But the pivot to service ownership is difficult, especially for large companies with hundreds or even thousands of services. Everything from defining a service, its boundaries, and who owns it can be a behemoth undertaking. And ensuring that services are configured in a way that allows the organization to scale quickly is next to impossible across the entire technology ecosystem. However, gaining this level of visibility is crucial for better business outcomes.

To address this problem, PagerDuty is excited to announce the general availability of Service Standards for all plans. PagerDuty’s emphasis on service ownership through our service-based architecture has traditionally allowed individual teams to determine how to configure services. Now, with Service Standards, teams across an organization have both the visibility to understand what best practice looks like as well as the flexibility to standardize that knowledge across teams new to service ownership in a way that’s beneficial for both the team and organization. 

Service Standards help all teams ensure that their service configurations are adhering to service ownership best practices. This means that services are informative, integrated with the right tools, and supported by the right people. Service Standards provides both the visibility and means to institute standards across teams to not only embrace service ownership, but also to scale it across the organization.

Introducing Service Standards

When configuring services, teams throughout an organization will have different methods. Some services may have the information that all teams need to act quickly during an incident and others may not. This lack of uniformity can cause problems across the ecosystem, with information that’s lost or locked up as purely tribal knowledge. And, it’s next to impossible for managers and administrators to know whether the services they are responsible for are in good shape or not.

Service Standards can help individual engineers understand how to configure better services, while providing a guide for managers and administrators to scale these standards across an organization.

Set up better services with guidelines for success

With the shift to cloud, the number of services for any organization has grown exponentially, and a central governing and creation team isn’t often able to handle the load. To make things more complicated, service owners configure services in markedly different ways. From naming conventions, to descriptions, to whether they have the right people on call, services vary in the depth of information they provide.

Too often this results in a lot of rework. Imagine this scenario: Team spins up new services only to be blocked before they can enter production. They’re told to make a variety of changes and fixes to ship. And, since these requirements are often not codified or widely known, this is a mistake that the team might make multiple times, adding pain and toil to the service creation process. 

We hear this from customers all the time. In fact, one of the top questions we get asked is “what does ‘good’ look like?” The truth is, it often depends, but it’s always the case that ‘good’ is unique to each team’s particular way of working. 

With Service Standards, teams can standardize on what good looks like according to company policy. PagerDuty has provided nine standards that each service should fulfill to have the depth and context required for the service to be considered well-configured, all of which are able to be toggled on and off.

Audit services for accountability

Service Standards also give managers and administrators the level of control they need to ensure that configuration requirements are met at scale. Administrators can determine visibility and decide whether to make these standards publicly available for the rest of the organization to view. They can also toggle on or off all nine standards depending on what the company needs. On a more granular level, administrators can apply these standards to only a subset of services for more flexibility. And, the service performance data can be exported out of PagerDuty and shared as needed to drive accountability and show progress.

Ready to try yourself?

Service Standards are here to help all organizations scale service ownership best practices. This feature gives engineers an understanding of what is ready for production and reduces the toil required to ship new services. For administrators and managers, Service Standards help drive accountability throughout the technology ecosystem and provide a way to assess progress. Over time, this improves incident response for first responders looking for quick context, and helps drive operational maturity at the organization level.

If you want to learn more, check out our recent webinar, “How to Standardize Service Ownership at Scale for Improved Incident Response” or read our knowledge base article here.

If you’re ready to see Service Standards in action, try PagerDuty for free for 14 days.

The post PagerDuty Service Standards helps organizations better configure services at scale appeared first on PagerDuty.

Seamlessly resolve multiple incidents occurring on the same service

When a service experiences an incident, a single responder receives the alert and begins to triage. If only one incident occurs, this is manageable. But, for services that have a higher volume of alerts, this can cause confusion during incident response as the responder is pulled in multiple directions to attend to multiple incidents. Imagine a service receives 5 distinct yet simultaneous alerts that must be addressed within 30 minutes. A single on-call engineer can’t handle them all, and that’s where Round Robin Scheduling can help.

With Round Robin Scheduling, users can easily set up a rotation by creating a new escalation policy or editing an existing escalation policy and checking the box that says, “Users are assigned via round robin on the escalation level.”

