Nearly a Third of Business Professionals State That IT Fails to Provide Rapid Resolution of Service Performance and Availability Issues

Independent Research Finds 54 Percent of Respondents Said Their Companies Lacked Adequate Incident and Problem Management Processes; 64 Percent Want Preemptive Analytics

San Francisco – November 11, 2014 — A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of PagerDuty, the leader in operations performance management, finds that traditional “reactive and tactical” incident management practices result in critical gaps within the incident lifecycle that lead to poor system reliability, accelerating the need for businesses to adopt an intelligent incident resolution strategy (Safeguard Business Reliability With An Intelligent Incident Resolution Strategy, October 2014).

The study uncovered alarming results about how companies experience incidents today:

  • 55 percent of business and IT decision-makers experienced IT service problems at least once a week
  • 53 percent of these decision-makers found out about these problems from business users or external customers rather than internal monitoring tools
  • 54 percent of respondents said their companies lacked adequate incident and problem management processes or did not provide enough information to identify where the problem comes from

Strategic Vs. Reactive Approach to Incident Management

The study describes how these poor experiences often stem from a “reactive and tactical” incident management approach that results in several issues:

  • Companies use multiple non-integrated monitoring tools, resulting in overlapping notifications and multiple sources of information
  • Information overload makes it hard for engineers to quickly identify where the problem comes from
  • Disorganized incident resolution culture encourages teams responsible for different aspects of the underlying technology to focus on self-exoneration rather than collaboration

The study further shows how the benefits of embracing a “strategic” incident resolution approach that focuses on resolving incidents by linking people, processes and technologies can be felt across the organization. It recommends that companies create a unified IT operations center that owns the entire lifecycle of incident resolution, leading to the following improvements:

  • Reduced impact on business operations due to faster incident resolution
  • More effective incident management due to proactive fixes
  • Reduced stress for engineers responsible for ensuring reliability
  • Greater satisfaction with IT among business users and customers.

As the complexity of enterprise technology increases, a strategic approach will become even more valuable, while companies that continue to take a reactive approach to incident lifecycle management will face even greater problems maintaining their operations.

PagerDuty’s operations performance management solution helps companies adopt this strategic approach to incident resolution by integrating across infrastructure and monitoring tools to provide visibility across their global operations and resolve the right problems faster. It also provides people and system analytics, which help companies make proactive fixes to reduce future incidents and improve mean time to resolution.

“Today’s businesses desperately need a better way to manage their expanding collection of enterprise technologies to guarantee greater reliability in an always-on world,” said PagerDuty CEO Alex Solomon. “I believe that this latest study from Forrester Consulting confirms the effectiveness of the holistic approach to incident lifecycle management that we have pioneered at PagerDuty.”

Though it can be hard to put an exact figure on the value of greater satisfaction, increased efficiency and higher reliability, another commissioned study by Forrester on behalf of PagerDuty places the ROI of PagerDuty’s solution at 448 percent over three years for an existing customer, with a net present value of $1,640,000.

About PagerDuty

PagerDuty’s operations performance platform helps companies increase reliability. By connecting people, systems and data in a single view, PagerDuty delivers visibility and actionable intelligence across global operations for effective incident resolution management. PagerDuty has over 80 platform partners, and is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and startups alike, including Microsoft, National Instruments, Electronic Arts, Adobe, Rackspace, Etsy, Square and Github. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Ignition Partners and others. Try PagerDuty for free, or to get more information, visit www.pagerduty.com.