Ops, Reimagined: All the New Features Announced at Summit 2017
As software becomes the de facto medium through which business is conducted, the quality of the digital experience defines an organization’s success. That’s why organizations have seconds, not minutes or hours, to mobilize people across the business to solve digital problems. And that’s why today, at PagerDuty Summit 2017, we announced a brand new set of exciting product innovations that meet these needs. With capabilities that integrate applied machine learning, end-to-end response automation, and the mobilization of people in real-time across the entire business, our latest features help you eliminate inefficiencies when it matters most and get back to innovation.
Let’s take a quick tour and check out all the new stuff.
For Responders: Intelligent, Real-Time Decision Support
One of the biggest sources of anxiety during incidents is not knowing how to get the right information to diagnose what’s happening. Rising infrastructure complexity and overwhelming volumes of system data make this even more difficult. With Alert Grouping, Similar Incidents, and a fresh user experience, the PagerDuty incident is now an intelligent container of all the exact systems and people context you need, right when you need it.
Alert Grouping
The last thing you want when you’re trying to diagnose an issue is your phone blowing up with notifications. Now, rules-based automation and machine learning automatically group related alerts together into a single incident, giving responders a central place to get context, triage the issue, and kick off response.
Similar Incidents
Machine data is a great place to start the incident triage process, but to get the entire picture, responders also need human context — such as, who has dealt with a similar issue before and what steps were taken to solve it. With Similar Incidents, responders can see previous, related issues and surface information around incident priority, impact, remediation steps, and much more.
Redesigned, Live Incident Page
As incident impact grows and response gets more complex, it becomes harder to keep track of everything going on. The first one of major user experience updates across the entire platform, our new incident page brings a fresh design, real-time updates, and improved information architecture and ease of use. The benefit to the responder? It’s easy to find the information you’re looking for, and you know you’re always seeing an up-to-the-second view of what’s going on. This new experience is available for all plans, today. Just click “Try Something New!” button at the bottom of your screen on any incident.
For Response Teams and Toolchain Owners: Automated Precision Response
When you’re in the middle of a firefight, with thousands of dollars on the line every minute, your top priority is to restore service as rapidly as possible. That means automating everything you can so that the team can focus on fixing the problem and not on looking up who to page. With new event and incident automation, incident response in PagerDuty is faster, easier, and more accurate than ever.
Response Automation
With our new Response Plays, teams can design the perfect major incident response in peacetime, and then execute it with a single click — or automatically for new incidents on critical services. Each response play can include specific responders, incident subscribers, and a status update message for a given situation, and with our new live incidents page, you can see them run in real-time. This saves critical minutes during the most severe incidents and helps the team more quickly restore service to the customer and stability to the business.
Event Routing
Managing business logic in multiple places isn’t just annoying and inefficient — it also decreases visibility and increases the risk of configuration errors. A highly-requested event management capability, event routing lets you send all your events to PagerDuty, and automatically route issues to different teams and services based on event payloads. With all your event automation defined in PagerDuty, you never have to wonder how a specific event will be processed.
Dynamic Notifications
Not everything needs to wake you up in the middle of the night: different events require different levels of response. Released last month and available for all Standard and above plans, Dynamic Notification enables you to customize the way event data translates into notification and escalation behavior. This means less alert fatigue, fewer duplicate services, and happier responders.
For the Whole Organization: Business-Wide Orchestration Practices
Major incident response involves the orchestration of not only IT responders, but also of stakeholders across the entire business who need to take proactive measures to manage customer relationships and protect brand reputation. Response extends to departments like support, customer success, and even legal and marketing — as everyone must be laser-focused around the unifying goal of protecting the customer experience.
That’s why we expanded our open-source incident response documentation to include more than just technical response. Now, you can leverage the ultimate guide to incident response — based on best practices from thousands of the best operations teams — and learn how an organization should mobilize when a service disruption happens. In addition, over the past several weeks, PagerDuty leaders from customer success to corporate communications have shared their unique lens on how we weave the culture of response into our everyday work.
Check Out What’s New
We hope you enjoyed this overview of the newest capabilities in the PagerDuty platform. Dynamic Notifications, the new incident page, and our updated response docs are available today. Other capabilities are in different states of customer preview and early access, but if you’re interested in trying them before anyone else, please let us know by filling out this form or contacting your PagerDuty account representative. Be sure to also join us for PagerDuty Pulse, our quarterly release notes webinar next week, Thursday, Sept 14th at 10am PST, to see live demos of these exciting new capabilities, get your questions answered, and learn how to get the most value out of our latest innovations.