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Tag: pagerduty

  • PagerDuty Focuses Incident Response Efforts on the Cloud

    PagerDuty Focuses Incident Response Efforts on the Cloud

    After helping to pioneer the adoption of incident management software in on-premises IT environments, PagerDuty is now focusing its attention on the cloud with the launch of PagerDuty for Cloud Operations.

    Jukka Alanen, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy for PagerDuty, said that as cloud computing evolves to include containers and serverless computing frameworks, it’s becoming apparent that managing IT incidents on public clouds is fundamentally different than on-premises IT environments. As such, demand for incident management platforms optimized for specific cloud platforms is increasing, he said.

    PagerDuty initially will focus its efforts on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform because that’s where most of the initial demand is coming from, Alanen noted. As part of that effort, an instance of the PagerDuty digital operations management platform running on AWS has been integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudTrail cloud services.

    Rather than replace all the capabilities already being provided by cloud service providers, Alanen said PagerDuty is committed to making them more accessible within the context of an incident management platform. With the rise of DevOps, the types of IT professionals who need to be able to access an incident management platform in the cloud era is also expanding. To resolve issues as quickly as possible, Alanen said it’s more critical than ever to make sure the right problems are being presented to the right teams within an IT organization.

    In terms of making that transition, however, IT organizations are all over the map. Many are trying to extend existing IT operations processes developed for on-premises IT environments. To the extent that organizations are essentially lifting and shifting monolithic applications running on-premises into a public cloud, that approach is feasible. However, once organizations also begin deploying cloud-native applications based on microservices and serverless computing frameworks, most will need to rely more on management and monitoring tools provided by cloud service providers.

    The next challenge then becomes defining workflows that automate responses to potential service disruptions or a security breach. At the same time, many organizations are adopting best DevOps practices that shift responsibility of many aspects of incident response on to the shoulders of developers who now need access to an incident management platform. The existing reactive approach to managing IT needs to be replaced with a proactive approach that automates responses to incidents whenever possible, Alanen said.

    To help organizations accelerate their move down that path, PagerDuty has crafted a Digital Operations Maturity Model, which provides benchmarking data and best practices for organizations looking to modernize their IT operations as part of a larger transition to increased reliance on automated workflow processes.

    Of course, once IT organizations define these workflows it won’t take long before IT organizations find themselves needing to extend more proactive approaches to incident management across multiple cloud computing environments. The challenge then becomes finding a way to weave all the application programming interfaces (APIs) and services exposed by multiple cloud service providers into what one day will become a truly hybrid cloud computing environment.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IT Operations: PagerDuty Unveils Hybrid ITSM Platform

    IT Operations: PagerDuty Unveils Hybrid ITSM Platform

    PagerDuty today unveiled a framework intended to make it possible for organizations to bridge multiple styles of IT service management (ITSM) methodologies for IT operations.

    Rachel Obstler, vice president of product for PagerDuty, said PagerDuty Solution for HybridOps provides a comprehensive incident management framework capable of spanning both ITIL and DevOps processes for IT operations.

    PagerDuty Solution for HybridOps combines existing and new product capabilities such as Event Intelligence and Modern Incident Response with machine learning algorithms and bi-directional integrations the company has developed between its incident management software and more than 300 third-party products.

    Those capabilities make it possible to facilitate real-time communications between platforms that tend to be favored by IT shops relying mainly on ITIL processes, such as ServiceNow, and DevOps teams that rely on Slack to communicate with one another, Obstler said.

    IT Operations: PagerDuty Unveils Hybrid ITSM Platform

    Rather than forcing an entire IT organization to transition to single framework for IT operations, PagerDuty Solution for HybridOps allows organizations to selectively apply each model where and when they best see fit, she said.

    The latest version of the ITIL framework goes a long way toward injecting some flexibility into what historically has been viewed as a rigid approach to managing IT. The ITIL framework is still a long way from being as agile as the various forms of DevOps that many organizations have adopted over the last several years to accelerate application development and deployment.

    Obstler said PagerDuty is moving to bridge that divide by leveraging machine learning algorithms to group all the various alerts generated by all the tools in an IT environment. That capability not only reduces the amount of alert fatigue any IT operations group is likely to suffer, but it also makes it easier to identify the root cause of any IT incident, she noted.

