Evolven, and More appeared first on PagerDuty.

Making updates or altering information within the integration was previously dependent on searching individual line items in the CMDB and clicking the desired action. You would then need to do the same thing in PagerDuty in order for them to correlate across systems—sometimes for tens of thousands of items. We’ve now made this much simpler for you. You’re now able to pick and choose the level of information for each service and its dependencies and identify the development team that flows from ServiceNow to PagerDuty through the CMDB. This makes the information configuration ideal for distributed engineering teams that own these services.

Make Sure Everyone Sees the Same Data

But that’s not all we updated. With this release, we also launched system capabilities to support integrating change request information of these services from ServiceNow into PagerDuty’s change events dashboards. Moving forward, when a change request is processed in ServiceNow, that information will be automatically reflected in PagerDuty’s recent changes dashboard, on the service impact dashboard, and the affected services will then be put on maintenance.

In our ServiceNow 7.0 integration, we introduced the capability to migrate items from ServiceNow to PagerDuty in bulk, but did not yet have the capability to transfer that data while maintaining the defined relationships from within ServiceNow. Now, with version 7.5, you can use a current relationship definition in ServiceNow to define your relationship automatically when it is transferred into PagerDuty. This ensures your teams are using the same information in ServiceNow to provision in PagerDuty, enabling users to be more service driven and enabling teams to get up and running much faster. By bringing in groups of data and predefined users from ServiceNow data sets, content provisioned into PagerDuty is ready to be used right away.

Get to the Root of Issues Faster

This means that users now have an easier view of dependencies and can take decisive action with important context. In PagerDuty’s easy-to-digest view of dependencies, users can find information about impacted services along with context across teams and systems to find the “why,” as well as gain visibility into multiple levels of context to better understand why things are happening. Teams can get to the root of issues much faster and take action on an accelerated timeline. We’ve also updated how we migrate critical information from change events if an incident is ongoing, or if there are other services impacted. Users can now see those levels of context and recent changes that have been made—all mapped against important data. This gives responders the necessary information to help resolve incidents faster.

With our 7.5 integration, it is easier than ever to maintain the relationship between the two platforms and reflect critical service changes in PagerDuty. Now, all users can have access to the same, easily provisioned information on both sites.
Moving forward, all of PagerDuty’s ServiceNow integrations will carry this framework for more seamless, easier to use, and robust working relationships between the two systems.

Curious to learn more? Check out the full integration guide.

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Getting Ahead of the Curve

Customer service organizations are traditionally slow to adopt new technologies and favor cost efficiency and the status quo over innovation. Today, they are striving towards operational excellence as providing a seamless customer experience has become the most critical component of customer satisfaction. And with two-thirds of customers switching brands due to poor customer service, it’s critical for companies to become proactive and get ahead of customer issues to continuously deliver satisfying customer experiences.

As part of those efforts, customer service teams are starting to leave legacy processes and technology behind as they embark on a new journey to embrace innovative initiatives and technologies, which also offers the benefit of aligning their new processes with that of technical response teams.

However, most companies are still operating in reactive mode with many issues still being reported by their customers. Resolving issues quickly when they occur isn’t enough to keep customers happy and coming back. Customers are looking for customer service teams to get ahead of issues and proactively update and resolve them as needed.

Additionally, companies need to focus on improving customer-centric metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) and build personalized, always-on support capabilities. By having technical response and customer service teams adopt and track joint success metrics, companies can better align team objectives and bring them closer to their customers.

Shift to Operational Excellence

As I mentioned earlier, customer service organizations are recognizing that to truly improve the customer experience, they need to shift into a proactive mode. In order to continue driving operational efficiency and engaging with customers in a meaningful way, these teams are also increasing their spending on new technology.

Additionally, to get ahead of customer issues, customer service and technical teams need to work as a united front. With fully bi-directional communications, both teams have access to full context and real-time data around customer issues, which enables them to solve issues faster while proactively updating impacted customers. It places the customer front and center—everything revolves around the end experience. To help address this, budgeting in customer service is improving to deliver always-on digital experiences through faster resolution, personalized attention, and proactive communication.

