Global Staffing Company Recruits PagerDuty to Manage Its Digital Operations

“Once we realized the power of PagerDuty, it expanded our use of the product to empower teams to just be better at what they do.”

– System Engineering Team Manager

This organization provides workforce solutions to several industries, with clients spanning from small businesses to the Fortune 500. The company fills individual positions on demand, staffs entire facilities, and manages outsourced recruiting processes and programs for a variety of clients.

As part of its digital transformation, the organization is adopting a cloud-first approach to drive more efficiency and innovation throughout the organization. In order to ensure a smooth transition, it completely redesigned its monitoring and metrics infrastructure, and uses PagerDuty to funnel thousands of various business signals and metrics into a single-pane-of-glass-view of its digital operations.

Legacy Processes Not Working as Well for Cloud Migration

As the company was moving more of its infrastructure to AWS, legacy processes made it challenging for its engineering teams to maintain uninterrupted service across a global environment. The legacy incident management process led to:

• Longer times to mobilize key stakeholders during major incidents due to a manual, internal “phone book” process
• Slower incident response driven by the lack of visibility into the overall health of the infrastructure
• More unplanned work and disruption for teams on call

Teams were bombarded by alert storms and signals, which made it difficult to determine if an incident required immediate attention. “We had teams working on the same incidents in silos—no one had any idea who was working on what,” explained a systems engineering manager.

Leveraging Integrations to Increase Visibility and Collaboration

Ensuring complete visibility and communication across teams was a top priority for the company. By leveraging many of PagerDuty’s 350+ integrations, including Slack, ServiceNow, Checkmk, and AWS CloudWatch, the company’s engineering teams were able to aggregate their entire monitoring suite into one centralized view within the PagerDuty platform and improve communications across teams. “Having many integrations within PagerDuty allows problems and events to quickly escalate to the right people,” explained an engineer on the team.

Employing Automation to Improve Operational Efficiency

With data and signals from monitoring tools flowing into PagerDuty, the engineering teams now have real-time visibility into systems health and are empowered to respond immediately. When major incidents occur, the company can now mobilize teams in under five minutes, where it had taken up to an hour previously. With PagerDuty Modern Incident Response, business stakeholders can automatically open a conference call and email key personnel immediately by running a Response Play.

PagerDuty enabled the company to:

• Automate more of its response process and quickly engage key stakeholders during major incidents with PagerDuty Modern Incident Response
• Improve work-life balance for responders with PagerDuty On-Call Management
• Mobilize teams immediately using PagerDuty Live Call Routing with one-touch-to-join conference bridge
• Gain visibility into infrastructure health by leveraging PagerDuty’s ecosystem of 350+ integrations
• Focus on constant operational improvement through retrospectives, reporting, and analytics

“Once we focused on automating the monitoring, escalation, and alerting, that’s when we started to improve as an operations team,” explained an engineering manager.

Recruiting the Security Team to PagerDuty

In addition to supporting the engineering teams, PagerDuty also helps the security team mitigate risk. Leveraging the deep AWS integrations from PagerDuty enables the operations team to notify the security team to immediately take action if one of their security servers goes down. Using the Red Canary integration, a number of events can be automatically resolved. “Without that ability, I’m not sure where the alert would really go. The ease of configuration as well as the results that we get are absolutely amazing,” explained an engineer.

Working on Next Steps

PagerDuty has already been adopted by other teams within the organization, including development, security, and the IT service desk teams, with more growth anticipated. Additionally, the engineering teams are evaluating PagerDuty Event Intelligence and Analytics to gain additional context into incidents across their environment. For this workforce solutions company, continuous improvement and innovation is critical to its success, and PagerDuty is a key partner as it continues to scale the business.
According to an engineering manager, “PagerDuty plays a huge role in ensuring we are successful in providing the highest level of service to our customers.”

Learn more about what PagerDuty can do for your organization by signing up for a free 14-day trial today.