Based in Arlington, Va., NAMI, the United States’ largest grassroots mental health organization, has independent affiliates throughout the nation. Their mission is to provide advocacy, education, support and public awareness so that all individuals and families affected by mental illness can build better lives. It’s a mission PagerDuty proudly supports. They offer multiple programs, including free education and support groups led by those with lived experience with mental health issues. 

A key service and common first point of contact is NAMI’s HelpLine. The nationwide peer-support service provides information, resource referrals and support to people living with a mental health condition, their family members and caregivers, mental health providers and the public. The HelpLine is largely staffed by volunteers who answer questions, offer support and provide practical next steps. In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HelpLine was overwhelmed and stretched to its limit. 

Pandemic Increases Need For NAMI’s Services 

The pandemic sparked a huge increase in the need for NAMI’s resources and support. According to The World Health Organization, the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a massive 25 percent during the first two years of the pandemic. 

At the same time, NAMI saw its HelpLine inquiries skyrocket. “In May of 2020, HelpLine calls went up more than 50 percent,” said Jessica Edwards, Chief Development Officer at NAMI. “The demand increased for our virtual support groups, our HelpLine, our resources online. Everything increased in a very dramatic way because people were really struggling,” Edwards said. 

The surge didn’t stop after that first month or even that year. The need for NAMI’s services became more crucial, especially as talking openly about mental health conditions became more accepted by society at large. “One of the only bright spots of the pandemic was that mental health finally got the attention that it really needed, because it was more comfortable for people to say they were not OK,” Edwards said.

PagerDuty’s Impact Pricing Allows NAMI to Expand Services 

NAMI needed a way to scale and meet this growing demand for the HelpLine. When they were introduced to PagerDuty and learned about Impact Pricing for nonprofit customers, NAMI found a way to solve its technology needs, giving the HelpLine a much-needed boost. The ability to streamline their on-call schedule and simplify how volunteers were made aware of a crisis call allowed NAMI to scale for the increased demand for the HelpLine.  

With the support of PagerDuty, NAMI was able to add 40 new HelpLine volunteers and several new full-time staff. “We’re now able to keep pace with necessary capacity for volunteer support, as well as expand our offerings,” Edwards said. “More people are calling the HelpLine,” she added. “More people are wanting guidance and information. So, the more we’re able to leverage technology like PagerDuty to have more volunteers, the more people we can help.”

Partnering With PagerDuty to Provide More Support

Eliminating the stigma of mental health and steering the public conversation around resources and support is the main focus for NAMI. With help from PagerDuty, they plan to expand services, such as increasing the number of bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking HelpLine volunteers and interns. This gives more access to services to more people in need. 

“PagerDuty is a company and an organization that is authentic in leveraging technology for social change and social good,” Edwards said. “They really make a change and make a difference. And in our social impact world, these are the kinds of companies that NAMI loves to work and partner with.”

Learn more about PagerDuty’s Impact Pricing and see how we help nonprofits accelerate their work and reach. Get started now with our free 14-day trial.

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PagerDuty delivers clear value for any organization at any stage of operational maturity. 

• $356K savings/year per team of ten.¹
• 70% faster time to resolve.¹
• 795% return on investment.¹
• 2 month payback period.¹

But you don’t have to take our word for it – the real-life experiences of our customers speak volumes. Here are a few examples of how PagerDuty creates value for global industry leaders. 

The Value SAP Receives from PagerDuty

SAP is a market leader in enterprise application software. And with more than three quarters of the world’s transaction revenue touching an SAP system, uptime is critical. 

SAP needed to digitally transform its business and move customer-facing services to the cloud. They also needed to ensure that there were fewer and less impactful incidents that could impact the customer experience and put revenue at risk. 

The task initially appeared easier said than done, especially given SAP’s size. Many teams were using custom in-house tools that weren’t scalable across the organization. There were “islands” of automation where certain sub-processes were moving quickly, but this acceleration wasn’t happening at scale. The exceptionally wide variety of tools and processes across business units and global theaters also made collaboration particularly burdensome. 

SAP’s Global Cloud Services team now uses PagerDuty to orchestrate their major incident response. We helped improve communication between teams and stakeholders, providing real-time information about the status of an incident and often reducing response time from hours to minutes. 

PagerDuty helped SAP achieve incredible results in just a couple of months, including: 

• 25% reduction in the number of responders needed for major incidents.
• Reduced response times by 30%.
• Resolution times reduced by 26%.
• Greater cross-team collaboration and ownership of services. 
• Seamless integration with various commercial and in-house tools. 

Read here to learn more about how SAP’s Global Cloud Services team improved operational excellence.  

The Value Brink’s Receives From PagerDuty 

Brink’s is a well-known leader in cash management, operating more than 16,000 secured trucks serving customers in more than 100 countries. Technology keeps the money moving—but a few years ago the company realized that to grow the business, its technology needed an upgrade.