    One of the primary reasons DevOps has been adopted evenly in the enterprise is that IT operations teams are expected to be able to programmatically adapt IT infrastructure to meet the demands of developers. The number of IT operations that have those skills, however, is limited. In theory, IT operations teams without programming skills could rely on automated frameworks to achieve that goal. But that approach requires IT organizations to standardize on a single IT automation framework across compute, storage and networking services. The number of organizations that have been able to bridge all the islands of automation that have been adopted across all the services they deliver are few and far between. Put it altogether and it’s clear that both legacy and modern approaches to ITSM will need to coexist well through the next decade.

    In the meantime, IT leaders might want to consider that old proverb about leading a horse to water. IT leaders can issue all the mandates they want. But when it comes time to accomplish a task, most IT professionals are naturally going to fall back on what they know. The challenge is to create ways to wean the IT operations staff off those legacy processes in a way that doesn’t necessarily result in everything grinding to a halt because nobody knows how to fix an issue that simply wouldn’t otherwise wait.

    — Mike Vizard

  • PagerDuty and Anodot Partner to Optimize Customer Operations with Real-Time Autonomous Analytics

    Autonomous analytics company and digital operations management platform work together to provide customers with fast time to detection, preventing business blind spots

    SUNNYVALE, California  – February 6, 2019 – Anodot, the autonomous analytics company, and digital operations management platform, PagerDuty, announced today their strategic collaboration as integration partners to ensure customers benefit from true self-service detection, providing accurate alerts of business incidents in real-time.

    As integration partners, PagerDuty and Anodot collaborate to bring joint value to customers, delivering an unparalleled digital experience with real-time insights and detection. With PagerDuty’s real-time operations management and Anodot’s real-time incident detection, this partnership will enable customers to constantly stay one step ahead of damaging business events, before costing companies significant ROI.

    “PagerDuty looks to deliver exceptional digital experiences for customers, and with Anodot, we combine operations management with real-time business incident detection, guaranteeing the prevention of problems that could impact business reputation and revenue. We look forward to continue working with Anodot to provide extraordinary service for customers, consistently delivering actionable business insights each time,” said Steve Gross, the Strategic Business Development & Alliances Executive for PagerDuty.

    Anodot’s integrated solution with PagerDuty ensures detection of critical business incidents and root cause analysis, allowing companies to restore services and mitigating risk. Customers such as Clicktripz and Browsi depend on Anodot’s autonomous analytics solution in combination with PagerDuty’s operations management to monitor business data at a highly granular level in real-time, for faster detection and resolution of business issues.

    “Through using Anodot and PagerDuty’s integrated service, our processes are instantly streamlined, giving analysts insight into metrics that would normally take hours to discover, mitigating any potential business risks immediately“, said Nathaniel Zenou, CEO, Browsi. “With easy to use technology, Anodot and PagerDuty are a great add-on to our Customer Success team, giving us real-time business insights that are accurate unlike any BI tool on the market.”

    “Partnering with PagerDuty has allowed for even better real-time insights, bringing operational management to our customers,” said Amit Levi, Anodot’s VP, Head of Product. “We are honored to be collaborating with PagerDuty as an integration partner, and look to continue to enhance customer experience through working together.”

    About Anodot

    Anodot empowers companies to run healthy businesses, at scale. Unlike humans, machines are built to scan big data. Anodot’s Autonomous Analytics platform leverages advanced machine learning techniques to constantly analyze and correlate every business parameter, providing real-time alerts and forecasts in their context, to lower time to detect anomalies and resolve incidents. We’ve got your back, so you can play offense and grow your business. We work with companies like Microsoft, Lyft, Waze, Pandora, Appnexus, Wix and King. Anodot is headquartered in Silicon Valley and Israel, with Sales offices worldwide. To learn more, visit us at https://www.anodot.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

    About PagerDuty

    PagerDuty is the leading digital operations management platform for all businesses. PagerDuty authorizes DevOps, IT operations, support, security, and business leaders to respond to online failures in real time. PagerDuty works hard to protect your business’s revenue and brand reputation by preventing and resolving major crisis that would affect your business and customers digital experiences. To learn more, visit us at https://www.pagerduty.com/ and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • PagerDuty Announces New AWS Integrations for for CloudWatch, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and Personal Health Dashboard

    PAGERDUTY LAUNCHES NEW AWS INTEGRATIONS FOR CLOUDWATCH, GUARDDUTY, CLOUDTRAIL, AND PERSONAL HEALTH DASHBOARD

    by Andrew Marshall

    As you may expect from a company founded by former Amazon employees, PagerDuty has been helping AWS users automatically turn any signal into the right insight and action for years. Our Amazon CloudWatch integration enables teams to proactively mitigate customer-impacting issues, which in turn allows organizations to innovate and scale both their AWS and hybrid environments with confidence.

