Long before “coronavirus” and “social distancing” were part of our vocabulary, PagerDuty set out to rebuild our online community to better serve our members and provide the support necessary to weather tough times like these.

When we originally launched the community in 2017, we envisioned an online forum where developers, engineers, and other end-users could go to get assistance from and share feedback directly with our internal Support and Product teams. Over time, the scope expanded to include discussion around best practices and processes for DevOps, SRE, on-call implementation, blameless postmortems, and more. Many teams and individuals at PagerDuty joined in the conversations alongside a great network of users, building the active, responsive online community we’ve become known for.

As the community grew, we began to recognize the platform needed an upgrade to accommodate the increasing membership numbers and provide a better, more interactive virtual space for our everyone to gather. Our team knew it would be a massive undertaking, so we hired a dedicated Program Manager, Alexa Alley, and got to work.

The new vision for our online community is focused on you, our community members, and every change has been made to better serve you. We set out to make our new forum a welcome and inclusive space that is fun, engaging, and informative—and I think we have achieved that vision.

While this project was not sparked by any specific event, we are thankful that the launch has lined up with this challenging time to allow us to better serve our community when you need it most. We are excited to share what’s new and how you can utilize the platform now to help combat your quarantine blues.

This New Forum Was Built to…

Recognize Members for Their Contributions

The PagerDuty User Community has always been at the core of our success. The direct interaction with and feedback from you help us continually improve our products and ensure that we are serving your needs. Many members have also done amazing things with and on top of our platform. We think it’s time to recognize and reward those contributions. The upgraded forum awards coins for posting and commenting, completing challenges, finishing learning paths, and other actions on the platform. These coins can be converted into PagerDuty swag—a small way for us to say “thank you” to our community members for all you do.

Connect and Network With Like-Minded Individuals

With so many people working remotely, many of us are missing interactions with coworkers in the office or peers at conferences and meetups. The new PagerDuty forum makes virtual interaction fun and comfortable. From casual water-cooler chat to troubleshooting support, our community forum can help you feel more connected and supported even when you’re on your own.

Help You Advance Your Organizational Practices and Technical Knowledge

Maintain your professional development even when you can’t be in a classroom. We have teamed up with PagerDuty University to provide educational materials and courses for our community members. On the forum, we have organized these into easy-to-follow learning paths to help you uplevel your skills and knowledge. Completion of these paths also help you earn coins and raise your spot in the leaderboards!

Hear Our Users’ Feedback

PagerDuty strives for continuous improvement and we rely on our community to help tell us how we can be better. Much of this feedback comes to us when we chat with you in the booth at in-person events. In lieu of those opportunities, we have made it easier (and more rewarding) than ever to provide feedback on feature ideas, integrations, add-ons, issues, and more.

Our online community also gives you access to the Developer Forum, a central gathering place for developers to share what they’re working on, post questions they have, or find information on developer tools that are available. Whether you’re working on a custom integration, extension, or an internal tool built specifically for your own team, the Developer Forum is a great place to share your project or things you learned. The forum is also actively monitored by the PagerDuty Support team to ensure that your questions are seen and heard.

Other Ways to Connect With Our Community

Another way we are pivoting to serve our community is by launching a series of virtual events by developers for developers with informative talks, best practices, networking, and peer-to-peer engagement. We’d love for you to join us for our first event, PagerDuty Connect Virtual, on May 21 at 9 a.m. PDT! Our Developer Advocates, along with other community leaders from Elastic, Gremlin, HackerOne, and Zendesk will be sharing ways community has impacted their technology and how their communities are helping to bring technical success in challenging times.

We hope you enjoy the changes made to the community forums. If you haven’t signed up for an account yet, hop on over to community.pagerduty.com and join us! In just a couple of minutes you’ll have access to the features above and more.

Stay safe and stay well. We’ll see you on the Internet!