Keeping Response Time at a Minimum

For the past year, our goal was to initially respond to customers within two hours. While this is easy in principle to do, keeping an eye on such a metric in real time isn’t as easy as you would hope. Earlier this year, we developed a dashboard that shows our queue of open tickets with color-codes to visually indicate how long a ticket has been idle.

As each new ticket inches towards our two-hour window it transitions from green to red. This makes it easy to see at a glance which customers we’re behind in responding to.

Our dashboard also makes it easy to see if any of our agents have too many tickets on their plate, helping us balance our queue and spread the work evenly. We’ve already seen a drastic effect on our customer wait times:

This is all while our ticket volumes have increased steadily:

Alerts for Missing our Internal SLA

Occasionally, a ticket will go untouched for more than two hours. If and when this happens, we trigger a PagerDuty incident that alerts the agent responsible for the ticket. If the alert is not acknowledged or resolved, it will get escalated to another agent on the team.

Our team has a designated room in HipChat to discuss support issues. Using PagerDuty’s HipChat integration the entire team can start chatting to tackle a latent customer issue.

Keeping Our Customers 100% Satisfied

The combination of all of these tools helps us hit our goal of 100% customer satisfaction. This is a goal is at the forefront of all of our agents’ minds and something that we narrowly miss each month. Our lowest monthly rating over the past 12 months was 96%, and we hit 100% in both October and December. We utilize Zendesk’s automated customer satisfaction emails to capture this information.

We track these metrics in GoodData, which are automatically synched with Zendesk, making it really easy to build dashboards with useful information.

We try to be as open as possible with the rest of the PagerDuty teams, so we display what our customers are saying about us (even bad things) on a television that displays recent customer satisfaction ratings:

This dashboard was made during a recent hack day. Source is available here: https://github.com/ryanhoskin/satisfaction

But this is just the tip of the iceberg; we use a variety of tools to help manage interactions with our customers.

• Zendesk for managing tickets and our knowledge base
• Olark for live chat, configured to create tickets within Zendesk
• JIRA for communication between teams and filing bugs
• HipChat for JIRA and PagerDuty updates
• Skitch for screenshots.

Our team is here to help our customers. So please don’t hesitate reaching out with any questions or support you need to use PagerDuty. If needed, the best way to connect with us is via support@pagerduty.com and we’ll see your name pop right up on our dashboard.

The post Cutting Response Time in Half while Increasing our Support Ticket Volume appeared first on PagerDuty.

Apica: Web Performance Monitoring

Apica is a powerful website and mobile monitoring tool for verifying that your website is available and responding as expected. The integration enables Apica’s alerts to automatically trigger incidents within PagerDuty any time your website becomes unavailable.

The Apica integration takes only a few moments to configure. Go to our Apica integration guide for simple instructions.

Stackdriver: Intelligent Cloud Monitoring

Stackdriver is a SaaS monitoring solution that uses data analytics to help you identify and resolve critical issues with your cloud-based applications. Stackdriver makes it easy to monitor your cloud infrastructure, systems, and application services.

Stackdriver has implemented a deep integration with PagerDuty, so alerts from Stackdriver can automatically trigger PagerDuty incidents. And then any incident status changes in PagerDuty will be update in StackDriver.

Integration with Stackdriver is pretty straightforward. You can find instructions in our Stackdriver integration guide. If you have any integration issues, please contact us at support at pagerduty dot com and we’d be happy to help.

The post New PagerDuty Integrations: Apica and Stackdriver appeared first on PagerDuty.

Below is a sample Compose alert:

along with the corresponding PagerDuty incident:

For more information, have a look at the simple to follow integration guide. Sign-up for a fully functional trial of PagerDuty, and sign up with Compose.

The post Compose (formerly MongoHQ) Integration appeared first on PagerDuty.

In addition, the PagerDuty team has rebuilt the escalation policy web interface from scratch.  The layout has been optimized to make it simpler to use and easier to understand how an incident will get escalated through your team.

You can find detailed instructions on using the new escalation policy API at our developer site.

If you run into any issues or have any questions, please contact our support team at support@pagerduty.com.

The post New Escalation Policy API appeared first on PagerDuty.

