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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New solutions for the new world of work

During our Summit, we covered a lot of ground. We discussed how PagerDuty solves the mismatch between modern work realities and the systems we have in place to do that work. We talked about how PagerDuty is more than on call management or even incident response, but rather, the Operations Cloud for improving operations with data and machine learning, so humans can focus on more beneficial, meaningful tasks. 

We also announced a slate of new tools and automation capabilities, including: 

• Incident Workflows: later this year, you will be able to define an orchestrated response using “if-this-then-that” logic. For the responder, this means creating a sequence of common incident actions, or customizing workflows based on your organization’s bespoke processes. And as you learn from each incident, you can feed those learnings back into your workflows, or even add custom fields to give responders more contextual data for faster triage and incident resolution. You can learn more here.
• Event Orchestration: this powerful decision engine, launched earlier this year, allows teams to create custom logic to enrich, modify, and control routing based on event conditions. Now we’ve added  Terraform Support to make event orchestration even more flexible for configuring, maintaining, and updating events at scale. 
• Automation Actions: these are now integrated with Event Orchestration, so if a CPU warning event occurs, deep diagnostics will kick in at time 0. We’ve also integrated Automation Actions into our Customer Service Ops offering, as well as into our Mobile and Slack experiences. Learn more about Automation Actions here.
• Custom Status Updates: we’ve added Status Update Notification Templates – including rich text editing and visuals — to format the content and context of incident responses. After all, you want your internal communications to answer questions, not raise new ones. 

Our journey continues 

There’s much more in store from PagerDuty. We’re not slowing down, ensuring you can spend more time on fulfilling and interesting work. It’s time to revolutionize operations – to offload the routine tasks to machines, and direct more energy toward your customer. Data should be in service of us, not the other way around. 

Being ready for anything in a world of Digital Everything doesn’t mean sacrificing human attention – it’s about putting that attention where it matters most. Technology should be intuitive and seamless, so that humans can deliver personalized support and foster peace of mind. 

We’d love to hear about your journey and how you are preparing for a world of Digital Everything. If you attended Summit, what did you learn and how will you use that knowledge in your work? What else would you like to see from us in the coming months? Whether you attended this year’s event or are thinking about participating next year, your opinions and perspectives will help us do our best, so you can do yours. 

Follow us on our blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram channels for the latest PagerDuty news and insights. 

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To be ready for anything in light of this increasing digital complexity and dependencies, operations must transform from manual, rigid, and ticket queue-based, to a continuously improving system that allows focus on customer experience, delivers operational speed AND resilience, and is heavily automated and augmented by machine learning and AI. Only then can teams move toward a more proactive posture to reduce the burden of manual toil, avoid burnout, and preserve focus. 

PagerDuty’s mission is to revolutionize operations so that teams spend less time on reactive, break-fix work, and more time delivering new innovation while meeting their desired resiliency objectives. We see this future of operations extending beyond the digital teams that build and run software, to all teams in the organization. 

At Summit 2022 we are announcing several updates to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud that move teams towards this vision. 

Automate Everywhere

PagerDuty helps customers automate their operations. With PagerDuty, organizations can accelerate responses to urgent IT incidents, customer issues, and even non-urgent day-to-day operations. 

Today, at PagerDuty Summit, PagerDuty is announcing new automation capabilities for creating custom incident response workflows, focusing responders on issues that matter, more ways to speed up MTTR through automated diagnostics and remediations, and more power for your customer service agents to proactively support your customers.

Incident Workflows: First, we’re excited to share that PagerDuty is integrating the powerful Catalytic workflow engine to support customizable Incident Workflows. With Incident Workflows, you define the workflow logic to configure a sequence of common incident actions—such as adding a responder, subscribing stakeholders, or starting a conference bridge—into an orchestrated response. These workflows run automatically, triggered by common events like a change in priority. Learn more in this summary of what’s new in PagerDuty Incident Response.

Auto-Pause Incident Notifications: Responders can also use automation to avoid unnecessary disruption. With PagerDuty Event Intelligence, responders can suppress transient noise with Auto-Pause Incident Notifications. This feature applies machine learning to automatically detect and pause transient alerts that historically auto-resolve themselves. For customers who experience these types of alerts, this can make a big difference in helping teams stay more productive, or better yet, stay asleep when they don’t need to be woken up by something that will self-heal. In just the first three months after release,  Auto-Pause Incident Notifications paused more than 350,000 flapping alerts. 