    Earlier this year, we announced that PagerDuty subscriptions are now available for AWS customers through the AWS Marketplace and Enterprise Contracts for AWS Marketplace. This week at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, we’re excited to share that PagerDuty is launching brand-new AWS integrations for CloudWatch Events, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and Personal Health Dashboard.

    Amazon CloudWatch (Events and Alarms): The Gateway to AWS Services

    AWS users count on Amazon CloudWatch to provide the performance data they can use to monitor the status of the AWS services they have deployed as part of their overall AWS ecosystem. Leveraging public cloud resources doesn’t mean users can ignore the status and performance of the servers that underpin them; in fact, keeping tabs on the various tools used becomes increasingly important as companies migrate critical apps to AWS.

    PagerDuty’s integration with CloudWatch Alarms, which our shared customers have used for some time, has allowed users to monitor resource utilization (such as memory optimization) by setting up custom high-resolution alarm thresholds. When these alarms are triggered, any resolution automation you need can be kicked off via PagerDuty. It’s an extremely powerful combination—and there’s no surprise why it’s one of the, if not the most, popular integrations PagerDuty offers.

    While a very useful tool, a CloudWatch alarm only watches a single metric over a specified time period and performs one or more specified actions, based on the value of the metric relative to a threshold over time. In other words, an alarm takes place once, at a specific point in time. This week at AWS re:Invent, we’re excited to launch CloudWatch Events, a new AWS integration that complements our Amazon CloudWatch Alarms integration.

    CloudWatch Events is a stream of system events describing changes in AWS resources, which augment the metrics CloudWatch collects. You can think of an “event” as any change to your AWS environment, along with the services that underpin it.

    For modern ITOps and DevOps teams, keeping tabs on changes is critical to maintaining the continuity and performance of your ecosystem. For example, teams need to know if an EC2 instance changes state from “pending” to “running.” They also need to know how much “scale” is actually taking place with “autoscale.” Additionally, AWS CloudTrail, in conjunction with Amazon CloudWatch, enables you keep tabs on things like API calls.

    Elasticity and the ability to rapidly scale are key value propositions for public cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. As a “pay for what you use” service, keeping tabs on your AWS bill is pretty important to most teams as well. With the CloudWatch integration, PagerDuty can alert you if your AWS bill passes a certain threshold, helping teams avoid costly unplanned scaling.

    By adding the CloudWatch Events integration on top of CloudWatch Alarms, PagerDuty enables teams to automate their digital operations based on a much more robust set of AWS data. It also allows PagerDuty customers to leverage data from many more AWS services, including:

    • Amazon EC2 instances
    • AWS Lambda functions
    • Streams in Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
    • Delivery streams in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
    • Amazon ECS tasks
    • Systems Manager Run Command
    • Systems Manager Automation
    • AWS Batch jobs
    • Step Functions state machines
    • Pipelines in AWS CodePipeline
    • AWS CodeBuild projects
    • Amazon Inspector Assessment Templates
    • Amazon SNS topics
    • Amazon SQS queues

    Whether your company uses on-prem servers, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or any combination of a hybrid infrastructure, PagerDuty is able to collect critical signals from your infrastructure and use them to power real-time operations.

    Amazon GuardDuty

    These days, it’s pretty common to hear the phrase “security is everyone’s responsibility,” which aligns nicely with AWS’ “shared responsibility” model. Security is everybody’s job—and PagerDuty’s integration with Amazon GuardDuty helps bring security ownership to developers by automating response workflows, as well as reducing the friction of escalating to a security expert. Amazon GuardDuty allows users to continuously monitor for any malicious or unauthorized behavior that could potentially impact an organization’s AWS ecosystem and the apps built on it. For example, while an unexpected API call or potentially compromised instance might be nothing to worry about, it’s better to collect that information so a deeper analysis can take place.