Teams were managing workflows manually and spending too much time and money on repetitive, mundane tasks. Moreover, attempts to deploy changes in the IT environment were both time consuming and inconsistent. That’s when Brink’s decided to turn to us for help. 

PagerDuty Process Automation quickly demonstrated its value by reducing toil and facilitating faster deployments and migrations. This made employee’s lives easier while delivering agility, scalability, and savings to the business. The company further expanded PagerDuty-powered automation to other stakeholders and services, such as reducing the time it took engineers to provision virtual machines. By choosing an easy-to-use solution and automating well-documented processes, the Brink’s team realized immediate value and saw a fast return on investment, including: 

• 99% less time spent on manual tasks while reducing risk of manual errors. 
• More than 500 FTE engineering hours are saved annually.
• Developer’s waiting time reduced from two weeks to 3 minutes via self-serve automated workflows. 

Read here to learn more about how Brink’s successfully used automation to drive constant, iterative improvements to the business and, in turn, to its customers. 

Reduce Costs and Accelerate Growth

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the platform for action that empowers organizations to anticipate, automate, and accelerate critical work and to transform operations. It’s essential infrastructure that allows teams to focus on high-priority work, substantially reduce operating costs, and radically accelerate innovation and growth. 

The results from SAP and Brink’s showcase how PagerDuty helps them save time and money, and the value is true for customers of all sizes and industries.

Learn more about how PagerDuty can help you save time and money, or sign up for a free trial.

¹IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by PagerDuty, PagerDuty Helps Organizations Optimize Their Digital Operations Management, doc #US47011820, January 2021

The post Learn How PagerDuty Customers Save Money and Achieve Fast ROI appeared first on PagerDuty.

Knightscope Leads the Way

For the past nine years, Knightscope, an American advanced security technology company, has been leading the charge with its Autonomous Security Robots. The publicly traded company designs, builds and deploys Autonomous Security Robots for use in monitoring people and vehicles in public areas such as malls, parking lots, neighborhoods, and casinos. They have been innovating public safety using robots and proactive monitoring to deter and report security risks. Their mission is ambitious: to make America the safest country in the world. 

When Knightscope shipped their first robot in 2015, the security robot industry was still in its infancy. With little competition and a blank canvas on the landscape of the industry,  Knightscope was a pioneer. They dove head first into the autonomous security robot space and now have contracts for more than 100 autonomous security robots. 

It Takes a Village

All of the Knightscope robots are, essentially, vessels for the company’s API software. The data collected by the robots is their real product. Several departments work together to keep the systems rolling, and they need to ensure that they are working as efficiently as possible. Jane Miller, Senior Operations Manager, manages the Network Operations Center (NOC) at Knightscope, where the team is responsible for maintaining client’s robots—keeping them up and running 24/7. “They’re our first line of defense for everything technical going on with our fleet of robots,” said Miller. 

The NOC needs to be able to handle potential software and hardware issues anytime, including after business hours, such as a computer’s hard drive within the robot filling up. Also, because Knightscope software is running in autonomous security robots, the robot’s vessel can end up with problems independent of the software glitches. For example, it could be vandalized or hit by a car. It may need human intervention in situations where it’s not sure what decision to make. In these situations, the on-call team member must resolve the issue or complete the diagnostics in preparation to pass it over to the appropriate team. 

Miller is also responsible for the technical client support of Knightscope’s Security Operations Center (KSOC), where Knightscope’s software interface allows clients to interact with their robots. Here, clients can view the video coming from the robots, and have an emergency phone call system where the robots can be programmed to call the Security Team. Clients can also prompt audio announcements if someone is seen as a threat or enters a restricted access zone. 

With all of the different systems and departments, resolving an issue could get complicated. Because they are a technology company at their core, they know they need a dependable and proven way to align all of the systems and teams.  

PagerDuty is Their Solution

Knightscope has been using PagerDuty since 2015 to manage its real-time operations. It connects the PagerDuty API into its proprietary robotics software to monitor the robot hardware, software, and autonomous decision making. The teams will receive proactive notices via PagerDuty if a piece of software crashes unexpectedly, if the robot physically needs help, or if connection to the robot has been lost. PagerDuty also provides data about the health of the fleet of robots, ensuring new software releases or bug fixes are operating as expected. 

“We take care of making sure that the robots are doing everything they need to be doing from a security perspective, if it’s having any hardware or software issues. If anything comes up, PagerDuty lets us know and we take care of it. If any new issues come up, we investigate, and escalate to our R&D teams,” said Miller.

This is where PagerDuty Incident Response shows its value. When a robot isn’t responding the way it should, “We’re using PagerDuty to make sure that the robots are doing everything they need to be doing to support the clients,” said Miller. In fact, it’s a huge relief for new employees when they start working for Knightscope and see that they can rely on PagerDuty to tell them when something is wrong, instead of wading through mounds of data. 