Learn more about Auto-Pause Incident Notifications on our website.

Automation Actions… everywhere: We’ve heard from our customers that they want to empower their first responders to diagnose and remediate common issues through automation. Last year, we introduced PagerDuty Automation Actions to securely invoke automation directly from PagerDuty. Now we’re making Automation Actions available through the PagerDuty mobile app, and within Slack. Responders can now resolve issues faster from wherever they respond, and it’s easier to collaborate with incident teams through shared results of this automation.  

But why wait for a responder to run common diagnostics? Event Orchestration users can now trigger these same automated diagnostics proactively even before your first responders acknowledge an incident, giving them the information they need to act faster. These same triggers can also attempt self healing for well known issues, only paging humans if the most likely automated fix fails to resolve an issue. 

Finally, we’ve extended this ability to provide automation to your customer service teams. Your customer service agents can now invoke automated validation tests from PagerDuty Customer Service Ops to determine if a customer’s issue is related to a system problem, and proactively receive information about known problems that could potentially be affecting their customer’s experience. 

Read more in our update blog post on Automation Actions. 

PagerDuty Runbook Automation: PagerDuty is making it easier for our customers to orchestrate automated diagnostics, remediations, and day-to-day operations through our recently launched SaaS offering PagerDuty Runbook Automation. PagerDuty Runbook Automation is based on the PagerDuty Process Automation software, and provides access to the same development and runtime environment without having to host a cluster. Its plugins allow teams to easily incorporate their infrastructure as nodes and reuse automation in end-to-end orchestrated job definitions. 

Use PagerDuty Runbook Automation to create business-relevant automation to speed up incident response, customer service, developer experience, and compliance. Learn more about optimizing cloud operations with Runbook Automation. 

Connect Everyone & Everything

The number of different systems in the modern digital landscape has exploded. Keeping systems and teams synchronized is critical to have a complete picture of what’s happening and what needs attention. With APIs, webhooks, and over 650 integrations, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud integrates with your tech stack, breaking through silos so that teams can work better together and provide customers with a better experience.

Status Update Notification Templates: PagerDuty has added new ways to keep internal stakeholders updated. Now you can standardize internal communications during incident response with HTML templates. For example, customize responses in a rich text editor and add images, screenshots, or graphs. Learn more about Status Update Notification Templates.

PagerDuty for Salesforce Service Cloud updates: Customer service agents are on the front lines during an incident and shouldn’t be left in the dark. This is where PagerDuty Customer Service Operations comes in. 

With our deepening integration with Salesforce Service Cloud, PagerDuty for Customer Service Operations creates a real-time link between DevOps, ITOps and Customer Service teams with Salesforce Incident Objects and cases. This creates a single source of truth that brings all teams together. Agents are now fully empowered to engage and collaborate across teams to help resolve customer impacting issues. Learn more about updates to PagerDuty Customer Service Operations. 

CollabOps updates: CollabOps has become the way in which many teams work and communicate in real-time. We’ve simplified our integration with Slack with a single connection management page. And Google recently built a new integration: PagerDuty for Google Chat. Learn more about PagerDuty for Google Chat.

Deliver Speed and Flexibility

When it comes to incident response, it often feels like nothing can happen fast enough. Time is often wasted swiveling between systems to get information, manually reviewing notifications, and digging through interfaces to find what you need. Helping teams focus helps them work – and drive to resolution – faster. That’s why we’ve prioritized building features designed to help responders get what they need quickly, wherever and however they need it, so that PagerDuty can fit seamlessly within the way that each of our customers uniquely approach incident response processes. 

Custom Fields on Incidents: It starts with surfacing information where you need it most. Today, PagerDuty is announcing Custom Fields on incidents. Custom fields give responders access to critical contextual information from any surface, whether API, web, mobile app, or SMS. With more information pulled into custom fields, responders can triage and resolve issues faster. 

PagerDuty mobile app updates. We’ve also redesigned the home screen of the PagerDuty mobile app. Key responder careabouts are now front and center, further accelerating incident resolution. With a single tap, responders can view details and take action. The carousel displays all options for responders to gain understanding while on the go. This feature is in Early Access now – to get access, sign your account up here. 