    That’s where PagerDuty and DevSecOps come in. Collecting machine-oriented outputs in CloudWatch is only the first step—you still need a workflow to determine the nature of a threat, its overall impact, and the correct action to take. When a threat is detected by Amazon GuardDuty, PagerDuty automatically notifies the right people about a critical security issue, based on your rules for response. Additionally, your team can cut through the noise by using PagerDuty Event Intelligence to group threats with other issues, giving you the right context to address an issue rather than getting buried in similar alerts. All of this can be done with seamless integration with your various systems of record (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow, Remedy, or Cherwell.).

    Amazon Personal Health Dashboard

    AWS has a lot of services. And they’ll probably launch a few more this week at re:Invent. While these new services provide AWS users with greater flexibility and power to build and support new software, it can make keeping tabs on the current state of the AWS services, regions, and zones that your organization cares about much easier. Here’s a scroll through of the AWS Service Health Dashboard for just North America.

    AWS understands this issue, which is where the AWS Personal Health Dashboard comes in. The overall Service Health Dashboard provides you with a view into the general status of AWS services, but the Personal Health Dashboard provides a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services your team uses everyday. These alerts on the services you actually care about are helpful—but you still need to do something with that knowledge.

    The new PagerDuty AWS Personal Health Dashboard integration lets you ingest this data and then automate how, when, and with whom you need to take steps to resolve any issues. Teams can then augment support plays and tickets with the precise AWS service causing the issue, giving everyone in the organization the information they need to address AWS service disruptions quickly.

    If you’re attending re:Invent and want to learn more about Personal Health Dashboard and the PagerDuty integration, check out the following sessions presented by AWS:

    Session: Optimize Performance and Reduce Risk Using AWS Support Tools (ENT316-R)
    Date and Time: Monday, November 26 at 4 p.m.
    Location: Bellagio, Level 1, Grand Ballroom 6

    Session: Optimize Performance and Reduce Risk Using AWS Support Tools (ENT316-R1)
    Date and Time: Tuesday, November 27 at 11:30 a.m.:
    Location: Mirage, Mirage Event Center C3

    Amazon CloudTrail

    Another shared responsibility between AWS and the end user is compliance, governance, and operational auditing. Just because the servers aren’t in your data center doesn’t mean you can wash your hands of those workstreams. AWS CloudTrail helps users enable the governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of their AWS ecosystem.

    By enabling teams to save logs of the various events that take place in their AWS ecosystems, Amazon provides a powerful tool to manage compliance, including the actions taken through AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. As you can imagine, based on the above text, that’s only half the battle.

    Through PagerDuty’s new AWS CloudTrail integration, teams can collect the entire AWS event history to use for DevSecOps plays, automating actions as needed and seamlessly integrating with systems of record like Jira and SNOW. PagerDuty enables correlation and grouping alongside other ongoing issues, giving DevOps and DevSecOps teams the context they need to cut through operational noise. Teams can, for example, identify when a potential data exfiltration is taking place in Amazon S3 or be alerted instantly when a security group rule is changed in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. In both examples, PagerDuty can be used to automate the correct response in real time.

    Come Talk to Us at re:Invent

    As an Advanced Partner in the AWS Partner Network with the DevOps Competency, PagerDuty is pleased to join AWS at re:Invent to share these exciting new integrations with our shared customers. If you’re in Las Vegas this week, come see us at Booth 1023. Not going to re:Invent? PagerDuty offers a free 14-day trial and can be procured through the AWS Marketplace. Also, you can read more about these integrations for AWS here.

    Get started with these AWS integrations:

    https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/aws-cloudwatch-integration-guide
    https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/aws-guardduty-integration-guide
    https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/aws-cloudtrail-integration-guide
    https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/aws-personal-health-dashboard

  • PagerDuty Welcomes Zendesk Chief Financial Officer Elena Gomez to Its Board of Directors

    SAN FRANCISCO – November 1, 2018 – PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, today announced the appointment of Zendesk (NYSE: ZEN) Chief Financial Officer Elena Gomez to its board of directors. As a senior finance executive with over 20 years of leadership experience at multi-billion-dollar companies, Gomez brings expertise in driving global growth and scaling finance operations, as well as deep knowledge of enterprise SaaS businesses to PagerDuty’s board.