PagerDuty has proven to be adaptable and reliable as Knightscope continues to develop new features and platforms. When a technology company, especially an industry disruptor, is at the forefront of tremendous progress, they need to ensure their systems are nimble and can change quickly. “We’re still a startup culture, so we’re always changing things. It’s been really easy for the team to integrate PagerDuty into new technologies—to adapt and grow as we go. It keeps us production-ready; ready to work with our clients.” 

Knightscope has benefited from PagerDuty because it is:

• Easy to use – Easily integrated with their software using PagerDuty’s custom APIs.
• Adaptable and agile – Easy to implement new features, platforms, technologies. 
• Flexible – Easily create and modify rotation schedules & notifications received how you want them. 
• Cost effective – Onsite robots, available 24/7 reduce the need for human staff. 

The Future is Changing

The future for Knightscope seems limitless. In the world of technology, change is certain. With ever changing priorities, crises, budgets and access to reliable employees, companies like Knightscope are constantly looking for ways to create effective and consistent solutions. They are pioneering the new age of security, and they rely on PagerDuty to achieve their goals. 

To learn how PagerDuty can help your organization, contact your account manager or try a 14-day free trial today.

The post Knightscope Relies on PagerDuty to Keep Their Robots Rolling appeared first on PagerDuty.

To this end, bringing everything—teams, services, data—under centralized management is key. Urgent work cannot be held up by centralized ticketing tools.

This is where combining IT service management tools with a digital operations platform can bridge the gap between central IT and decentralized teams. Enter PagerDuty and ServiceNow—by combining the two, responders gain access to automation to drive action without delay, enabling a real-time response in seconds while maintaining a complete history of all activities. This combination also streamlines the business response to incidents, keeping stakeholders updated.

This better together approach is representative of incident response processes leveraged today in the modern enterprise stack. One such PagerDuty customer benefitting is IHS Markit.

The Culture Clash

IHS Markit provides analytics and intelligence to financial service providers, governments, and other major industries. Headquartered in London, UK, it employs 16,000 people globally.

IHS Markit needed to bring together a rapidly growing number of hybrid operations to gain full visibility across the business and manage incidents from a centralized command center. The company had grown through acquisition and now offered around 700 customer-facing services and 300 internal services. Tracking for incidents at this scale was incredibly challenging, and was made harder by the conflicting requirements held by different areas of the business.

• The DevOps team wanted to remain “agile, autonomous, and awesome,” with full control over all its monitoring needs. A core requirement from DevOps was that the team did not want to raise tickets or have to log on to ServiceNow.
• The operations command center (OCC) team was rooted in a more traditional IT infrastructure library (ITIL) structure and based its system on ServiceNow. The team wanted better scheduling and escalation policies, but with “zero impact to the existing, mature incident management processes.”
• Compliance wanted to track controls and records in a common system of record in ServiceNow, particularly as IHS Markit has many products under various regulatory regimes.
• Management requested global oversight across all teams, whether the team was more aligned with DevOps or sat within the more traditional ITIL side. Management wanted ServiceNow to provide this visibility.

IHS Markit already had PagerDuty in place, but wanted to expand its use. John Kennedy, Director of Observability at IHS Markit, explained, “We wanted to bring incident management together into one enterprise offering that was horizontal across the company and properly managed.”

A Solution for Everyone

To achieve this, IHS Markit integrated ServiceNow incidents with PagerDuty. IHS Markit worked with PagerDuty’s customer success team to customize the PagerDuty platform to accommodate all requirements and improve operations. 

This enabled the DevOps team to maintain ownership of their services within PagerDuty. For these teams, the ServiceNow integration was introduced “by stealth”—everything was tracked and recorded in ServiceNow, without them ever having to log into the platform. 

For the OCC team, PagerDuty’s integration with ServiceNow ensured the existing incident management process remained intact. Everyone could monitor major incidents via PagerDuty dashboards, even if they were not yet onboarded in PagerDuty. With one click, incident managers could quickly bring in specialized teams with diverse skills, including senior executives or product experts.

This also fulfilled compliance and management’s visibility requirements, as PagerDuty gave them a single pane of glass through which they could view the entirety of the system.

“All of our major incident management was now being done in PagerDuty, and if the incident occurred outside of it, then our major incident managers would sync it up with PagerDuty,” John explained. “On top of this, they’re using response plays to bring in executives to help us make quick decisions. As a result, we’re getting major benefits, especially on MTTR.”

This better together approach means that central IT has visibility and access across distributed teams. This will be essential as IHS Markit continues its growth journey.

What’s next for IHS Markit?

Looking ahead, IHS Markit will continue to centralize visibility. “There is a huge expansion of agile and DevOps methodology across the company, which means we need to think about the next evolution of our converged model for incident management,” John said.