In a case like the above example, each person on the round robin would be assigned one of the 5 alerts to triage. This streamlines incident response and results in less downtime and better customer experience.

Additionally, identifying who is next on the rotation is simple. When users view their escalation policy, a green arrow indicates who is next up in the Round Robin rotation, so there are no surprises about who will be alerted when an issue arises.

Distribute work and escalate as needed to reduce burnout

With on-call teams that receive a high volume of requests, burnout is always top of mind.  One teammate may be expected to handle multiple issues at the same time while the rest of the team waits idle. Any particular on-call shift like this can result in alert fatigue, slow responses, and decreased cognitive capacity. Even if the on-call shift occurs only once per month, it can be enough pressure to increase attrition.

Round Robin Scheduling ensures that each new incident is assigned to the next person in line, including managers as well as users so teams are able to better balance responsibilities. This helps keep rotations fair and predictable for everyone on the on-call schedule, including upper levels of escalations such as directors who may need to step in during a high priority incident.

Use Round Robin Scheduling today

If your team is looking for a way to manage on-call volume, streamline incident response, and equitably distribute the workload, Round Robin Scheduling is now available for all Business and Digital Operations plans. If you’re a current customer and you’d like to upgrade to unlock access to this feature, reach out to your PagerDuty account team. If you’re not a customer yet, you can try this feature for free for 14 days.

To learn more about Round Robin Scheduling, you can read our support documentation here or watch a short YouTube video here.

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The majority of our customers tell us that they’re dealing with this enormous rise in complexity by adopting a service ownership approach to create a holistic view of a system and democratize knowledge between all technical and business teams. Adopting this model takes an organization-wide effort, and, like all cultural changes, will never truly be “done.” Thankfully, PagerDuty can help teams on their service ownership journey, whatever that stage might be.

We are excited to announce the general availability of PagerDuty’s Dynamic Service Graph. This feature enables organizations to have a holistic view of all their technical and business services and dependencies, bringing the entire service topology into a single view to be used by all teams in real-time.

Introducing Dynamic Service Graph

Dynamic Service Graph democratizes knowledge across the entire organization about how services work together to deliver customer-facing capabilities, and visually represents the health of those services. This helps teams better understand the health of the overall system, not just the components they’re individually responsible for. It also improves incident response as teams can better determine where an incident is occurring as well as the potential upstream and downstream effects of the issue.

Understand how services connect to deliver business capabilities

Technology ecosystems have hundreds or thousands of moving pieces. Other line-of-business stakeholders might find it difficult to understand how these interconnected pieces make up the business services they’re responsible for. Yet, it’s critical that all teams are able to communicate effectively with each other to resolve problems and bridge any gaps in understanding.

With Dynamic Service Graph, it’s easier than ever to visualize how each service is connected to another, and how they build up into larger business services that have direct impact on critical business capabilities. This interconnectedness removes siloes and encourages knowledge sharing.

Understand affected services during an incident

Technical teams often receive alerts that their service is experiencing an issue. Yet, sometimes their service isn’t the true culprit. If the service is dependent on another service which is experiencing an issue, there might be little they can do to fix the problem themselves. But, if teams are in the dark as to what services are affected, they could be wasting precious time investigating the source of the problem.

On the flip side, when an incident occurs, a team facing an issue with their service might lack the information to triage accurately. If the team doesn’t understand the downstream effects of the issue with their service, it could cause outsized negative impact.

Dynamic Service Graph allows teams to examine services and identify what’s affected by failure and why. From both the incident details page and the service graph, teams can quickly see a service’s impact on the rest of the system.

Identify services missing dependencies to understand gaps

Whether an organization is well into its service ownership journey or just getting started, it’s likely that some information on the system structure is incomplete. This is due to increased silos as teams grow, and tribal knowledge that’s passed on through teams but rarely documented or shared. And, it’s exacerbated by the rapid pace of change within the systems, with code pushing multiple times per day and new services changing underlying relationships.

Dynamic Service Graph helps encourage teams to maintain up-to-date dependencies because that control is in the hands of the people operating the services, making the on-call experience easier for everyone carrying the metaphorical pager. When mapping services, PagerDuty will offer suggestions as to which services currently lack dependencies. From there, you can drag and drop relevant services into your graph, creating a more comprehensive view of the system with each click.