    Gomez will also serve as the audit committee chair for PagerDuty’s board of directors. She is the second independent director to be elected to PagerDuty’s board, following the recent appointment of Zach Nelson, the former CEO of NetSuite.

    “We are thrilled to welcome Elena, an experienced, world-class leader and financial expert to our board of directors. Elena brings experience in scaling and building finance teams and capabilities in high-growth companies like Salesforce and Zendesk, as well as board committee leadership at Smartsheet — all companies we respect tremendously,” said PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. “Elena joins a board committed to building an inclusive, diverse and enduring business in service to our users and customers’ digital transformation success.”

    At Zendesk, Gomez leads the finance and strategy organization supporting the company’s growth as it broadens its enterprise reach and expands its product portfolio. Prior to Zendesk, she served in senior finance roles at Fortune 500 companies, including several publicly traded industry leaders such as Salesforce, Visa and Charles Schwab.

    “I’ve long admired PagerDuty and the phenomenal growth the company has achieved under Jennifer’s visionary leadership. She and the board have cultivated an exceptional corporate culture that is reflected both in their innovative platform and the values they demonstrate to the industry,” said Gomez. “Together, we will help PagerDuty accelerate its growth on a global scale and continue to transform real-time operations at organizations throughout the world.”

    Gomez’s appointment follows a series of financial, product and growth milestones for PagerDuty. The company recently closed its Series D fundinground, elevating its valuation to over $1 billion; expanded its product to a modular, multi-product platform that recently launched two new products,PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics; surpassed over 300 integrations in its partner ecosystem; and expanded to 10,500 customers, with strong traction in the enterprise market.

    About PagerDuty

    PagerDuty is a leading digital operations management platform for organizations. Over 10,500 customers—including enterprises such as IBM, GE, Gap, Vodafone, American Eagle Outfitters, Pitney Bowes, Box, and ING—and small to midsize organizations around the world trust PagerDuty to improve digital operations, drive revenue, mitigate threats, protect assets, and delight customers. To learn more and try PagerDuty for free, visitwww.pagerduty.com. Follow our blog and connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook.

  • PagerDuty Introduces Two New Products to Help Companies Shift From Reactive to Proactive by Identifying Business Impact and Analyzing Operational Performance

    PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics help business leaders gain real-time insights to improve digital operations and take action in real time

    SAN FRANCISCO – September 11, 2018 – Today at PagerDuty Summit 2018, PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, launched two new products to extend its digital operations management platform: PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics. PagerDuty Visibility provides IT leaders, technical responders, and business owners a shared, real-time view into operational health that impacts both consumers and business. PagerDuty Analytics provides operational insights for business and technical leaders by combining machine and human response data collected over time to drive better business outcomes.

    “Every business is engaged in some form of digital transformation, with the focus on delivering delightful digital brand experiences,” said Rachel Obstler, vice president of product at PagerDuty. “Leaders need new proactive solutions that connect operational performance to customer and business impact. PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics provide actionable information so business and technical teams can deliver best-in-class customer experiences.”

    PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics leverage the company’s rich and unique data set collected over the past nine years from more than 10,500 customers. This gives organizations unprecedented insights into understanding actual customer and business impact of digital incidents and real-time productivity that affect their bottom lines.

     

  • PagerDuty Now Available on AWS Marketplace

    Over 2,600 AWS customers are using PagerDuty to manage cloud services health and respond to incidents in real time

    SAN FRANCISCO – July 16, 2018 – PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, today announced that it has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is now available on AWS Marketplace. This enables AWS customers to purchase subscriptions to PagerDuty more easily and quickly. PagerDuty’s real-time platform for action enables DevOps and ITOps teams to manage the health of their cloud services and take action to respond to any incidents, as well as address any opportunities. This allows them to accelerate cloud migration, deliver high-quality user experiences, prevent costly downtime and increase productivity and agility using the DevOps model.

    All PagerDuty subscription purchases on AWS Marketplace are integrated into a customer’s AWS account and bill, and customers can customize pricing for PagerDuty and other terms based on their needs using AWS Private Offers. AWS customers who are enrolled in AWS Enterprise Contracts also can purchase PagerDuty subscriptions using established, pre-approved enterprise licensing terms, simplifying the procurement process.