Terraform support for Event Orchestration: Event Orchestration helps teams cut down on manual event processing by harnessing complex logic and rule nesting. We’re seeing customers replace ten Event Rules with a single Event Orchestration — that’s 90% more efficient! 

For customers who have been asking about more Terraform support with Event Orchestration to use as a part of their Infrastructure-as-Code practices, we heard you! You can now configure orchestrations in Terraform to easily create, manage, and modify orchestrations at scale. Check out the Terraform provider documentation.

Continuously Improve

An incident doesn’t end with resolution. Investing in culture, implementing best practices, and learning from what happened in previous incidents helps teams build resilience. 

Service Standards: As customers mature their digital operations, they often want to standardize what ‘good’ looks like across teams. With Service Standards, teams can configure services according to best practices. For example, account owners can audit things like service dependencies, or a service’s Escalation Policy with multiple levels. Service Standards provide custom guardrails to help scale service ownership across the entire organization. Learn about Service Standards. 

Next generation reports: Developing a more proactive operational posture starts with understanding how things are working today. From there, teams can identify opportunities for fine-tuning and improvement. Newly enhanced reports in PagerDuty help teams make better data-driven decisions. 

First up: the Service Performance Report has new interactive visualizations, intuitive service drill-down capabilities, a new Response Effort metric measuring the engagement time to solve an incident(s), and more filtering options to help prioritize your incidents. Stay tuned for updates to the Incident Activity, Escalation Policy, and Responder Health reports.

Register now for PagerDuty Summit to learn more about any of these announcements, both in the keynotes and deeper dive virtual breakout sessions. Ready to get started? Contact sales or sign up for a 14-day free trial to get started.

Follow us on our blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitch channels for the latest PagerDuty news and insights. 

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How are you running your cloud operations? Are you operating in ticket time and losing the agility of the cloud? Or are you extending cloud automation to the operations task level? The trick to maintaining your cloud agility is to create operational APIs, and it calls for your teams to run at their speed, not languish in ticket time. The good news is that PagerDuty® Runbook Automation is here to help. PagerDuty® Runbook Automation is a SaaS that helps businesses accelerate cloud operations by safely delegating automated IT workflows. Now you can operate faster by standardizing and safely delegating automated IT workflows to stakeholders. These workflows automate procedures in runbooks for resolving incidents, and fulfilling IT requests. 

PagerDuty® Runbook Automation is new to the market, but we’ve already seen some interesting use cases from our early access users. Here are some promising use cases:

1. Self-service Automation for Cloud Ops

PagerDuty® Runbook Automation lets DevOps engineers and SREs get started on building automation immediately. Engineers can create workflow automation and deliver reliable automated runbooks to end-users. This is especially useful for automating requests from developers to the Cloud Ops team for things like provisioning and deprovisioning instances, creating data sandboxes, copying data from production systems to development and test systems, and querying production data for things like user logs.

In addition to ensuring that system requirements are met and costs can be controlled, developers can start coding right away, instead of having to waste time on repetitive tasks or waiting for the platform team to do the same.

2. Drive Better Efficiency and Better-integrated Workflows 

Many IT Ops and Tech Support Ops tools are now available as SaaS but the infrastructure and production infrastructure they need to connect to is still behind a firewall or VPC. These SaaS tools may not be able to invoke “on-premises” automation from a SaaS product because company policy doesn’t allow inbound webhooks. 

Automation is most valuable when more people can use it. However, because there are a limited number of people that have access to environments behind the firewall, there are only a few who can utilize the automation that touches these environments. Delegating automation requires new approaches for connecting traditional automation to these cloud-based tools.

PagerDuty Runbook Automation’s approach for standardizing workflow automation can help you develop a congruent strategy for connecting front-office systems to back-office systems. Easily hook your SaaS tools into PagerDuty Runbook Automation to execute automation without requiring an inbound webhook through the firewall. Now, end-users can work more efficiently by invoking delegated automation where they work. This includes CRMs like Salesforce, ITSMs like ServiceNow, Github Cloud, Jira Cloud, PagerDuty, and more.