• Automatic triggering and resolution of PagerDuty alerts
• Synchronized acknowledgements between ScienceLogic and PagerDuty
• Direct links from the PagerDuty web interface to your ScienceLogic website
• A powerful and beautiful ScienceLogic dashboard

How to get started

To begin, you’ll want to sign-up for a free PagerDuty trial account. Next, follow the ScienceLogic Integration Guide.

How it works

Once an alert has been triggered within ScienceLogic, it will be sent to PagerDuty. Incidents that are acknowledged in PagerDuty it will be synchronized back to ScienceLogic (or vice-versa):

Additional details for the alert can be found after clicking on the Details link:

The Details pane will also provide you with a direct link back to your ScienceLogic web interface.

ScienceLogic also has a powerful dashboard that shows recent alerts along with some other powerful metrics.

Should you run into any problems in getting your integration completed, please contact us at support [at] pagerduty [dot] com.

The post ScienceLogic Integration with PagerDuty appeared first on PagerDuty.

Meet Hue.

Last year Philips released a much-hyped LED light bulb called the Hue that gives you complete control of every aspect of the bulb from your smart phone or through the Philips website. Hue lights have an API which unlocks a ton of potential for interesting integrations.  I acquired a Hue set around the holidays and ever since I’ve been wanting to hook them up to our PagerDuty alert notification system at Chartbeat.

Enter: My Hack Week project, which I’ve named “Pager Huety”.  Pager Huety is a script that controls the Philips Hue light bulbs based on triggered incidents from the PagerDuty API.

Meet me and my hack.

Part of my job as the Chartbeat Senior Web Operations Engineer requires being a part of an on-call rotation to ensure everyone’s dashboards are running smoothly 24/7.  Occasionally you may see an issue on your dashboard but luckily we’re immediately alerted to any issues via our monitoring system, which will send an alert via PagerDuty to the dedicated on-call team member.

I wrote Pager Huety to wake me up in the middle of the night with my Hue lights rather than have my phone going off with whatever less-than-awesome ringtone I’ve selected.  There’s an option to only have it alert during nighttime and filter for incidents only assigned to me.  Currently the default light sequence is to flash the bulbs red and blue a few times, then turn bright white for 10 seconds and shut off.

There are a lot of cool things you can do with the Hue Bulbs and your Chartbeat data.  You can even utilize the Chartbeat API to flash Hue lights when you hit a new 30 day max – want to give it a go yourself? Tweet your results to @Chartbeat.

The post Pager Huety appeared first on PagerDuty.

The Librato team has taken their already powerful tool to the next level by directly integrating with PagerDuty.  This allows your team to be promptly notified of critical situations.  The integration is highly customizable so that only the metrics that matter are monitored.  Additionally, you can tie your Librato account to multiple PagerDuty services so that the right members of your team get notified every time.

Getting Started

If you don’t already have a PagerDuty or Librato account, sign up for your free trials today. Once you’re registered at both sites and have added your systems to Librato, follow our simple integration guide to get configured.

Integration in Action

After a threshold has been exceeded, Librato will communicate with PagerDuty to trigger a new incident:

You can then click on the incident to view more details:

If you run into any problems getting setup, feel free to contact our support team.

The post Librato Now Integrates with PagerDuty appeared first on PagerDuty.

PagerDuty is proud to announce an integration with Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, a system that allows you to monitor your critical systems even if they are hosted on a distributed environment.  Now that the powers of Rackspace Cloud Monitoring and PagerDuty have been combined, you now have the best of monitoring and alerting systems available, ensuring that your team is notified of critical events with your systems.

Getting Started

In order to utilize this new integration, you will need a PagerDuty and Rackspace Cloud Monitoring account.  Follow these links to sign up for accounts at PagerDuty and Rackspace Cloud Monitoring.  To configure your integration you can follow our easy Rackspace Cloud Monitoring Integration Guide.

Integration in Action

First you must configure a Monitoring Check for your system within Rackspace Cloud Monitoring. After an alert has been triggered, you’ll see the incident within PagerDuty.

To get additional details as to the contents of the alert, simply click on ‘View Message’ and all of the information from Rackspace Cloud Monitoring will be displayed for you.

If you have any questions or issues, don’t hesitate to contact us at support [at] pagerduty.com.

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