In Q3, we released many exciting new capabilities to continue to deliver a great user experience and value to our customers. In last week’s What’s New webinar, we sat down with Dave Cliffe, Product Manager of Incident Management; Steve Rice, Product Manager of Platform; and Vera Chen, Technical Marketing Manager at PagerDuty to share the newest updates.

Major Incident Response

Dave showcased key capabilities around major incident response that make it easier than ever before for responders to recruit and collaborate with others on critical, business-impacting incidents. These features dramatically eliminate chaos while in the line of fire and ensure that organizations’ incident management processes can grow with them as they scale.

• Response Mobilizer – Dynamically invite individuals by name or escalation policy to collaborate directly on any PagerDuty incident with rich, contextual details.  You can recruit up to 300 people simultaneously.

• Response Bridge – Include meeting details for a conference bridge from any conference provider directly in a critical incident for real-time resolution.

• Response Notes – Ensure critical decisions, status, conversation summaries, and details are captured and time stamped. This enhances visibility into the current status of incidents, creates a historical record for postmortems, and enables better alignment to reduce future resolution times.  

In his live demo, Dave showed how Incident Commanders can leverage these three features to assess the scene, understand the impact of an incident, establish incident command, request the required resources, and maintain common ground to deliver a streamlined response.

Workflow Extensions

PagerDuty has the largest number of native integrations in the space. To truly optimize and customize the incident response workflow, there needed to be a simple and intuitive way to extend core PagerDuty functionality to support the tools that our customers already use. We broadened the scope of our platform capabilities by making it easier for developers and non-developers to configure workflow extensions. Our new Workflow Extensions provides a centralized location to discover, manage, and configure all all of the tools with which they want to extend their PagerDuty workflow.

• Slack Extension – Slack can now be configured with our new Workflow Extensions capability, making it easier than ever to add it into your workflow wherever it makes sense, so your teams can respond and collaborate faster. The update provides a more native experience as customers can now choose what actions they want to notify in the Slack channel. Additionally, it maps users bi-directionally, enabling permissions and cross-platform analytics.
• Add-Ons – Add-Ons enable you to embed custom or third-party tool directly within PagerDuty. One example is being able to view real-time infrastructure dashboards from Datadog, directly in both the PagerDuty web and mobile apps.
• Live Call Routing – Live Call Routing enables anyone to communicate with on-call responders or specific teams, simply by calling a number that PagerDuty provides. Incoming calls get routed via the same escalation paths as your monitoring alerts, and voicemails automatically generate incidents.
• Persistent Conference Bridge – Customers can now easily pre-configure all their bridge and online meeting information via the Workflow Extensions interface. These can be easily added, self-service, in any incident via a simple dropdown.

Steve showed off an exciting live demo of how Workflow Extensions can power an end-to-end incident management workflow to dramatically reduce MTTA and MTTR. He was able to automatically generate an incident simply by calling a number via Live Call Routing, and the incident details automatically pushed into a Slack channel where the on-call team could immediately assign a status to it with Slack message buttons. When he drilled into the incident to see what was wrong, the embedded real-time Datadog dashboard helped him quickly identify the source of the issue and resolve the incident.

Integrations

Finally, Vera wrapped up the webinar with an update to one of our most enterprise integrations. The PagerDuty App for ServiceNow v3.1 is now certified for the Helsinki and Geneva versions of ServiceNow. Incidents triggered from PagerDuty to ServiceNow can now be resolved in either platform.

If you missed the What’s New Webinar, not a problem — it’s available to watch on demand at any time. Be sure to also register for our upcoming What’s New webinar to stay in the loop with new capabilities.