PagerDuty Blog

PagerDuty Summit 2021 Platform Release: Digital Operations Now

We are delighted to welcome you to another PagerDuty Summit and excited to announce a plethora of product developments designed to help you accelerate your digital transformation. And what an accelerator the COVID-19 pandemic has been for innovation. It really brought into focus the seemingly distant goal of becoming digital-first. Organizations who were truly prepared and benefited from the radical shift in how they did business thrived and rose to the top. Those who didn’t have a limited time to catch up, because the product and service approaches of companies like Zoom, Doordash, and Instacart are quickly becoming the new normal. And the gap between the leaders and laggards will only continue to grow.

In that vein, PagerDuty’s latest product release helps our customers become digital leaders by delivering on our broader vision to:

  • Be flexible. Our platform is powering many use cases beyond traditional DevOps and IT. One use case in particular that has had the most impact is customer service operations, and we are formalizing and investing in it to deliver powerful capabilities specifically for this space.
  • Connect everyone. It’s critical to pull your entire organization together to deliver an amazing customer experience, because doing so involves more than just a technical team. It requires keeping stakeholders and business leaders informed and arming customer-facing teams with business-critical information needed to keep customers happy.
  • Connect everything. One of PagerDuty’s greatest strengths is in our ecosystem, where we can integrate into the most complex environments without an army of expensive consultants by leveraging over 550 out-of-the-box integrations.
  • Automate everything. By fully integrating Rundeck technology into PagerDuty and the incident response lifecycle, customers can automate away some of the toil, with the first step being to not only identify when urgent work is required, but getting that actual work done—automatically where possible, safely at all times, and only interrupting humans when absolutely necessary.

Our innovations are connected straight through to the customer experience—because that is ultimately what matters. Highly mature digital operations provide employees with a clear connection to business outcomes, which keeps both external and internal customers productive, efficient, and happy. We call this approach full-service ownership, and it is underpinned by the best practices of DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and agile development.

In our product keynote today, Sean Scott, PagerDuty’s Chief Product Officer, will highlight our major new product innovations aligned with the above themes. They include:

  • PagerDuty Rundeck Actions, which speeds up incident response by leveraging Rundeck technology to provide responders safe, role-based delegation of corrective automation in real-time, right in the cloud. Rundeck Actions allows responders to choose from a palette of tools to help triage, diagnose, mitigate, and remediate an incident, and can be integrated with event rules to invoke actions even before responders are paged. Subject matter experts such as developers will experience fewer interruptions due to escalations for known or recurrent issues. Plus, safety and quality will improve by utilizing well-tested automation and reducing manual toil.

  • Dynamic Service Graph, which allows users to instantly map and visualize business and technical services across their entire PagerDuty deployment. The service graph is useful not only to view services and their relationships when incidents are not occurring, but also to help responders assess the impact radius during incidents, zero in on probable causes, and understand how the business is affected.

  • Furthering our investments in AIOps, machine learning, and actionable insights, we announced Change Correlation to surface changes that are the likeliest culprits of incidents, as well as possible contributing factors. Additionally, we announced Outlier Incidents to enhance incidents using historical data to help responders understand whether incidents are anomalous, infrequent, or frequent, and which ones may be more challenging to resolve.

  • PagerDuty App for Salesforce Service Cloud, coming soon, will provide an integrated and native experience in Salesforce Service Cloud, aimed at customer service teams and their stakeholders. The native app provides agents and key stakeholders a direct line of escalation and mobilization for customer-impacting issues, and also provides a status dashboard and incident command console to instantly make agents and stakeholders aware of customer-impacting outages, fulfilling PagerDuty’s promise to break down silos between front-line agents and engineering teams.
  • Round Robin Workflows to equitably distribute on-call shift responsibilities among teams in order to achieve around-the-clock coverage—a pattern very common among customer service or central IT organizations alike—in order to balance load during an on-call shift when a high volume of incoming issues occur.
  • General availability of our EU Service Region, an offering that helps EU customers isolate their use of PagerDuty to the European Union in order to abide by data privacy and residency requirements.
  • And finally, our first annual State of Digital Operations Report, with key insights derived from the 37 million+ events we ingest per day across PagerDuty’s 13,000+ customers. We are releasing some key statistics from this report today, with a full dashboard and the report itself available in July.

Overall, PagerDuty’s product and engineering teams have been hard at work on delivering new capabilities in automation, AIOps, incident response, and customer service operations, and these are just the highlights. For a comprehensive look at all our product announcements including those not captured here, please be sure to check out our What’s New in PagerDuty page. Plus, we’ll be covering these new capabilities in many of the breakout sessions over the next few days of PagerDuty Summit, so check out the schedule to locate the ones you are most interested in. And if you’re interested in learning more, please be sure to check out our free trial or sign up to apply for early access to our new features.