After getting our exciting entries from you guys and narrowing it down to five stellar finalists, you guys all helped #pickyourpage and now, we have our alert sound contest winner.
3 min read
The submissions are in! Now it’s time to vote on what custom alert sound will make the cut and become the newest PagerDuty alert, available in the November 2015 release for selection from the PagerDuty app.
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Introducing User Reporting, the latest addition to PagerDuty’s Advanced Analytics suite. User Reporting helps managers and teams understand how individual team members are responding to incidents. Now managers can see how many incidents each responder has received, acknowledged, reassigned, or moved up the chain of command due to non-acknowledgement. With this information, managers can work with their teams to make sure every team member is in the right position and that workload is spread properly across the team.
4 min read
StatusCast is an application status page tool that allows you to proactively communicate uptime status to your end-users to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can use StatusCast with PagerDuty to build a hosted status page in minutes and keep users informed with status updates via email, SMS, Twitter, Slack, HipChat etc.
3 min read
Something goes wrong in your staging environment, and you start seeing “CRITICAL” or “ERROR” all over the place. Oh… I forgot to mention that it’s 3am where you live. Is it really “critical” in that moment? Well, technically it is. The environment is still busted. But do you want to fix it now? Is it urgent?
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We’re excited to announce our first-ever custom alert sound contest! Beginning September 21, 2015, we will accept submissions for a chance to be included as an alert sound in our mobile app. We have a great community, and we want to see them get creative. Or ironic. Or immature. Songs, clever noises, avant-garde recordings of one hand clapping - all are welcome. Send your best creation to pickyourpage@pagerduty.com.
2 min read
We know that alert fatigue is a big concern for our users. When everything is important, nothing is important. But “non-critical” is not the same thing as “insignificant”; in fact, non-critical issues are often indicative of a larger problem down the road. So now, with Incident Urgencies, users can confidently track all events, and only get woken up for the most important ones. A big part of what has made PagerDuty useful for our customers is analytics, and being able to see what’s going on with events across all of their systems and monitoring tools. Keeping non-critical events out of PagerDuty means those analytics are only telling part of the story. And the more data you have, the easier it is to prevent incidents from occurring in the future.
3 min read
Too many companies take the happiness of their engineers for granted. This is a huge mistake, especially since engineers are doing important work for your company: building your product, and then keeping it up-to-date and functioning. Their morale has a direct influence on their performance, and, by extension, your product. Part of the DevOps ethos is getting engineers working together better, smarter, and happier. But why should executives care about that?
3 min read
One day, Ethan, whose dad works at Altiscale, heard a sweet song. It was an infectious tune; he couldn’t get it out of his head. Over and over, he heard this song, wafting again and again from his father’s phone. What was this magnificent melody? When would it play again? The song was, technically speaking, a PagerDuty alert: a jingle by the name of “You Made the Server Cry,” recorded Barbershop Quartet-style by some of PagerDuty’s more musical employees. Five-year-old Ethan thought the song was so amazing, he found himself singing it all the time. Pretty soon, he was making up his own PagerDuty alert sounds, and came up with a ditty called, “Something’s Broken,” sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” His dad decided to record it and submit it to us as a custom alert sound.
2 min read
Using ticket systems can be fraught with issues: a clunky workflow, mired in process, means that users can’t always move and adapt quickly. While ticketing systems are a great way to manage a ticket queue of ongoing requests, we’ve noticed that many operationally mature companies stay away from ticketing systems for their real-time incident management. Instead, they are using a more lightweight solution, like PagerDuty. A lightweight solution, with a focus on automation, allows them to be more agile, and get things done faster.
3 min read
As indicated in a survey conducted by Forrester Research, a well-constructed IT Operations management system provides fast alert notification, keeps business-critical incidences from occurring at a minimum, and focuses on automation as a way of addressing issues. What we are actually seeing in the field today, however, doesn’t seem to line up with this approach. According to a recent Forrester thought leadership paper, incident resolution practices today are tactical, reactive, and harm commercial success. Listed below are some observations we are seeing with IT Organizations in the Enterprise.
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We're pleased to announce our fourth major mobile release, which brings some significant improvements to the performance and usability of key parts of the app. With all these changes, it’s faster and easier than ever to see, investigate, and take action on problems in your system — driving down resolution time and helping your team improve your operations performance.
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We are delighted to announce that our Customer Support and Advocacy team won the Silver Stevie® Award in the Customer Service Department of the Year category in the 2015 International Business Awards. The award demonstrates PagerDuty’s commitment to its customers, as evidenced by a satisfaction rating that averaged 98.3 percent throughout 2014.
3 min read
Having one person on-call isn't enough. What happens if your on-call engineer sleeps through their alert? What happens if their phone's battery dies without them knowing, or if they get an alert at a really inconvenient time, like when stuck on a bus or in traffic? It will happen. We present best practices for back up. One or more people, waiting in the wings, ready to spring into action if your primary on-call is unable to perform his or her duties to the best of their abilities at any given time.
Etsy occasionally runs an engineer exchange program, where they trade engineers with another tech company to give both organizations insight into what the other does differently. PagerDuty was their most recent participant, and in May, I had the pleasure of spending a week at Etsy’s office in Brooklyn. I learned from their practices, observed what they were doing well, and gained insight into their team dynamics. Etsy has an amazing culture, and I observed the customs they put into place to maintain their environment of empathy, autonomy, and learning. It was a great example of the traditions a company can foster to maintain a productive and happy work environment.
6 min read
Our customers and community are very important to us, and to maintain the transparency that is essential to keeping your trust, we wanted to tell...
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We’re pleased to announce improvements to our reporting capabilities that enable teams to gain even greater insight. Now, teams can optimize their monitoring by visualizing metrics such as common incidents, SLA performance, and noisy incidents.
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We think we’re doing the whole DevOps thing right — new hires can deploy on day one, Travis CI is humming along, and we own the code we ship. But then something breaks, something doesn’t go according to plan, tempers flare up, and all that warm, fuzzy collaboration seems to evaporate. What’s going on? What happened to #HugOps?