Blog

Gearing up for Digital Transformation

by Vera Chan August 16, 2016 | 5 min read

Modern organizations face great challenges as they embrace innovation and integrate new tools and services. They begin to mature and move away from the complacency of maintaining traditional technologies and systems that only solve individual, siloed problems and work “well enough.” In order to build a product that delivers continuous value, organizations must discover and address the true pain points and pitfalls teams experience throughout the incident management lifecycle in order to innovate solutions that boost revenue, increase system availability and performance, and augment employee productivity and efficiency. These companies must undergo a digital transformation.

In recent months, the product team here at PagerDuty has continued to impress me with their feature releases that aim to improve the welfare of IT organizations and the lives of their IT Ops and DevOps incident responders. I’d like to share a few areas of recent product focus that stand out, as they focus on transforming the way people get things done and resolve issues.

Dynamic and Collaborative Incident Response

PagerDuty recently released features that help people connect with data at scale. Dynamic incident response streamlines workflows that help you recruit the right collaborators and responders on an issue. How? You can now easily incorporate additional individuals or escalation policies to collaborate and resolve issues faster with Response Mobilizer. Moreover, individuals who are collaborating on a critical incident can quickly jump on a conference call to share root cause analysis status updates, discuss and tackle roadblocks, and drive faster resolution of issues with Response Bridge.

Continuing with the theme of collaboration, our bi-directional PagerDuty Slack Integration syncs critical incident details including incident ID, description, status, services impacted, and who the incident is assigned to. Collaborators can leverage Slack’s slash commands to create a PagerDuty incident from directly within Slack. This enables seamless collaboration with remote teammates and cross-functional team members, making it easy to discuss critical issues or remediation details, and even easier to acknowledge or resolve incidents with the click of a button — without having to leave the Slack interface.

Platform Extensibility

The product team continues to make it even easier for developers to extend the PagerDuty platform in various ways. The recent release of API v 2.0 introduces more consistency and allows users to quickly test API calls right within the document library! You can embed PagerDuty easily into your apps, or your apps into PagerDuty, to create your own integrations.

API v2.0 gives you the ability to create your own integrations through the Custom Events Transformer. Use JavaScript to easily convert a payload from any tool that can run a script or send an HTTP/HTTPS request into a payload that PagerDuty can interpret. You can easily add the custom event transformer via creating a new service, execute and modify pre-populated JavaScript code, and send a payload to the integration URL to trigger an incident in PagerDuty! It’s that simple!

PagerDuty Add-ons give you the power to add more functionality to PagerDuty so that you can access additional features directly within PagerDuty. You can for instance add scripts or web pages to your PagerDuty environment. Our support team introduced a few Add-ons for you to consider and help you get started — export users to a CSV, view PagerDuty’s status via a status page directly from your own account, view incident activity trends that may help you decide how to efficiently staff your teams and organize their response schedules, and so much more!

Native Integrations

I could go on and on about some of our newest native integrations as well — especially the bi-directional PagerDuty ServiceNow Integration that syncs incident updates, status, and notes between both platforms in real-time, and also enables you to provision PagerDuty users directly from the ServiceNow platform, and more!

Looking Ahead

Our engineers will continue to diligently develop valuable features to surprise you and most importantly, solve more of the problems you face today. You’ll get to see and hear more about these features by joining us at the PagerDuty Summit. In addition to the opportunity to attend a variety sessions, delivered by the industry’s best, you will have the opportunity to check out live demos of our newest features and solutions! You’ll be one of the first to see how you and your organization can leverage PagerDuty’s newest features to transform your operations environment.

I hope you’re just as excited as I am to bring your teammates to the PagerDuty Summit on September 13th ! You’ll meet our new CEO, members of the amazing product staff, and other industry leading attendees and speakers from Yahoo, Splunk, Google, IBM, Airbnb and more! Most importantly, you’ll be able to learn from organizations similar to yours that have overcome digital transformation challenges you might be currently facing now or some day in the future.