Ready to try for yourself?

With PagerDuty’s Dynamic Service Graph, your technical teams will have the ability to view and dynamically map clearly defined services and streamline incident response to reduce downtime and customer impact. This will help teams make the most of their service ownership model and spend less time firefighting and more time innovating for their customers.

“Service Graph has driven us to shift focus from a technical service dependency strategy to a business service based strategy to more effectively identify impact to our end users. Using the new service graph functionality, our support teams are able to visually assess impact at a glance, which enables them to more quickly and accurately determine root cause. The feature has given our service owners the visibility into their dependencies which were previously only in documentation.” —Senior Manager, Gaming Industry

If you want to learn more, check out our recent webinar, Services Like a Boss: Best Practices for Implementing and Maintaining Services Architecture, read our knowledge base article here, or view our documentation here.

If you’re ready to see Dynamic Service Graph in action, try PagerDuty for free for 14 days.

The post Visualize and manage all of your services in one place with Dynamic Service Graph appeared first on PagerDuty.

Let’s take a quick tour and check out all the new stuff.

For Responders: Intelligent, Real-Time Decision Support

One of the biggest sources of anxiety during incidents is not knowing how to get the right information to diagnose what’s happening. Rising infrastructure complexity and overwhelming volumes of system data make this even more difficult. With Alert Grouping, Similar Incidents, and a fresh user experience, the PagerDuty incident is now an intelligent container of all the exact systems and people context you need, right when you need it.

Alert Grouping

The last thing you want when you’re trying to diagnose an issue is your phone blowing up with notifications. Now, rules-based automation and machine learning automatically group related alerts together into a single incident, giving responders a central place to get context, triage the issue, and kick off response.

Similar Incidents

Machine data is a great place to start the incident triage process, but to get the entire picture, responders also need human context — such as, who has dealt with a similar issue before and what steps were taken to solve it. With Similar Incidents, responders can see previous, related issues and surface information around incident priority, impact, remediation steps, and much more.

Redesigned, Live Incident Page

As incident impact grows and response gets more complex, it becomes harder to keep track of everything going on. The first one of major user experience updates across the entire platform, our new incident page brings a fresh design, real-time updates, and improved information architecture and ease of use. The benefit to the responder? It’s easy to find the information you’re looking for, and you know you’re always seeing an up-to-the-second view of what’s going on. This new experience is available for all plans, today. Just click “Try Something New!” button at the bottom of your screen on any incident.

For Response Teams and Toolchain Owners: Automated Precision Response

When you’re in the middle of a firefight, with thousands of dollars on the line every minute, your top priority is to restore service as rapidly as possible. That means automating everything you can so that the team can focus on fixing the problem and not on looking up who to page. With new event and incident automation, incident response in PagerDuty is faster, easier, and more accurate than ever.

Response Automation

With our new Response Plays, teams can design the perfect major incident response in peacetime, and then execute it with a single click — or automatically for new incidents on critical services. Each response play can include specific responders, incident subscribers, and a status update message for a given situation, and with our new live incidents page, you can see them run in real-time. This saves critical minutes during the most severe incidents and helps the team more quickly restore service to the customer and stability to the business.

Event Routing

Managing business logic in multiple places isn’t just annoying and inefficient — it also decreases visibility and increases the risk of configuration errors. A highly-requested event management capability, event routing lets you send all your events to PagerDuty, and automatically route issues to different teams and services based on event payloads. With all your event automation defined in PagerDuty, you never have to wonder how a specific event will be processed.

Dynamic Notifications

Not everything needs to wake you up in the middle of the night: different events require different levels of response. Released last month and available for all Standard and above plans, Dynamic Notification enables you to customize the way event data translates into notification and escalation behavior. This means less alert fatigue, fewer duplicate services, and happier responders.

For the Whole Organization: Business-Wide Orchestration Practices

Major incident response involves the orchestration of not only IT responders, but also of stakeholders across the entire business who need to take proactive measures to manage customer relationships and protect brand reputation. Response extends to departments like support, customer success, and even legal and marketing — as everyone must be laser-focused around the unifying goal of protecting the customer experience.

