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.

One of the most highly anticipated announcements from our November launch was Incident Workflows to automate manual steps of incident response. Today, we are excited to share that this feature is now generally available. If you’re a PagerDuty customer, you can start using them today!

What are incident workflows?

Think about all of the manual steps in your incident response process–paging subject matter experts, setting up a conference bridge, establishing a Slack channel, sending out status updates… the list goes on. Remembering to take each of these steps every time an incident strikes adds unnecessary cognitive load to an already stressful process. These repeatable, manual tasks are perfect candidates for automation. 

Incident Workflows automatically orchestrate the actions you already know you’ll need to take based on the type of incident at hand. Serving as an upgrade from Response Plays, now you can use a no-code/low-code builder to create customizable incident workflows that will reduce the manual work required to escalate, mobilize, and coordinate the right incident response for any use case. You can automatically trigger common incident response actions using if-this-then-that logic, such as adding a responder, subscribing stakeholders, or spinning up a conference bridge. 

Here’s a short demo that showcases how it works:

Let’s take a closer look at the functionality that makes Incident Workflows so powerful. 

Conditional Triggers

Different incident types require different remediation steps. Conditional triggers allow you to create logic to kick off a workflow when criteria for certain incident fields are met–like changes to priority, urgency, or status. For example, you can now define a major incident workflow that is automatically triggered for all P1 and P2 incidents. And for the users who would like to double down on automation, you could even set priority using Event Orchestration and have your Incident Workflow pick up that priority change as a trigger for the major incident workflow.

You can also utilize manual triggers that allow a responder to start a workflow directly from the incident details page. When a manual trigger is added, Incident Workflows can be triggered from the PagerDuty web app, mobile app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or directly through the API.

Enhanced CollabOps Actions

Save time setting up collaboration channels by configuring your workflow to do it for you. Use workflow actions to spin up a Zoom conference bridge or create a per-incident Slack channel that includes all incident responders and incident updates. P.S. If you’re a Microsoft Teams user, we’re working on comparable functionality–stay tuned. 

Easy Communications & Coordination

Communicating to internal and external stakeholders in a timely and transparent way is essential to effective incident response. As my colleague, Hannah Culver, explained, having a prepared business response plan in place can help internal cross-functional teams work better together, while also helping customer-facing teams preserve customer trust through proactive communications. Incident Workflows make this piece of the puzzle easier by allowing users to automate adding responders to the incident, subscribing stakeholders, and posting status updates, so you can keep everyone who needs to know about the incident informed in real time. 

Resolve On-the-Go

Incident Workflows are also available for PagerDuty Mobile on iOS and Android devices. Whether walking your dog or away from your desk, PagerDuty Mobile alerts you about the top open incidents you need to take action on. You can manually trigger a preconfigured incident workflow of custom response steps, from your incident detail screen, and start working with the right teams to resolve the incident from your preferred mobile devices. Learn more about triggering Incident Workflows from your mobile device in the Knowledge Base.

End-to-End Automation on a Unified Platform

Incident Workflows were built to pair with other automation features on the PagerDuty platform to help teams resolve faster and minimize impact to revenue. For example, Event Orchestration can simultaneously change priority to automatically trigger an Incident Workflow, while also kicking off automated diagnostics via Automation Actions so that the script is already run by the time the right responders are called and get to the incident-specific Slack channel that the Incident Workflow has spun up. 

Conclusion

During Incident Response, responders should be free to focus on their core responsibility – resolving the incident. Incident Workflows give them the gift of being able to automate those other essential, yet tedious tasks in a standardized, repeatable way. By standardizing your incident response processes, you can ensure the right actions are taken across teams to reduce your time to incident resolution. Given that Incident Workflows are already included in Business and Digital Operations plans, it makes sense to utilize this great new functionality at no additional cost. Why piece together your tech, when you can achieve end-to-end incident response all in one place? Your management team asking about tool consolidation will certainly appreciate it. 

This is just the first step in PagerDuty’s journey towards offering more extensibility for our customers to configure responses for their unique use cases. To learn more about Incident Workflows, check out our KB article and try it out today. For more in-depth learning, you can also sign up for the Incident Workflows PDU course on-demand.

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