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PagerDuty Summit 2016 Recap

by Community Team September 14, 2016 | 6 min read

12 sessions. 20 speakers. 1 action-packed day.

The excitement was radiating. “It was amazing,” said one of the many attendees. The industry-based content and the social interaction made the event worth attending. The eyes in the room lit up when new features and product enhancements were announced. The conversations within sessions and around breaks were impressive. The hype for Summit exclusive gear was real! PagerDuty Summit was a huge success.

Jennifer Tejada kicked off the event with her opening keynote discussing digital transformation; Gene Kim followed with his top 5 DevOps learnings and Maynard Webb wrapped up with a fireside chat alongside Alex Solomon discussing trends in the space. Eight breakout sessions with speakers from Google, Twilio, Splunk, IBM, Dropbox, FlapJack, Operable, and SPS took us through the rest of the day. The event closed out with a panel led by Chris Riley, featuring panelists from Slack, Datadog, Airbnb, Cisco, and PagerDuty — one of the most amusing panels we’ve seen in a while!

In case you missed it, or just want to relive the excitements, here’s a recap of the event.


General Sessions

Driving Digital Transformation | Jennifer Tejada

Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty CEO, opened the show with a lively keynote discussing the importance of delivering top notch digital experiences to consumers and how DevOps fits into the greater picture. Micro-moments matter, the stakes are higher than ever before and if applications or services go down, consumer experience suffers. This makes solutions like PagerDuty more critical than ever before to ensure that your systems are always up and running, and if there are any issues, they’re flagged before consumers notice a disruption in services.

David Cliffe and Ophir Ronen stepped on stage to demo and showcase our latest product enhancements and newest upcoming features — features built based on the input of our users — it’s safe to say the crowd was excited for what’s coming up!

Digital Transformation – My Top Five DevOps Learnings | Gene Kim

Gene Kim took the stage to talk DevOps and the importance of being a high performing DevOps organization in the marketplace. PagerDuty also managed to score some early release copies of his book, The DevOps Handbook, that he was kind enough to sign for attendees!

Fireside Chat | Maynard Webb

PagerDuty CTO Alex Solomon sat down with Maynard Webb to discuss trends in the space, including cloud wars, containers, where he sees the industry going over the next five years. He also shared his experiences at Yahoo, eBay, Salesforce, and VISA.

 

— PagerDuty (@pagerduty) September 13, 2016

Breakout Sessions Worth Noting

Whether you were on the more technical side or looking to learn new strategies, the breakout sessions were a huge success and offered content to appeal to all audiences. Topics included:

  • Where is the modern day post-op? | Google
  • Data-Driven Service Intelligence | Splunk
  • Tactics and Strategies in Reliability | Dropbox
  • Large Scale Agile/DevOps Transformation | IBM
  • The Journey of Chaos Engineering Begins with a Single Step | Twilio
  • Human Scale Operations| Operable
  • 7 Years of Monitoring and Metrics| FlapJack
  • Using Incident Data to Build Better Internal Processes | SPS

Panel Hot Topics

Chris Riley took the stage with guests from Slack, Airbnb, Cisco, Datadog and PagerDuty to discuss ops transformation,  the human component of devops and the idea of using team happiness as a business metric.

New Features

No event would be complete without the announcement of new features. New platform features, available today, include:

Workflow Extensions: Building on PagerDuty’s ecosystem of over 175 native integrations, organizations can now configure operational workflows between PagerDuty and other 3rd party services. The bi-directional flow of information helps provide consistent information across teams and services for faster incident resolution. Workflow Extensions is available to all Pagerduty customers.

Live Call Routing: Available to PagerDuty’s enterprise edition customers, Live Call Routing allows anyone inside the organization to directly reach the operations team to report a problem by simply calling a number. Calls get routed via the same on-call schedules and escalation policies in place, and the ability to report incidents in real-time helps restore services faster.

Response Notes: Available to all PagerDuty customers, this capability ensures that all relevant contextual and human generated data around incidents are captured and time stamped, creating a clear timeline of the actions taken and the people involved. Response Notes delivers clear visibility on the current status of incidents, a historical record for postmortems, resulting in a reduction of future resolution times.

Enhanced Slack Integration: Our improved Slack experience is a key tool in a very powerful new concept we’re introducing: workflow extensions. Slack is a leader in an entirely new class of customizable workflow experiences we’re introducing to enable real-time collaboration and MTTR. Slack can now be configured in our new Workflow Extensions UI, making it easier than ever to add it into your workflow wherever it makes sense so your teams can respond and collaborate faster.

Be sure to check out our press release to learn more about what was announced and what’s coming up.

Customer and Partner Awards Winners

There were a lot of firsts at PagerDuty Summit, including our first-ever customer and partner awards. We handed out three awards:

The PagerDuty Operational Excellence Award — Silver: Yelp | Gold: Dropbox

The PagerDuty Innovation Award — Silver: Etsy | Gold: GitHub

The PagerDuty Partner Awards — Silver: AWS |Gold: Datadog

Check out the related customer awards and partner awards blog post to see how each showed operationally mature, innovation and a unique approach to incident management.

Thank you!

We want to take a moment to thank all of our attendees, customers, and partners for making this event such a success. An event like this wouldn’t be possible without you all — thank you for your continued support! A huge thank you also goes out to our sponsors AWS, Datadog, Evident.io, and Threat Stack!

Be sure to follow us PagerDuty on Twitter @PagerDuty to remain in the loop for more upcoming events and news, as well as a chance to enter our #MyEpicOpsKit Contest.

Join us for one or all of the sessions at PagerDuty Virtual Summit — a 3-day online event that will bring together experts from leading organizations to share new strategies and key insights on how to overcome the challenges of digital transformation by building a modern ops environment. Learn more »