That’s why we expanded our open-source incident response documentation to include more than just technical response. Now, you can leverage the ultimate guide to incident response — based on best practices from thousands of the best operations teams — and learn how an organization should mobilize when a service disruption happens. In addition, over the past several weeks, PagerDuty leaders from customer success to corporate communications have shared their unique lens on how we weave the culture of response into our everyday work.

Check Out What’s New

We hope you enjoyed this overview of the newest capabilities in the PagerDuty platform. Dynamic Notifications, the new incident page, and our updated response docs are available today. Other capabilities are in different states of customer preview and early access, but if you’re interested in trying them before anyone else, please let us know by filling out this form or contacting your PagerDuty account representative. Be sure to also join us for PagerDuty Pulse, our quarterly release notes webinar next week, Thursday, Sept 14th at 10am PST,  to see live demos of these exciting new capabilities, get your questions answered, and learn how to get the most value out of our latest innovations.

REGISTER NOW

The post Ops, Reimagined: All the New Features Announced at Summit 2017 appeared first on PagerDuty.

Alert Multiple Responders at Once

In a high severity incident, you want to immediately get all-hands on deck. With PagerDuty’s Multi-User Alerting, you can alert 10 responders in each level of your escalation policy.

Critical incident? Alert the primary, secondary and tertiary at the same time to get someone on it faster.  Slower responders can join the resolution in progress.

Or in the rare case that your primary and secondary on-call miss their alert, you can use Multi-User Alerting to get the rest of the team responding to incidents to ensure nothing ever fall through the cracks.

Shadowing

When you hire new team members it’s imperative to get them up to speed quickly so they can start contributing to your team. With Multi-User Alerting you can have a trainee share on-call responsibility with a seasoned engineer to tag team incidents in order to get them into the swing of things, fast.

Keep Followers and Interested Parties Informed in Real-Time

With Multi-User Alerting it’s easy for managers or interested parties to stay in the loop about what’s going on.

Non-responders can add themselves to escalation policies to stay informed — or if they can handle the issue themselves, acknowledge and start working on it.

As a manager you can put yourself on any level of an escalation policy to be notified along with your team when they are receiving alerts, and immediately know when an incident gets escalated.

Notify Multiple Teams for Incidents

Critical incidents should often wake up people from multiple teams — is this a web or an ops issue?  You now have the ability to wake up someone from each time to tackle incidents together.

Try it now!

Multi-User Alerting is already available in your account, just edit any of your existing escalation policies or create a new one.  No more 1-minute escalations, no more workarounds needed. If you have any questions, shoot us an email at support@pageduty.com.

Please remember to wake your team up responsibly. Unless it’s truly a sev-1, let the primary responder do their job — you hired good people for a reason. Not every incident needs to wake up 10 people.

The post Alert All the Right People with Multi-User Alerting appeared first on PagerDuty.

After talking with our customers, it was clear that we needed to create a feature to help on-calls everywhere remember that they are on pager duty.

PagerDuty On-Call Handoff Notifications Are Here!

Over the last couple of months we have quietly begun rolling out PagerDuty’s new On-Call Handoff Notifications. Now Handoff Notifications are available for everyone via email, SMS or push notification.

You can find this feature on your profile page. At the bottom of the page you will see On-Call Handoff Notifications nested below your alert Notification Rules.

Select when you would like to receive a notification, either before you go on-call or off-call, or both. To customize an alert method for going off-call versus on-call you can select them independently.

Then simply chose your preferred contact method for the second drop down menu. You can chose from any of your email addresses, phone numbers for SMS notifications or by push notifications via PagerDuty’s mobile app.

We’ll give you a heads up a couple of minutes before you go on or off call.

As always, we love to hear from you. Please send any questions or feedback to support@pagerduty.com.

The post Stop Forgetting You're On-Call with Handoff Notifications appeared first on PagerDuty.

PagerDuty’s latest user role, Limited User, will give you more control over what each of your team members has access to. This makes sure that only those authorized to make changes to on-call schedules and services within your account can do so.

You can check PagerDuty’s user level permission in the chart below:

PagerDuty User Permissions

To invite a new team member and make them a limited user simply navigate to the Users Tab, input the team member’s information and select “limited user” from the role drop down menu. You may also update a current user’s setting from the Users Tab. For more information visit our knowledge base.

Have questions about our new permissions? Shoot us an email at support@pagerduty.com.

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