PagerDuty Blog


How to get buy-in for on-call and design for humans

On-call is about more than just reducing mean time to acknowledge and mean time to resolve (MTTA and MTTR, respectively), it’s about improving the human…


In Engineering


How We Use React Embedded Apps

This is the first in a three part series about how the PagerDuty Front-end team approaches their micro front-end architecture. The front-end of PagerDuty’s web…


In Engineering


How Lookups for Non-Existent Files Can Lead to Host Unresponsiveness

Late last year, we had an interesting problem occur with the Kafka clusters in our staging environment. Random hosts across several clusters started experiencing events…


In Engineering


The 4 Agile Scrum Ceremonies: Everything You Need to Know

Commonly referred to as agile ceremonies, the Official Scrum Guide calls them events. But what are we really talking about? These are meetings, which are…


In Agile, Best Practices & Insights


Efficiently Structure Data Science Teams to Achieve Company Goals

Mitra Goswami (PagerDuty Senior Director Data Science) is a machine learning professional with experience working in Astrophysics, Media, Martech, and the Financial Services Industry. Her…


In Engineering


Recipe for Meaningful Change

I’ve had the privilege to be with PagerDuty since 2016, and in that time, I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve seen the company evolve…


In Engineering


What is Software Understandability?

Liran Haimovitch is the co-founder and CTO of Rookout, a modern software debugging platform. Back in my early days at Rookout, I had the privilege…


In Engineering


A Menagerie of DevOps Habits, Part 2

Alerts and notifications are what allow us to know if there’s something out of the ordinary with our systems. Unfortunately, as we scale up and…


In Best Practices & Insights


A Menagerie of DevOps Habits, Part 1

As many of us settle into our careers, we fall into habits—some are conscious and we know we’re doing them, but we’re just not actively…


In Best Practices & Insights


Collaborating to Build Secure, Maintainable Systems

I’ve built and taught others about building systems of many kinds—as a mathematician and teacher, and more recently as a security engineer in the last…


In Engineering


Side Quests For Work: The Main Quest Can Wait (Sometimes)

In video game parlance, a side quest is a little diversion that you do while ignoring that you should actually be saving the world. In…


In Engineering


English Linguistic Imperialism in Programming

Many are likely familiar with the “American tourist” stereotype, where Americans visit different countries around the world, yet insist on imposing American culture on everyone,…


In Engineering


Elixir at PagerDuty: Faster Processing with Stateful Services

One of the core pieces of PagerDuty is sending users incident notifications. But not just any notifications—they need to be the right notifications at the…


In Engineering


3 Takeaways From Running a Remote-Friendly HackWeek During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This piece is co-authored by: Derek Ralston, Agile Coach, and Charlotte Sarfati, Technical Support Engineer. Charlotte and Derek worked together on PagerDuty’s cross-functional HackWeek committee….


In Engineering


Writing Intelligent Health Checks for Kafka Services

Health checks are vital for maintaining resiliency and ensuring continuous operations of any system. In an ideal world, health checks should be able to detect…


In Engineering


Cultivating Engineering Leadership at PagerDuty

At PagerDuty, taking the lead is a key value, and we are always looking for opportunities to cultivate leadership within our engineering group. One of…


In Culture, Engineering


Making Better Decisions With Athena and S3

In a world of highly complex systems, it isn’t uncommon to use different data storage technologies and mechanisms for different purposes, as each technology has…


In Engineering


PagerDuty Engineering’s Career Development Philosophy

This post is written for engineering leaders who are responsible for building on and maintaining their company’s engineering career track. It’s meant to provide a…


In Engineering