Maintaining DevOps’ ability to be “agile and autonomous” will also be a major focus. “We need them to be able to create their own technical services, so that means thinking about the technical services in ServiceNow and whether they need to be hooked into our hierarchy there,” John explained. “Governance is important too—how we maintain the quality of the system and how that’s governed centrally.”

As digital transformation continues and teams are more distributed than ever, it’s key that business processes for managing urgent work can operate in real-time. To find out more about how PagerDuty can enhance ServiceNow and other ITSM tools for faster resolution times and enhanced coordination, check out these resources:

How Your ITSM Tool & PagerDuty Make a Dynamic Duo for Real-Time Work

Enhance your ITSM

Solutions brief: Extend ITSM Workflows with PagerDuty

And, if you’re ready to see PagerDuty in action, try us out for free for 14 days.

The post IHS Markit: Centralizing Incident Management With PagerDuty & ServiceNow appeared first on PagerDuty.

In rural Sub-Saharan Africa, however, it’s estimated that only about 28% of hospitals have reliable electricity. With little to no data to understand how and when power outages occur, it has become increasingly challenging for the hospital staff to manage. 

Nexleaf Analytics is working to solve this challenge. Nexleaf creates data and technology solutions for better health outcomes in low and middle income countries. They work alongside health advocates, governments, and local communities to provide actionable data for decision-making at scale. Their mission is to ensure countries have the data they need to build lasting solutions that improve people’s health.

The Case for Data and Analytics

Having an unreliable power source causes a myriad of problems for rural hospitals. For example, many rely on diesel generators when they have unreliable power. Although this is the only way to ensure backup power, it’s also a costly and inefficient workaround for unstable power systems. Most of these facilities lack baseline data to track the trends in outages, which means the hospital staff play a guessing game of when there will be an outage and are constantly on high-alert. It also causes problems forecasting budgets for diesel fuel expenses. 

Without data showing exactly how long and costly these outages are, it’s difficult for these hospitals to justify additional funds. “Our main aim was to document demand for power data and to also understand what problems and challenges exist that could be assisted by having visibility in data,” said Amos Momanyi, Medical Equipment Project Manager for Nexleaf Analytics. 

A pilot program between PagerDuty, Nexleaf and the Center for Public Health and Development was implemented to understand how and when outages occur, and to establish protocols for maintaining healthcare facilities when outages happen. The program was implemented in 15 rural hospitals in Kenya with a few goals in mind:

• Document the demand for power data
• Understand the problems and challenges that could be assisted by having visibility in data
• Understand how alerts and data could help resolve power outages

The Power of PagerDuty

Nexleaf deployed PagerDuty and connected IoT sensors to provide notifications to hospital staff via SMS and an online application. This allowed the staff to easily understand the root cause of power outages. One hospital, for example, found that they were sharing electricity with a neighboring facility, triggering power outages at 6 a.m. They shifted energy usage to different times of day to maintain a predictable energy supply–  a simple solution, but one that would otherwise be invisible to the team without data from PagerDuty.

The data from the PagerDuty platform also helped medical facilities explain their need for increased diesel and justify why they were over budget. Even better, the data helped improve the accuracy of their financial projections for the months ahead.

Most importantly, real-time notifications from PagerDuty meant that biomedical engineers were not required to be at the facility to know when an outage was happening. After receiving an alert, hospital employees could act quickly to reconnect power to the facility. This eliminated the need to manually monitor their backup power, and prevented blackouts with potentially major consequences on patient outcomes. “With PagerDuty, teams could ensure that no fatalities happened because of equipment failure due to loss of power,” said Momanyi.

The Future Looks Bright

With the success of the pilot, hospitals and their staff found a number of solutions. Hospital employees worked to determine use cases for power data that could help them make effective and efficient decisions around management of power at their facilities. Facilities are keeping PagerDuty in place and Nexleaf is expanding to new facilities. 

For more on Nexleaf Analytic’s journey, watch the full Summit ’22 session here.

Learn how real-time operations from PagerDuty powers nonprofits, or try a 14-day free trial today.

The post Better Data for Public Health: How Nexleaf and PagerDuty are Monitoring Healthcare appeared first on PagerDuty.

Launched in 2017, Loft Orbital’s satellite-as-a-service business model is shaking up the space industry. Loft Orbital flies customer payloads onboard regularly scheduled satellite launches and handles the entire mission as a service. For example, suppose a customer wanted to send a camera to space to analyze weather. Loft Orbital would add the camera onto one of its upcoming satellite launches and take care of the data collection process once the camera is in space based on customer requests.

Understanding The Gravity of the Situation

John Murray is a senior member of Loft Orbital’s satellite operations and software engineering team. He helps build and manage the company’s proprietary ground control software, Cockpit—an all-in-one solution for satellite operations. Engineers control everything through Cockpit, from mission planning to communications between satellites and ground stations. Cockpit is highly automated, reducing the risk of human error while making operations simpler for both Loft Orbital’s engineers and customer requests.

