PagerDuty Blog

4 Automation Talks To Watch from Summit 2021

PagerDuty Summit 2021 is a wrap, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all of the great content we presented! All of the sessions will be available on the Summit Platform for a few more weeks.

Automation is a big topic this year. Teams work in environments that just keep getting more complex, so deploying automation into your response processes can help manage all the bits and pieces that need to get done—and get done fast. Rundeck joined PagerDuty last year, and this year we got to see some great content about automation at Summit. Plug Rundeck into your PagerDuty account to not just identify urgent work, but to get it done—automatically, safely, and only interrupting responders when it’s absolutely necessary.

Here are four on-demand sessions on automation that I’d recommend you check out.

Customer Use Cases

David Morse, a Principle Site Reliability Engineer at Parsons, joins Arturo Suarez Martin of Rundeck for “Adventures in Operational Automation.” Parsons has been around for 75 years and is pivoting to more digitally centered projects. David and his team provide tools to other developers to make them more efficient.

Automation is a big part of their projects, but they started by focusing on automating small pieces that could save time and linking those pieces together into bigger processes. Their successes with automation created interest across Parsons, and more teams got excited to adopt automation.

Ali Soheili and Andrea Valenti from Trimble present “How PagerDuty & Rundeck Drives Operational Maturity.” Ali is a Senior DevOps Engineering Lead, and Andrea is the Director of Cloud Engineering and Infrastructure. They shared Trimble’s story of a multi-layer organizational transformation to consolidate requirements across many teams into a single cloud team. They found benefits such as lengthening the duration of their on-call rotations, avoiding burnout, and reusing work across their projects.

Trimble uses Rundeck to help automate business processes like provisioning infrastructure, creating data sandboxes, and copying data from development to production for developers. They reduced the time it takes for these tasks to be completed from days to minutes, freeing up time for the SREs and helping developers to work more efficiently.

Rundeck also helps Trimble manage their incidents automatically instead of alerting human responders. Check out Ali and Andrea’s talk for all of the details, as well as a demo of one of their self-healing jobs using Rundeck.

PagerDuty Talk You Missed

Are you part of a “you build it, you run it” organization? Check out this session featuring Jake Cohen, “Adopting and Maturing to Service Ownership with PagerDuty and Rundeck” for a look at how teams can operate at a fast pace and at scale—while still maintaining valid and safe service ownership.

If you’re already using Rundeck, don’t miss out on the new features available in Rundeck 3.4, including enhancements to the security and compliance features and a slick new UI. Forrest Evans takes you through all of the details in “What’s New In Rundeck 3.4.” Additionally, don’t miss your opportunity to take a look at the new Rundeck content!

Also, we announced PagerDuty Runbook Actions. This integrated runbook automation for your PagerDuty account will give your teams the ability to incorporate more powerful automation into response workflows. Are you already a PagerDuty user and want to be in on the early access program for Runbook Actions? Runbook Actions will be generally available later this year. You can sign up for early access at https://www.pagerduty.com/whats-new/.

Catch Summit 2021 On Demand Until July 25th

Visit https://www.pagerduty.com/events/summit-2021/ for free access to the Summit recordings on demand until July 25th.

Note that you will need to create an account on this portal since it is not tied to your PagerDuty account. If this is your first time visiting the PDU portal, please click on the ‘Sign Up’ tab and create an account, using the access code pdusummit21.

If you have questions or just want to chat with us, join us in the PagerDuty Community at https://community.pagerduty.com. There you’ll have access to challenges to earn points for swag, and you’ll be the first to know about new features and events from PagerDuty and Rundeck.