Transformation Across Customer Service Culture

While aligning the processes of technical and customer service teams can help improve customer satisfaction, it also creates some challenges around the technology tool stack. The tools these teams use do not traditionally talk to each other. While technical teams have been fast to adopt and integrate new solutions, customer service teams have not always kept pace in investing in technology, which leaves them working with antiquated and disconnected tools that don’t meet modern customer standards or demands.

Customer service teams are now looking to bring visibility, automation, and scale to their organizations. This cultural shift is driving faster adoption of new technologies and a trend towards selecting a centralized platform rather than using disconnected and siloed tool stacks. The need to be more connected with technical teams is also creating an opportunity to adopt the tools that are already being used by those teams and extend them into customer service workflows.

As these silos are broken down, customer service and technical teams will become a united front to deliver always-on digital experiences. To truly deliver a great digital experience and improve customer satisfaction, they need to streamline their tools and processes and jointly own customer-centric success metrics.

PagerDuty for Customer Service

PagerDuty is already the platform of choice for technical teams to deliver always-on digital services. Now, we are helping break down the silos between customer service and technical teams so they can become proactive and work as a united front to deliver great customer experiences around the clock. As these teams become more aligned through culture and processes, PagerDuty is deepening their collaboration by bringing them together via a single platform to get ahead of customer issues and delight their customers.

With PagerDuty for Customer Service, teams are able to:

• Enable customer service and technical teams to work as a united front to deliver always-on digital experiences and improve customer satisfaction by resolving issues faster and proactively updating customers
• Deliver automation and enterprise-scale to customer service organizations that may be remote and distributed
• Empower true “work where you are” functionality with industry-leading integrations
• Get ahead of customer issues and improve satisfaction by enabling end-to-end ownership and customer advocacy

With PagerDuty’s new Customer Service Plan, your customer service organizations can gain a holistic view across data, people, and operations. They can be better connected with technical teams to work as a united front to quickly solve customer issues and proactively update impacted customers to improve customer satisfaction. As a result, customer service teams can scale and automate to solve more issues faster. Check out our recent webinar to learn more or contact sales to get started.

The post Digital Transformation Is Driving Operational Excellence in Customer Service Teams appeared first on PagerDuty.

I think you’ll really enjoy Paushali and Sonal’s session, especially if your organization is currently in the middle of (or plans to undertake) the cloud migration journey. We’re excited to speak with customers during re:Invent about their cloud migrations, and how PagerDuty and a full-service ownership model can help.

Cloud-Ready: PagerDuty for AWS

No matter where they are in the cloud migration journey, re:Invent gives us the opportunity to work closely with our thousands of shared customers as they add new services, regions, and workloads to their AWS ecosystem. PagerDuty’s deep partnership with AWS has always been centered on unlocking AWS’s unprecedented scale and agility for our customers, and our growing portfolio of AWS integrations reflects this. PagerDuty’s platform for real-time operations helps teams manage a complex transition from siloed and centralized approaches to multiple, distributed teams supporting a hybrid cloud infrastructure. To make this journey successful, one thing is clear: your people, technology, and operational processes need to be aligned in real time. That’s where PagerDuty can help.

People
With over 10 years of experience helping companies move to the cloud, PagerDuty is a key partner for teams navigating the new challenges and building the additional skillsets required to manage cloud environments. By breaking down silos, PagerDuty empowers teams to adopt a full-service ownership model where teams can directly manage and address the cloud-based services they build. Accountability and refined domain expertise help you drive real-time operations and a “you code it, you own it” culture. This helps teams maintain business continuity while adding the scalability, flexibility, and value of the AWS cloud.