One of Murray’s first tasks, when hired, was to implement an incident response system that could provide 24/7 support, in preparation for their first satellite launch. The system needed to scale in line with the fast-growing business and integrate with Loft Orbital’s existing tech stack, such as Grafana. Loft Orbital needed a solution with a stable API that was easy to customize.

Being able to quickly respond to incidents was a key priority. Loft Orbital operates Low Earth Orbit satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit, so satellites regularly pass over ground stations, or very large satellite dishes used to communicate with the satellites, located at the North and South Pole. There are no ground stations in much of the Pacific Ocean, so there are times when Loft Orbital’s satellites are not in contact with the ground. This means that if an engineer misses an opportunity to correct a problem, they won’t be able to respond for at least another 45 minutes. “Urgency is key because things tend to snowball very quickly in space,” explained Murray. “Prompt responses save us time and money on a huge scale.”

Another requirement was rethinking the mission command center. “Traditionally, you’d have a team of 20 or more people in a room 24/7 keeping your satellite healthy and operational. We’re hoping to only get called in when there is a problem that needs to be fixed, though we generally have at least one person on duty to perform certain manual tasks and maintenance,” explained Murray. “Automation is foundational – we need the ability to scale our operations to 5, 10, or 100 satellites rapidly without needing to scale personnel.”

Murray had used PagerDuty in a previous role at another company and was familiar with its functionality. “There was no question in our minds that PagerDuty was the best solution to solve our problems.”

A Trustworthy Solution

Loft Orbital was able to implement PagerDuty quickly, and seamlessly integrate it with Cockpit and Grafana. If Grafana determines there are telemetry issues with a satellite such as abnormal temperatures or low battery voltage, it triggers an alert in PagerDuty and engineers are able to quickly respond. Additionally, PagerDuty’s agile API was able to easily integrate with Cockpit to alert when performance issues arise with the software itself. “Since adopting PagerDuty the team has acknowledged and resolved all incidents swiftly, giving us complete trust in our incident response processes,” explained Murray.

Loft Orbital also benefits from PagerDuty’s simplicity; PagerDuty’s interface is so easy to use that new hires can support satellite operations within just a few hours. “PagerDuty is something that I can throw at users and don’t have to worry about extensive training on how to ensure they are aware of issues so they can focus on issue resolution training,” explained Murray. “The software is simple enough that you give it to new hires and they’re off to the races an hour later.” Additionally, employees can personalize alerts to suit their preferences to make sure it is notifying them as effectively as possible, which is ideal when managing a global team with differing approaches to work-life balance.

PagerDuty has increased collaboration between Loft Orbital’s teams. The company doesn’t follow a traditional hierarchy, instead empowering engineers to manage services and incidents when they arise while ensuring full-team awareness by tracking issues and resolutions. When there is an issue, PagerDuty alerts the relevant expert according to set escalation policies aligned with time zones, minimizing out-of-hours disruption and downtime while documenting the problem for future reference. “PagerDuty has simplified our team’s lives immensely,” explained Murray. “Previously, engineers were stuck in a position where they didn’t know who the subject matter expert was, but PagerDuty helped eliminate this and now allows for seamless collaboration.”

“PagerDuty is the glue that joins human monitoring to automated response and has given us the ability to scale operations rapidly,” said Murray. “With PagerDuty, I can walk away from my desk and live my life knowing my team has access to me in an emergency, and I have a way to look back on any issues others have addressed.”

Mission Accomplished: A Culture of Rapid Incident Response

PagerDuty has enabled Loft Orbital to scale its operations rapidly and provide 24/7 support for its satellites without a traditional command center or needing to hire additional staff at the same pace that its constellation grows. The company can confidently meet all customer SLAs and let them focus on what matters to them—their data or service.

Looking ahead, Loft Orbital plans to roll out PagerDuty to different engineering teams. By adding more users to the platform, teams will be able to create a more solid structure of response orchestration and cross-team issue tracking and resolution. When an incident arises, everyone, regardless of their role, knows whom to escalate the alert to. Loft Orbital is building a culture in which everyone feels empowered to triage and troubleshoot incidents without worrying about missteps or causing an inconvenience. The company is also considering exploring PagerDuty’s Event Intelligence features to further increase the efficiency of its incident response process.

To learn how PagerDuty can help your organization, contact your account manager or try a 14-day free trial today.

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In many low- and middle-income countries and underserved communities, emergency responders typically coordinate the response via messaging services (e.g., WhatsApp). But scrolling through group messaging chats to coordinate and mobilize on a broader level is not scalable nor effective, and leaves emergency responders at the mercy of outdated mobile networks and legacy infrastructure.