    “Our customers want easy-to-use SaaS solutions like PagerDuty to prevent downtime and digital disruptions, and now that PagerDuty is listed on AWS Marketplace, they can enable rapid incident response in a seamless, accelerated manner,” said Barry Russell, general manager of AWS Marketplace and service catalog business development, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are excited that PagerDuty has decided to extend their offering on AWS Marketplace.”

    With PagerDuty’s solution, AWS customers gain full-stack visibility across their applications, services, and hybrid environments to address business-impacting issues in real time. PagerDuty’s enterprise-grade incident management solution enables DevOps and IT Ops teams to automatically mobilize responders and orchestrate the ideal response, based on machine learning and human response data. As enterprises continue to migrate critical workloads to AWS to take advantage of scale and flexibility, PagerDuty also helps cloud migration projects move quickly.

    “Integrating Amazon CloudWatch with PagerDuty really gives us the peace of mind that we will always be able to get the right information to the right someone,” said Steve Hunt, senior director, infrastructure, FanDuel. “With millions of customers watching, issues can hit us hard—combining PagerDuty and Amazon CloudWatch has been invaluable to us in getting our people online to fix any issues as fast as possible. The importance of Amazon CloudWatch and PagerDuty in connecting Support to Engineering during their off hours can’t be overstated.”

    This latest collaboration between PagerDuty and AWS builds on PagerDuty’s existing support for Amazon CloudWatch. AWS customers currently use monitoring information from Amazon CloudWatch with PagerDuty to minimize business disruptions by automatically identifying incidents, enabling responders to respond and resolve quickly and effectively. Many AWS customers also use PagerDuty with third-party monitoring and application performance management tools, using PagerDuty as the central hub for all events and incidents.

    “We are thrilled to expand our collaboration with AWS and make it even easier for AWS customers to start improving their digital operations with PagerDuty,” said Jukka Alanen, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy at PagerDuty. “Thousands of AWS customers have realized the value of using PagerDuty with AWS to empower their DevOps and ITOps teams to collect all relevant signals in one place and address incidents as they arise, in real time. By helping operations teams take advantage of automation, agility and flexibility, PagerDuty increases productivity, saves time, and enables smooth and confident migration to the cloud.”

    PagerDuty has also earned Advanced Technology Partner status in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and achieved AWS DevOps Competency status in Monitoring, Logging and Performance by demonstrating proven experience, technical proficiency and success in helping enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.

    Find out more information about PagerDuty’s collaboration with AWS on AWS Marketplace or at www.pagerduty.com/partners/amazon-aws/.

     

  • PagerDuty Helps Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio Customers Manage Incidents in Real Time and Migrate Confidently to the Cloud

    PagerDuty’s real-time operations management platform integrates with Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio Team Services to enable Microsoft enterprise customers to enhance the customer experience, mitigate business disruption and improve employee productivity

    SAN FRANCISCO and SEATTLE – May 7, 2018 – Today at Microsoft Build 2018, PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, announced integration of PagerDuty’s real-time operations management platform with Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio Team Services, Azure’s integrated suite of DevOps services. These integrations enable Microsoft’s enterprise customers to manage incidents in real time, helping minimize business disruption, migrate confidently to the cloud and bridge the gap between development and operations teams. Today, hundreds of companies and their DevOps teams are already using PagerDuty with Azure to automatically monitor their cloud services’ health and quickly respond to incidents.

    “PagerDuty gives Microsoft customers a best-in-class platform to automatically manage incidents and orchestrate action,” said Jukka Alanen, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy at PagerDuty. “In today’s environment, the price businesses pay for failing to deliver a great customer experience is extremely costly, resulting in lost revenue, customer churn and compromised brand value. With PagerDuty, Azure and Visual Studio Team Services customers can quickly address critical issues that arise throughout the software delivery lifecycle while improving productivity of their DevOps teams.”

    In order to meet escalating customer expectations for cloud-based services, enterprises must be able to manage digital operations in real time, requiring automated processes for incident management and cross-functional team orchestration across the software delivery lifecycle. With PagerDuty, Azure and Visual Studio Team Services users can leverage the platform’s sophisticated automation capabilities to empower their teams to quickly and accurately orchestrate the right response for any incident—all while ensuring developers who do not need to be mobilized can focus on innovation rather than operational maintenance.

