PagerDuty Operations Cloud Improves Incident Workflows, Status Updates

ITOps platform vendor PagerDuty announced the fall update of its operations cloud this week, introducing a series of new capabilities designed to help teams better manage IT operations.

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud provides a set of services designed to help IT teams manage and optimize operations and incident response. Among the capabilities the company announced for the fall update are customer-facing status pages, designed to provide a business's users a view into service status. PagerDuty has also made its incident workflow capabilities more flexible. The ability to more intelligently group alerts gets an AIOps boost in the new update as well.

"In the current environment, companies need to control costs and consolidate software," Sean Scott, chief product development officer at PagerDuty, said in a statement. "This can result in significant change to production environments."

Bringing New Status to ITOps Updates with PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Among the most critical needs for ITOps for any organization is the ability to update users and management about status.

PagerDuty has had status dashboards that give technical responders and business stakeholders a shared view of system health, Dormain Drewitz, vice president of product and solutions marketing at PagerDuty, told ITPro Today.

Related:4 Ways AIOps Benefits IT Operations

What's new with PagerDuty status pages in the fall update is the ability to more easily provide external visibility into service availability.

"This add-on empowers teams to proactively communicate with customers about operational updates to maintain trust and transparency with valued accounts and external stakeholders," Drewitz said.

Incident Workflow Gains More Flexibility

Back in March, PagerDuty acquired no-code workflow automation vendor Catalytic. That company's technology is now helping to improve the workflow automation capabilities in the PagerDuty Operations Cloud.

Drewitz explained that PagerDuty has had Response Plays to package up a set of actions to apply to an incident.

"We announced Incident Workflows at our PagerDuty Summit this year, but are unveiling the early access of it with this announcement," she said.

Incident Workflows give teams more flexibility and control over what types of responses they want to configure for different types of incidents, as well as the ability to trigger the workflow based on changes in priority, urgency, and status. For example, Drewitz said that a user can customize a major incident workflow, so when an incident is classified as a priority one (P1), that automatically opens a conference bridge, adds responders, and starts an incident-specific Slack channel to keep everyone in sync.

Related:IT Job Market Remains Strong, Growth Outlook Positive

"You can also design a separate workflow for handling smaller bugs and routing them into a backlog for a team to look at later," she said. "This takes the cognitive load off the response team and makes incident response processes smoother and more consistent."

Understanding how to construct incident workflows in the first place often requires some experience and knowledge. To that end, Drewitz said that PagerDuty has done a lot to educate and share best practices around incident response, as well as on-call practices, postmortems, customer service operations, and more.

"Our Ops Guides are even on GitHub under an Apache License 2.0, so that teams may use them in their own internal documentation," she said. "This week, we also announced updates to our Incident Response Ops Guide to reflect our latest learnings around communications and how to streamline stakeholder management during incident response."