Maybe a financial planning and analysis analyst needs to grab inventory data about IT infrastructure for capacity planning. Instead of filling out a ticket for the Ops team they can pull this data themselves using a prebuilt workflow in Runbook Automation, possibly triggered from JIRA. Customer service agents can also benefit. For example, say a customer wants to change their SaaS portal subdomain, which is only possible by making API calls to “internal” API endpoints. You could empower your customer service agents to make these changes on behalf of a customer by invoking an automated workflow right from Zendesk that changes the customer’s portal name. See a demo of this use case here. 

3. Self-service Cloud Operation Across Multiple Accounts or Products 

PagerDuty® Runbook Automation can safely delegate access to automated tasks that work across cloud accounts, making it easier to consistently manage infrastructure in multiple cloud accounts. With PagerDuty® Runbook Automation’s AWS Systems Manager integration, operators can view and manage their global EC2 footprint in a single interface. This means faster execution and accuracy for tasks such as configuration management, patching, and deploying monitoring and security tooling agents.

This can be very useful for service providers who manage cloud infrastructure for customers. For example, customer success engineers can easily support customer environments without needing detailed knowledge or direct access to infrastructure resources. Because PagerDuty® Runbook Automation provides sharing of credentials in the context of operational processes, support reps and support teams have outcome-based jobs at their fingertips.

4. Improve Cloud Ops Compliance 

PagerDuty® Process Automation is great for optimizing security and compliance since secure setup and configuration are ensured by automation, and all access and executions are logged. The same is true for Cloud Operations. 

It can be time-consuming for someone to have to gather all the logs needed for audits across a sprawling number of cloud accounts and services. Runbook Automation logs every job execution inside the platform, which provides auditable history more directly aligned with business activity. This makes it easier for cloud engineering teams to meet compliance requirements.

Runbook Automation’s SaaS-based architecture makes it easy to trial! Start using powerful task automation in minutes. Contact us if you want to try Runbook Automation today. Learn more about Runbook Automation here.

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First, we’ve officially rebranded our automation product line, Rundeck®, as PagerDuty® Process Automation. Fundamentally, everyone who buys Rundeck becomes a PagerDuty customer, so we decided to make it less confusing.

Second, our runbook automation cloud service (announced last fall as “Rundeck Cloud”) is now generally available. This was included in the rebrand, so we chose to name it according to what it does: “PagerDuty Runbook Automation.” PagerDuty Runbook Automation is a SaaS-based offering within our PagerDuty Process Automation portfolio that’s designed to automate operations procedures so that a wider range of people in an organization can utilize them.

Finally, we are announcing version 4.0 of Rundeck Enterprise, which will now be known as “PagerDuty Process Automation On-Prem.” PagerDuty Process Automation On-Prem is self-managed software that supports a wide range of process automation use-cases. 

Let’s get into the details:

Rundeck Is Now “PagerDuty Process Automation”

As mentioned above, the Rundeck product line has been rebranded as PagerDuty Process Automation. Since the acquisition of Rundeck, we’ve seen rapidly growing demand for the product from both existing PagerDuty customers and the Rundeck community. PagerDuty has also released multiple new products related to Rundeck, providing seamless integration with PagerDuty Incident Response (now called PagerDuty Automation Actions) and now a SaaS version of Rundeck focused on the runbook automation use case (now called PagerDuty Runbook Automation). 

The vision behind PagerDuty Process Automation is to help our customers automate everything in their businesses, drive up consistency, and drive down resolution times. PagerDuty Process Automation empowers customers to automate IT and business procedures across their business systems. These processes can then be safely delegated to stakeholders, run on a scheduled basis, or triggered in response to events.

These automated processes can be used to diagnose and remediate issues, fulfill service requests, and conduct regular maintenance and administrative tasks. These actions can be human-assisted, or executed without any manual intervention.

The PagerDuty® Process Automation portfolio consists of the following offerings:

• PagerDuty® Automation Actions. A PagerDuty add-on that curates and connects responders in PagerDuty to automated diagnostics and remediation for services involved in incidents.
• PagerDuty® Runbook Automation. A SaaS service that enables engineers to standardize and automate runbook procedures, and delegate services as self-service operations.
• PagerDuty® Process Automation On-Prem. A self-hosted software cluster that gives engineers the ability to standardize and automate end-to-end operational workflows, and safely delegate them as self-service operations to stakeholders.