    PagerDuty with Azure and Visual Studio Team Services supports the full DevOps lifecycle, from code development, to build, testing and deployment, as well as incident response across all critical processes of the delivery pipeline. PagerDuty’s Azure alerting integration combines signals from Azure with PagerDuty to identify and manage incidents that require an orchestrated response, and its Visual Studio Team Services integration helps DevOps teams manage and track incident resolution in their development tools.

    “Agile incident response is an essential practice to enable a successful DevOps culture,” said Sam Guckenheimer, product owner, Visual Studio Team Services and curator, DevOps at Microsoft. “VSTS integration with PagerDuty helps manage incidents and mobilize the right people to accelerate resolution and complete the DevOps loop.”

    As part of the relationship with Microsoft, PagerDuty has become a Premier partner in the Visual Studio Partner Program, launching in both the Visual Studio Marketplace and the Azure Marketplace. It has also joined the Microsoft Partner Network.

    “At Vibrato, our vision is one of a world where everyone’s life gets a little easier each day,” said Pete Gatt, CEO at Vibrato, an IT consulting firm. “In the DevOps arena, these new integrations between VSTS and PagerDuty provide an amazing development and IT feedback loop that makes our clients’ lives a little easier.”

    Azure and Visual Studio Team Services customers can learn more about the PagerDuty solution and try PagerDuty for free through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace or Visual Studio Marketplace.

    Learn more at www.pagerduty.com/solutions/microsoft.

    More about PagerDuty:

    PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform for businesses that allows teams to optimize their digital operations and resolve incidents faster. The firm has 10,000 customers worldwide, including over 50 of the Fortune 100 firms. Customers include IBM, Groupon, Panasonic, Google and Conde Nast.

  • 6 Must-Haves When Using Chat for Incident Management

    6 Must-Haves When Using Chat for Incident Management

    Over the last few years, teams have realized the benefits of sharing and distributing knowledge in chat applications such as Slack. Today, teams are extending the use of these applications beyond collaboration by embracing ChatOps. ChatOps empowers teams by bringing complex day-to-day operational work into shared chat channels. If done correctly, it drastically reduces context switching and increases the speed at which teams can tackle tough challenges.

    Companies are realizing incredible benefits by incorporating ChatOps into their incident management workflows. Chat channels provide hyper-effective means to alert teams of issues, take immediate action and collaborate with clarity and urgency. It is for this reason that companies including OpsGenie, PagerDuty and VictorOps have invested in integrating their incident management applications into chat applications such as Slack, HipChat and Microsoft Teams.

    ChatOps to the Rescue

    Ideally, users of a modern incident management solution need to have access to a multitude of features so that they can address specific challenges directly within the chat tool. During an incident, switching between applications to access and collaborate on the actionable data is a waste of time. Keeping the conversation and action in one place, where team members already are, is the key to a fast and successful incident resolution process. That is why ChatOps has emerged as an alternative to the war room concept.

    To get the most out of the technology and resolve problems more quickly and easily, here are six tips to consider when using ChatOps for incident management:

    1. Post Messages with Clarity

    The basic requirement for integrating any application within chat tools is to simply have messages posted within chat channels. However, there are three additional needs to consider when integrating an incident management tool into chat when increasing efficiency is the goal.

    • The integration must be able to post chat messages regardless where the incident originates and additional information added (monitoring, ticketing, or collaboration tools).
    • Messages need to be customized based on the specifics or severity of the incident. Often the basic message needs to be appended with tags or additional information fields.
    • If possible, include a button in the message that allow responders to take instant, prescriptive actions.

    2.  Control How Information is Shared

    Posting every alert and comment into a shared channel can quickly become overwhelming and is considered bad practice. A strong integration enables the creation of separate channels for specific responders and have direct control over what types of alert and follow-up messages are shown.

    A seamless integration also provides the flexibility to receive only the incident actions that are decidedly relevant. Low-priority issues that don’t require immediate action can be filtered and not sent to the chat stream, ensuring the team stays focused on what really matters.

    3. Accelerate Actions

    ChatOps transforms chat into a vehicle through which users take actions and deploy solutions. This virtually eliminates the need for operations teams to switch between applications when responding to an incident.

    Most integrations enable users to execute incident actions using text commands. This method is valid and often preferred. However, deeper integrations simplify tasks by providing interactive buttons that enable users to begin working on incidents with just a click.