Technology
Concurrently managing on-prem and AWS cloud infrastructure adds new requirements for monitoring, supporting, and securing your digital business. PagerDuty helps DevOps teams maintain visibility and leverage AIOps to cut through the noise and automate key elements of your incident response. PagerDuty’s cloud-agnostic platform integrates data from across your digital services to unify an enterprise on serving its customers across hybrid services and environments. With over 350 integrations, the PagerDuty platform can ingest and and contextualize all your digital signals in real time.

Processes
A shift to AWS and a hybrid cloud infrastructure inherently increases the complexity of your infrastructure and breadth of incidents. PagerDuty’s AIOps helps teams cut through the noise to contextualize incidents and automate remediation to support real-time operations. Arm your service teams with automated real-time response tools and only surface actionable alerts so teams can resolve issues quickly. PagerDuty provides insights and analytics so teams can proactively identify and address underlying issues.

PagerDuty, along with adopting a full-service ownership approach, helps facilitate a cloud management model where development and operations teams have complete ownership over every aspect of the services they support—from design and development, to production operations and the eventual sunsetting of their software.

New Tools for the AWS Cloud

PagerDuty is excited to announce several new AWS integrations and launch partnerships with AWS this week. These new integrations, combined with PagerDuty’s existing set of AWS integrations for CloudWatch, Personal Health Dashboard, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, EventBridge, and SecurityHub, help teams streamline their cloud migration and hybrid cloud management process. Check them out below.

New! PagerDuty for Amazon DevOps Guru

PagerDuty is excited to deepen our long partnership with Amazon Web Services by joining them as one of four launch partners for Amazon DevOps Guru. PagerDuty’s platform for real-time operations was built to ingest digital signals from across the entire enterprise, contextualize them using human and machine learning, and then arm the right responders with the right tools to act in real time. PagerDuty has deep integrations with industry-leading observability tools, so we’re excited to see AWS add this new service for cloud-native companies building AWS-based apps. Observability is becoming a business requirement for digital services built on any infrastructure. This means PagerDuty can ingest even more real-time signals to make them actionable.

PagerDuty was built to drive the move to a DevOps culture by orchestrating the entire incident response lifecycle. PagerDuty for Amazon DevOps Guru allows operations teams to improve their optics into their AWS ecosystem and AWS-based applications. Leveraging DevOps Guru’s machine learning-enabled application health information, PagerDuty provides even more real-time, signal-to-action capabilities to our AWS-using customers. Through PagerDuty’s ingestion of DevOps Guru’s Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications, AWS customers can take real-time action on operational issues before they become customer-impacting outages.

Customers who use a hybrid or multi-cloud model can count on PagerDuty’s deep integrations with observability tools to give them actionable insights and the ability to drive real-time operations—no matter what combination of infrastructure they use.

New! AWS Control Tower

For many teams, the ability to get started “building” quickly is an enticing value proposition for developing applications in the AWS cloud. But what happens when multiple teams across your organization leverage AWS accounts to do this concurrently? To keep things sane, you need central governance, control, and visibility.

AWS Control Tower helps teams add guardrails to provide ongoing governance for their multi-account AWS environment—and that’s why we’re excited to announce PagerDuty for AWS Control Tower. When combined with PagerDuty, teams can extend Control Tower guardrail notifications to their existing incident management and compliance alerting process. The end result? A centralized incident management process that helps teams identify and mitigate business-impacting compliance issues, reduce risk and time to resolution, and keep systems running smoothly.

You can read more about how PagerDuty works with AWS Control Tower and AWS Marketplace to help organizations with multiple AWS accounts respond to real-time incidents across a multi-account AWS environment.

New! AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts, announced at last year’s AWS re:Invent, is a fully managed service that offers AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and other tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. In short, you get AWS software and hardware in your choice of location connected seamlessly to the broader AWS cloud. Flexibility meets scalability, with true hybrid-cloud infrastructure—which is why PagerDuty is also excited to announce PagerDuty for AWS Outposts. This integration empowers teams to manage incidents in real time for AWS infrastructure used in a private data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility for real-time operations–enabled hybrid-infrastructure environments.