Runbook Automation is Generally Available

PagerDuty Runbook Automation gives you powerful runbook automation without needing to install and manage the automation software yourself. Why is this useful? Let’s look at how cloud computing services themselves get provisioned and managed. Cloud computing is powerfully easy. With the press of the button, users can spin up nearly any kind of IT service. Despite the fact that the cloud provides a lot of powerful technical automation, this automation is not considered safe to make broadly available to all potential users. The reasons for limiting access include concerns about cost, speed of outcome, quality of operations, and security.

To mitigate this limited access, companies resort to having their engineers and stakeholders submit tickets to centralized cloud infrastructure teams for their needs.  These infrastructure teams can keep track of all cloud usage, have the skills to properly set up and operate cloud services, and are able to enforce policies and ensure secure operations.  However, a task that could take minutes to spin up in the cloud automatically ends up taking days to be manually fulfilled by the central cloud team.

What companies really need to do is build automation for fulfilling those tasks, and make them available to the humans that need them. In other words, automate their runbook procedures, and then delegate this automation to stakeholders.

Using PagerDuty Runbook Automation (previously announced as Rundeck Cloud), Users turn manual runbooks into delegated, self-service requests and automate key IT tasks across environments to optimize security and compliance. This can include automating runbooks for resolving incidents, closing tickets, and fulfilling requests, now with the agility of operating in the cloud.

As a SaaS-based offering, PagerDuty Runbook Automation lets DevOps engineers and SREs get started immediately. They can deliver reliable, automated processes that are highly secure and available without having to manage automation infrastructure. 

PagerDuty Runbook Automation

Engineers standardize task automation for any public cloud. They do so by defining jobs that incorporate common infrastructure components as nodes and executing steps that utilize existing scripts and commands. PagerDuty Runbook Automation facilitates the delegation of these jobs by ensuring safety and compliance with authentication, access control, and privileged access management services—and by logging every activity. 

PagerDuty Runbook Automation connects automation in customers’ production environments via an agent called a Runbook Runner that is deployed behind the firewall. It securely connects nodes within their environments back to the PagerDuty Runbook Automation endpoint. These nodes can then be used to execute steps in automated process jobs. Job definitions can incorporate nodes connected by different Runbook Runners.

The PagerDuty Runbook Runner is built to meet the latest zero-trust security models. It calls back to the PagerDuty Runbook Automation endpoint via HTTPS. There’s no need to open additional ports in firewalls. 

Some of the use cases we’ve seen early users utilize PagerDuty Runbook Automation for include: 

• Providing self-service cloud operations for end-users like developers and customer service agents. Developers no longer need to wait for their environments, while platform teams see fewer tickets and interruptions.
• Simplified management of multiple cloud accounts. It can be difficult to manage many accounts across multiple public clouds. PagerDuty Runbook Automation simplifies the sharing of access credentials in the context of operational processes. 
• Tracking of automation for auditing and compliance. When users are managing hybrid environments, it can be difficult to track down all the automation logs across cloud accounts and other tools. All jobs are logged and easily viewable in PagerDuty Runbook Automation, making audit tracking seamless. 

Process Automation On-Prem 4.0 Now Available

We’re also excited to announce Version 4.0 of PagerDuty Process Automation On-Prem (previously Rundeck Enterprise). Version 4.0 rolls up security, stability, and usability enhancements, and includes a version of the Runner technology used by PagerDuty Runbook Automation—in this case, a Process Runner.

The Process Runner allows customers to run automated jobs that span between trusted environments. Customers can complete multi-environment changes, such as patching software instances in different data centers or availability zones, through automation in minutes instead of manual procedures that can take days. 

The Process Runner deploys behind firewalls in disparate environments. It securely connects nodes within these network segments back to the central PagerDuty Process Automation On-Prem cluster. These disparate nodes can then be used to execute steps in automated process jobs that span across multiple environments.

The Process Runner is built to meet the latest zero-trust security models. It calls back to the PagerDuty Process Automation On-Prem cluster endpoint via HTTPS. Now there’s no need to open additional ports in firewalls. 

PagerDuty Process Automation On-Prem’s security model allows companies to eliminate the need to support SSH between their trusted zones. This update is especially useful for businesses that need to better support automation of IT processes at subsidiaries and acquired companies, automate across global geography, and optimize the separation of customer data. 

We love our Rundeck customers and look forward to continuing the journey together. Sign up for the PagerDuty Process Automation Launch Webinar to learn more! 

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