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

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

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

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

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

Here are Three Ways to Cut Down Incident Time

Experience significant time savings with Incident Workflows

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

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

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

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

Better context for faster incident resolution

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

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

Simplify stakeholder updates with notification templates

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

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

Get 1+1=3 with the PagerDuty Operations Cloud

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

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

Watch a demonstration of how these features work together.

Dynamic Digital Ecosystem

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

Don’t Wait, Try it Out

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

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

The post How to Maximize Time Savings and Reduce Toil During Incident Response appeared first on PagerDuty.

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

1. Label incident impact 

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

2. Sync with important ITSM data 

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

3. Attach links to third-party or homegrown tools 

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

4. Connect conference bridges for different regions

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

5. Assign incident response roles

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

Conclusion

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

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