New! Amazon EventBridge Quick Start

PagerDuty launched our integration for Amazon EventBridge in 2019, and it has been amazing seeing what customers have used these serverless event-driven workflows to do. Now, getting started with EventBridge is even easier—introducing PagerDuty for Amazon EventBridge Quick Start. EventBridge Quick Starts help AWS users use AWS best practices to quickly get started with serverless workflows. This new integration allows us to help our customers build unique and business-critical functions for EventBridge that help them set up Lambda-driven updates to their AWS ecosystem even faster.

Join us at re:Invent!

It’s going to be an exciting three weeks! Make sure you visit our sponsor page to play games, get your digital swag bag, talk to a PagerDuty expert, and find out more about PagerDuty’s set of AWS integrations for cloud migration.

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AWS Outposts, announced at last year’s AWS re:Invent, is a fully managed service that offers AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and other tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. In short, you get AWS software and hardware in your choice of location connected seamlessly to the broader AWS cloud. Flexibility meets scalability, with true hybrid-cloud infrastructure.

The power of the AWS Cloud—when added to an on-premises datacenter—is a compelling value proposition for businesses embracing the cloud natively or through migration of workloads. From an operations standpoint, cloud professionals in highly regulated markets like healthcare, financial services, and government now have the ability to leverage the latest and greatest AWS cloud services and still adhere to strict data privacy and compliance rules with on-premises workloads. Industries that crave low-latency compute capabilities, such as high-frequency trading, medical labs, and academia, can use AWS Outposts to shorten the path for computational horsepower from multiple jumps to a direct connection to their data centers.

Additionally, AWS Outposts allows more traditional enterprises to dip their toes into the public cloud with regard to their data centers and use it as an on-ramp to cloud migration. This is exactly why PagerDuty is excited to extend our partnership with AWS through AWS Outposts.

For organizations that are migrating workloads to an AWS Outposts-based hybrid cloud, it’s important to understand the implications on a) your technology stack, b) people, culture, and skills, and c) operational process. PagerDuty, when combined with a full-service ownership model, plays an essential role in empowering and connecting all three of these focus areas.

Hybrid Cloud Technology Stack

The PagerDuty integration with AWS Outposts leverages the popular Amazon CloudWatch integration on-premises. This linkage happens through AWS Simple Notification Service(SNS) Topic, which is agnostic to the AWS workloads location, whether it is in the public cloud or Outposts. By creating this connection from AWS Outposts to PagerDuty, customers extend the digital operations capabilities of PagerDuty seamlessly across all AWS workloads, whether it is on-premise or cloud. The reference architecture below shows how this works.

People, Culture, and Operational Process

The one constant about the cloud is that it’s always changing—and with these changes come a wider range of incidents that can interrupt business continuity. Quite simply, a queued/ticketed approach to addressing issues negates the real-time value that cloud provides. PagerDuty helps teams reduce noise using cutting-edge machine learning, contextualize incidents for rapid response, and then automate remediate when possible for real-time operations.

Additionally, migrating to the AWS cloud and managing an Outposts-based hybrid infrastructure unlocks the ability to more easily adopt a “you build it, you own it” full-service ownership model, making it easier for teams to collaborate and resolve issues faster. Having the ability to quickly spin up AWS instances to build new apps and services means making some changes to ITOps workflows. With PagerDuty, the service team that owns a particular Outposts-based application can be provided with the right contextualized information to deal with these incidents in real time. This is critical to unlocking the power of Outposts.

Get Started With PagerDuty for AWS Outposts

PagerDuty has made it easy to learn more about, and get started with, your Outposts migration. If you’re new to PagerDuty, you can sign up for a free trial and learn more about how we help teams with their cloud migrations, adopt a full-service ownership model, and integration with key AWS services.

If you’re an existing PagerDuty customer using AWS Outposts, you can get started with our integration for AWS Outposts here, or connect with our support team to learn more.