Enter non-profit organization Trek Medics, a PagerDuty.org grantee and Impact Pricing customer. Trek Medics works to improve emergency response for at-risk and vulnerable populations through innovative mobile phone technologies. Through Trek Medics’ Beacon communications platform, responders can alert, coordinate, and track emergency response networks on any mobile phone—with or without internet. The platform is active with more than 2,000 daily users in 25 countries including Puerto Rico, England and Tanzania, and handled over 100,000 calls in 2020.

Orchestrating Emergency Response at Scale

The emergency services organizations that rely on Trek Medics need to be on call 24×7. Teams in these regions are typically alerted to nearby emergencies via text message or even an air siren. The Beacon platform serves the same purpose, but instead of an air siren, Beacon sends a digital signal to the responder’s device.

Beacon goes beyond just alerting individuals. “Coordinating a response to an alert is the second part of the equation that is just as critical as the first part. We can coordinate the appropriate response to make sure that the right people are going to the right place at the right time,” said Jason Friesen, the Founder and Executive Director at Trek Medics.

Beacon must be available to support the mission-critical nature of 24×7 emergency response. Whether it’s a motor vehicle collision, opioid response or domestic violence emergency, prolonged downtime puts lives at risk. It’s vital that Trek Medics can spot and resolve any digital incidents in Beacon before end-users are impacted. This is where PagerDuty comes in.

Getting Help to Where It’s Needed Fast

Before PagerDuty, Trek Medics’ approach to digital operations management was manual and time-intensive. Teams logged onto different sites and sifted through various sources to identify and resolve issues. With PagerDuty, Trek Medics integrates and centralizes alerts coming from sources such as Twilio, Slack, Cloudwatch, New Relic and internal monitoring, providing teams with visibility into issues within its whole environment. “To us, PagerDuty is an internal response and early warning system,” explained Friesen. “So, there is a real parallel between what we do and what PagerDuty does. PagerDuty not only streamlines all of the back-end alerts that we could be getting on our stack, but it also helps to coordinate our own response to make sure that the right people can investigate and resolve the alert.”

Prioritizing Alerts to Ensure Users Aren’t Impacted

PagerDuty also provides Trek Medics with priority and severity tagging to help teams quickly sort through alerts and identify the mission critical problems in real-time. For instance, when one of Trek Medics’ two servers went down, PagerDuty alerted Trek Medics immediately. “Thanks to PagerDuty, as soon as the server went offline, our back-end developers were alerted through Slack, the mobile app, SMS and phone. This allowed them to instantly take action to resolve the problem and we avoided any tangible impact on our users,” said Friesen.

In another case, PagerDuty flagged instances of Beacon’s mobile app crashing when a user opened a photo that was more than a month old—even before the mobile app monitoring tool sent a notification. PagerDuty enabled the team to quickly resolve the issue without impacting users. “While this was a relatively innocuous problem with the app, it’s a great example of how effective PagerDuty is at keeping us aware of what’s going on across our services at all times and making sure users are not impacted,” commented Friesen.

Creating a Future-Proof Ecosystem

Looking ahead, Trek Medics plans to further integrate PagerDuty with its partners. “Many of our Beacon users leverage additional services on top of the platform. We want to alert Beacon users immediately through PagerDuty when these third-party services run into issues. If a mobile network goes down, for instance, we could alert our partners and even the mobile network before they realize it’s happened. This helps the whole ecosystem become more proactive.”

PagerDuty.org’s partnership model, designed to help nonprofits and mission-driven organizations accelerate their vital work, has helped Trek Medics further improve its services. “As a non-profit organization, we’re counting our pennies every day and we are dependent on the generosity of others. We have to watch our budget very closely. PagerDuty’s holistic support makes it totally possible for us to work at full capacity without having to make any trade-offs or compromise any of our services.”

Find out how nonprofits and B Corps can accelerate their work and reach with our Impact Pricing and COVID-19 Response Pricing.

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David opened the session by defining Vodafone’s strategic goals. “Our vision is to create an engineering-driven culture,” he explained. “We want to empower development teams to be self-sufficient. Therefore, we’re putting them at the center of everything we do, but we want to challenge them—their code needs to reach production within four hours.”

To do this, Vodafone is building self-service capabilities, with development teams given the power to say what tools and capabilities they need and how they want to use them. The end goal is to have observability and alerting capabilities that tells development teams what happens to code and how it behaves as it moves into production.

“We’re building a lot of tooling around this,” David shared. “We’re building true continuous CI/CD, with a focus on continuous deployment that enables us to move code from a sandbox into the production environment. But this cannot be achieved without immutable infrastructure, which will enable us to provide immutable observability and alerting for development teams.”

Why Is Immutable Telemetry Important?

To explain how immutable observability can be defined, David gave us a great analogy using Formula 1.

Imagine you’re leading the race and your tire gets a puncture, forcing you to come in for a pit stop. What do you expect your engineers to do—repair or replace the tire? You of course want them to replace it because you want to get back to the race as soon as possible. Immutability is about throwing away what is broken and replacing it quickly, instead of spending time trying to repair it.