    The value of responding to an alert by clicking a button extends beyond simple alert acknowledgement. Enabling all common responses (i.e. assigning an alert, taking ownership, adding notes, muting incidents, etc.) to be executed in this manner accelerates resolution and unlocks the real power of ChatOps.

    4. Instantly Retrieve Supporting Information

    A challenge of a long chat thread is that critical information can get lost within the communications or additional information may be needed. A user might have to leave the channel to look up important details and related information, such as looking at other open incidents, for example.

    The integration of an incident management system into the chat environment needs to allow users to access supporting information at any time. The ability to query not only additional details about a specific incident but also general information regarding on-call schedules and alert policies is a requirement. By empowering team members to access this data directly within the chat interface, they stay focused and are able to respond in the most efficient manner possible.

    5. Create New Alerts

    A common task when managing an incident is to create manual alerts. Again, requiring people to switch applications to complete this task is a distraction and slows the progress.

    Creating new alerts for a team or service right within the chat channel is a necessity. The incident management system then notifies the person on-call automatically. Having the ability to create an alert directly within chat empowers individuals that may not have direct access to the incident management system to report problems efficiently.

    6. Control Access

    When an incident occurs, it is important that corrective action is taken by only the people who are authorized to respond. Mapping (or linking) the chat users to the users within the incident management system enables this level of control.

    Linking the user profiles between the chat and incident management has additional benefits. As alerts are acknowledged and responded to within the chat environment, the events are recorded within the incident management solution. A clear history describing who took each action is recorded for future reporting and analysis.

    While there are many things to consider when integrating incident management into a chat application, the benefits are clear. Response time, ability to collaborate, and team access to incident details are crucial factors for incident resolution.

    About the Author / Serhat Can

    Serhat Can is a Technical Evangelist for OpsGenie. He has contributed to different parts of OpsGenie as an engineer and now tries to spread the word by coding, writing and talking about DevOps. He is still a proud member of the on-call schedules. Follow him on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
  • Using AI to Automate Incident Management Sparks Debate

    Using AI to Automate Incident Management Sparks Debate

    When it comes to incident response with an integrated DevOps environment so much depends on the ability of an IT team to respond quickly and consistently to a specific set of events. Because of that requirement, many IT organizations have invested in incident management systems that everyone in IT can consult whenever an issue arises. Now PagerDuty, a provider of incident management software, is taking that concept a step further by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to automate as many incident response tasks as an organization deems appropriate.

    As promising as that may sound, however, Resilient Systems, a unit of IBM that is an arch-rival to PagerDuty, contends most organizations today do not have anywhere near the level of incident management maturity to make investing in AI worth their time and effort yet.

    Eric Sigler, head of DevOps for PagerDuty, says the the latest edition of the company’s namesake incident management platform is designed to augment the capabilities of the local IT administrator by providing:

    Alert Grouping: Rules-based automation and machine learning algorithms automatically group related issues together to make it simpler to identify related issues.

    Similar Incidents: IT administrators and support specialist can see previous related issues and surface information around incident severity, impact and remediation steps.

    Response Automation: A Response Plays capability allows teams to design and execute an automated response pattern to recruiting responders and stakeholders by a single click.

    Dynamic Notifications and Event Routing: IT teams can select notification and assignment behavior and automatically route events to different teams based on event payloads.

    Sigler says PagerDuty has also redesigned the company’s user interface, creating an enhanced live incident details page that makes discovering events simpler.

    Those capabilities, says Sigler, will collectively prove to be critical in an emergency because most of the time the specialist associated with a specific IT discipline is usually not immediately available when needed. First responders to any given event need as much information as possible as their fingertips to resolve issues as quickly as possible.

    But Ted Julien, vice president of product management for Resilient Systems, says most organizations simply don’t have incident response processes in place that would benefit from that level of AI. Machine learning algorithms require access to massive amounts of incident response data to learn what to do, but most organizations don’t collect that data, much less learn from it, he says. That doesn’t mean AI doesn’t have potential. But he believes AI is not nearly as far along when it comes to incident response as anyone would like. In fact, he notes, machine learning algorithms and other forms of IT automation could just as easily wind up doing more harm than good.

    There may come a day when incident response in an IT environment is fully automated. But the distance between where most IT organizations are today and the achievement of that goal is still nothing less than considerable.

    — Mike Vizard