The post To The Cloud and Back On-Prem With AWS Outposts appeared first on PagerDuty.

DevOps and SRE teams are under intense pressure to reduce the mean time to recovery (MTTR) when resolving incidents. With the proliferation of cloud services and the increasing complexity of DevOps toolchains, engineers today need to not only learn how to use these services, but also troubleshoot them when an incident is raised at 2 a.m. The problem is, many incident response processes are still manual today—cobbling together runbooks and ad hoc scripts and orchestrating people to respond. This “digital duct tape” approach results in what we call the “DevOps Dumping Ground,” which ultimately increases MTTR.

How PagerDuty and Relay Work Together

PagerDuty is the industry-leading digital operations management platform that provides reliable notifications, automatic escalations, on-call scheduling, and other functionality to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems quickly.

Relay by Puppet is an event-driven automation platform that pulls together all the tools and technologies DevOps engineers need to effectively manage a cloud environment. Unlike many existing workflow automation tools, Relay can intelligently respond to external signals by combining event-based triggers with a powerful workflow engine in a single platform.

The latest integration between Relay and PagerDuty eliminates the “digital duct tape” by creating reusable, event-driven workflows to close the loop on incidents faster through Relay’s event-based automation approach. PagerDuty users can now:

• Enrich alert data: Using the new Change Events launched at PagerDuty Summit, Relay enhances alerts with diagnostic information to speed time to resolution by presenting more context around the alert.
• Automate incident communication: Whether it’s creating a Slack channel, updating a Jira ticket, or notifying team members, Relay ensures that communication is timely and updated.
• Trigger Auto-Remediation Workflows: Raising PagerDuty incidents can initiate Relay workflow runs to troubleshoot and remediate common problems securely and quickly.

Example: How to Automate Incident Communication Plans

A key way to reduce MTTR is to formalize an incident communication plan. Making sure that teams have a robust plan for understanding roles and opening communication channels is key to reducing incident response time. Relay can automate this workflow for you by contacting the on-call responder with a message detailing content from the incident.

Relay uses “triggers” and “steps” to automate a set of actions. Steps are reusable, modular, and composable—things like getting a user’s info, sending Slack and Twilio messages, and using the PagerDuty Event API to provide more information on an incident. “Triggers” are based on cloud events, git events, monitoring alerts, tickets, and incidents. In the example below, we see how a PagerDuty incident triggers the following incident response workflow utilizing the steps mentioned.

When a new PagerDuty incident is raised, Relay looks up the on-call person’s email address, identifies that user in Jira and Slack, and creates a Jira ticket for the production incident. Relay then creates a Slack channel as a production incident command center, invites the on-call in, along with the pertinent engineering manager, and sets the topic of the channel with a link to the Jira ticket that has been created. Finally, it sends a message to the Slack channel and posts a note with the expectations of how a production incident policy should be followed.

Using PagerDuty’s exciting new Change Events, Relay elaborates on content from the incident with enriched alert data. This enables the individual on call to respond to the incident quickly, with less toil required for ticket creation and communication about what triggered the workflow.

Try out this workflow here.

Customize Your Incident Response

There are several starter workflows available for PagerDuty users, which you can find on Relay’s integration page. You can use these workflows to create an issue in Jira, send a message to slack, and send a Twillo SMS automatically when a PagerDuty incident is triggered.

Everyone’s workflow is a little different, so Relay workflows are customizable for use cases. Relay provides contextual help within its sidebar. This feature lets you browse the library of integrations and steps to make it easy to customize your workflow.

Sign Up for Relay!

Use Relay with PagerDuty to reduce your incident response time and improve observability. Reducing your mean time to resolution (MTTR) is key to successful DevOps management and enabling event-driven automation will mean that your incident response time is much shorter. Relay makes this easier by using workflows that fix more common and well-understood problems that teams have already identified. To learn more about Relay, visit our site at relay.sh and sign up for our free beta!

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