“Immutable infrastructure in IT really means that you shouldn’t change things if something is broken; it is much quicker to replace it with something new,” David explains. “Immutable observability leverages this approach to provide an on-demand, out-of-the-box capability to monitor and alert everything, end to end, in an immutable fashion.”

How Vodafone Is Enabling Immutable Telemetry

The immutable approach to telemetry would see Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams develop new monitoring approaches on demand. Llewelyn gave us an example where three development teams are all using a threshold error rate monitor.

But what happens if one team decides it wants an anomaly detection error rate monitor? Instead of replacing the existing monitor and upsetting the other teams, the SRE team would develop the new monitor. Once ready, the development team that requested it would use the new monitor, while the others carry on using the existing monitor.

Llewelyn also talked about the challenges Vodafone faced in implementing immutable telemetry. “We have 150+ developers and are following the DevOps approach, where developers need to own the code whether it’s in production or lower environments, including subsequent monitoring and alerting,” he shared. “We also need to give an immediate view of our production status to all stakeholders to enable visibility across digital.”

He also explained that the solution they build needs to be in line with SRE principles of reducing toil. But because the solution will also be for the developers, it means they need to make all modules and monitors available as code and implemented via a CI pipeline, which allows developers to quickly add them as needed and also allows Vodafone to recover should an incident arise.

The SRE team dreamed of a developer never having to leave the release pipeline to set up monitoring and alerting; instead, they can simply call up modules that have been built by the team itself. In practice at Vodafone, this sees the SRE team developing configurations for Datadog monitors and PagerDuty callouts, which can be called up in Terraform to set up monitoring and alerting. In the future, should developers want new monitors, these would be requested from the SRE team, who would develop it and make it available, and developers could then call it up through Terraform.

David wrapped up the session by explaining how PagerDuty fits into SRE’s strategy. “SRE’s goal is to eliminate toil to allow time to be spent on more valuable tasks, like engineering solutions that make tomorrow a better place. Automation of tasks is vital here, and PagerDuty is the best tool for the job because it brings development teams closer to their code and empowers ownership.”

Interested in watching the full session? Register today to check it out on demand (for free!), along with other customer sessions, including incident management at Form3 and how to drive operational efficiency with Auto Trader UK and Gousto.

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This experience is exactly what Form3—a UK-based, cloud-native, payment-as-a-service platform—aims to eliminate. The company provides payment technology, processing, and infrastructure to the financial services industry, enabling organizations to clear transactions faster. Due to its cloud-native platform running on AWS, Form3 is able to deliver faster payment processing to their customers than they are accustomed to, as typical payment platforms that are not cloud-first are often held back by monolithic processes and legacy infrastructure.

At PagerDuty’s Summit EMEA 2020, Eimear O’Connor, Chief Operations Officer of Form3, shared how her company uses the PagerDuty platform in combination with AWS cloud infrastructure to improve their operations to ensure the best possible customer experience—so that their clients’ end customers can pay seamlessly when checking out with their shopping carts and merchants can capture as much revenue as possible. Several banks, e-commerce platforms, credit card providers, fintech companies, and financial institutions all rely on Form3 to ensure payment transactions are secure, reliable, and processed quickly.

The Need for Speed

O’Connor’s team is responsible for maintaining the successful operation of Form3’s platform and ensuring a positive and consistent customer experience. During her PagerDuty Summit EMEA session, she described how their customers expect instantaneous access to view the status of their payments, which they need to ensure their services are up and running around the clock. And when incidents inevitably occur, Form3 needs the ability to orchestrate a swift response and ensure the right responders are contacted at the right time to resolve issues to reduce the impact on customers.

To achieve all this, O’Connor and her team knew they needed a solution that could quickly identify and notify teams what was happening if any services started to experience a disruption or outage. Form3 adopted a DevOps approach from its inception, building a culture of accountability and ownership with its teams and leveraging PagerDuty to empower engineers to build their own schedules, customize alerts, and gain real-time visibility into incidents. “We utilize PagerDuty to coordinate all of our intelligence, 24/7, 365 alert and incident response. We use predefined on-call scheduling and escalations based on alert types, which are then instantly directed to the right DevOps teams that can then respond in real-time,” O’Connor said.

Because Form3 is growing so quickly, O’Connor also shared that implementing automation capabilities into their infrastructure and provisioning processes will help their teams scale more easily on AWS. For example, to help speed up the onboarding process for engineers, the company is utilizing PagerDuty’s Terraform integration to automatically provision the PagerDuty instance.

Additionally, PagerDuty isn’t just used by engineering teams and on-call responders. By using the PagerDuty API, Form3 was able to develop an integration that helps track and report on-call hours for responders. With this integration, the company’s finance team can now easily view a report detailing any on-call hours worked and pay employees accordingly.

Interested in hearing the full story? To view Form3’s session and others at Summit EMEA, register here—it’s free!

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While these numbers are grim, innovation in healthcare and financial technology is opening the door to opportunities for people to gain access to healthcare and financial assistance on a global scale. Enter mTOMADY, which got its start as a project of the NGO Doctors for Madagascar, and is a digital platform that facilitates resilience to medical impoverishment and universal health coverage, particularly in countries with underserved healthcare systems such as Madagascar.

And as a PagerDuty Impact Pricing customer, mTOMADY is one of the organizations committed to helping bring essential medical care to people who need it, in the hardest-to-reach places, in the moments they need it most.

Increasing Healthcare Access Through Technology

Samuel Knauss, a medical doctor and digital health clinician, oversees mTOMADY’s Product team and is responsible for the organization’s development and operations of end-user software solutions, as well as strategy around the distribution of care and support for their patients and users through those solutions. “Our teams are distributed across Germany, Madagascar, and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa,” shared Knauss. With a small, distributed team operating in different workstreams, it’s important that communications are properly directed to the right people at the right time. “Between the team of on-the-ground agents and software developers, it is important for our teams to be able to communicate timely and effectively when incidents with our systems occur.”

mTOMADY’s services have to be online and available 24×7 in extremely rural areas to serve patients, so uptime and connectivity is critical to ensuring patients have access to proper care and financial support solutions, especially during global crises.

mTOMADY is built upon the foundation of five main principles:

• Transparency. Collecting real-time data on healthcare system usage, disease prevalence, and treatment costs enables impact to be traced down to individual health outcomes.
• Universal Access. Technology that works in resource poor settings, on any mobile phone, allows patients and healthcare workers to access the platform even in isolated, rural areas.
• Cost Reduction. Simple-to-use technology that can be easily integrated into existing procedures to reduce costs and streamline administration obstacles, improving operational efficiency.
• Advanced Technology. Cutting-edge pattern recognition and data analytics provide actionable insights to prevent insurance fraud and improve quality of care.
• Scientific Evidence. Research conducted to collect measurable, empirical evidence on how the solution works in the real world enables continuous optimization.

Manual vs. Real-Time Incident Management

Before PagerDuty, mTOMADY’s incident management process was completely manual. They used a spreadsheet for on-call directories, which led to delays in response and confusion around how to prioritize alerts for certain teams with different expertise. The manual directory also created a bottleneck in terms of scheduling because on-call rotations were globally distributed and cascaded across time zones. “Organizing our duty times and who’s responsible for what at what time is crucial in our field. If we don’t know who’s on call, we can’t provide the level of care we promise to our patients,” Knauss explained.

Since the implementation of PagerDuty, mTOMADY has seen significant improvement in their on-call and incident management processes. They replaced manual on-call spreadsheets with automated rotation schedules, which let responders know precisely when they are on call and what services they are responsible for. They also leverage PagerDuty’s ecosystem of over 350 integrations to centralize tools like Kibana, Sentry, and Slack into a single point of ingestion. With these implementations, the mTOMADY team has seen significant improvements in metrics like MTTA/MTTR, as well as better alignment around who the point person is for incidents involving certain applications and services.

“Timeliness is the most crucial factor in our field of work; knowing that the PagerDuty platform holds my teams accountable in response scenarios gives us the peace of mind we need to focus on our work, both on-the-ground and internal operations.” said Knauss. If mTOMADY is unable to respond to inquiries in a timely manner, it could mean that someone out there isn’t getting the care or support they need.

Healthcare in the Sahara During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, mTOMADY has drastically changed the way it operates: They have canceled or delayed all non-essential meetings until further notice and have moved from much of their on-the-ground work to a predominantly digital approach.

However, mTOMADY is also constantly looking for ways to offer assistance. This includes working directly with rural hospitals to provide support and shift their focus to COVID-19-related response by distributing protective equipment to local and rural communities to help slow the spread of the virus. Looking ahead, mTOMADY wants to create a way to integrate PagerDuty into their global health emergency systems so they can detect spikes in illnesses or outbreaks in both local and rural communities.

Looking Into the Future

mTOMADY plans to continue expanding its use of PagerDuty into different facets of the business and go beyond just on-call management. They plan to integrate PagerDuty into their emergency response processes, including integrating with their ambulance service that works directly with rural communities. Additionally, they are looking to expand PagerDuty into their supply and equipment networks so that when there is some sort of communal shortage, they are alerted in real time and can act accordingly.

To learn more about how PagerDuty is working to provide resources to healthcare companies, specifically around the COVID-19 outbreak, visit our COVID-19 resources page. Additionally, visit PagerDuty.org to learn how PagerDuty partners with organizations to deliver on their mission when moments matter, including providing Impact Pricing to organizations like mTOMADY.

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