Yesterday at our second annual user conference, PagerDuty Summit, we brought together hundreds of DevOps practitioners and business leaders to share best practices and lessons learned from actual implementations to help others do the same. With a common theme of learning and sharing across organizations in full swing at the event, we made sure to provide attendees with actionable insights that they could take back to their teams.

Here are 5 overarching themes from the event we think are worth remembering.

#1. PagerDuty is for people

PagerDuty is the platform for action for teams and individuals to enable the best possible experience for the end customer and colleagues. Our vision has always been to make it easy for teams to surface critical context and bring people together when it matters most for the business. With the right tools in place to streamline response workflows, teams can avoid the chaos and get back time for innovation.

And speaking of people, we officially announced PagerDuty Community, a place for learning and sharing across companies so they can be more effective. After being in public beta for a few months, it’s finally open to everyone! We hope you’ll find the forums a valuable resource to engage with other users and the team at PagerDuty, share your experiences, learn from others, and get the most out of PagerDuty to improve your OpsLife.

We’re also proud to announce that we’ve joined Pledge 1% with the commitment for 1% of equity, 1% of product and 1% of employee time to support the community by helping them meet their needs to operate effectively towards their mission. The pledge strengthens our social responsibility initiatives through inclusivity efforts with community partners, empowering volunteerism and driving the launch of PagerDuty.org to support nonprofits.

#2. DevOps is for business too

Put the entire company on-call

A major theme that came up over and over again throughout Summit this year had to do with “doing DevOps” throughout the organization. Being on-call is no longer just for DevOps engineers. Anyone who write and ships code can and should be held accountable to go on-call for their services. What’s more, is that even non-technical teams like marketing, communications, customer success and support, executive teams, and even public relations teams are now going on-call in order to protect the customer experience. In a world where consumers have an endless number of digital outlets to voice their opinions through, it’s more important than ever before to get the entire business on the same page and control the storyline before it spirals out of control.

One particular session from Summit 17’, Reimagining Customer Support, brought together leaders from Okta, GE, and Gainsight to discuss how they each coordinate response to customer issues of any scale to deliver the best possible responses and a unified customer experience 24×7, every time. DevOps is no longer just for the engineers, it’s now a business-wide imperative. And reimaging your operations is how you get there.

#3. Customer expectations are changing

Last year, Jennifer Tejada talked about the importance of micro-moments and how they impact the customer experience — which makes it all the more crucial to enable teams to provide the best possible experience for the end customer. This year, she expanded on this by discussing how the world and technology landscape is changing, and changing with it is the role of the developer. If businesses want to remain competitive and relevant in this constantly evolving and changing landscape, they must reimagine operations. In this new world order, we’re seeing:

1. The ultimate customer experience: Customers are looking for the ultimate customer experience, regardless of if you are a consumer facing brand or an enterprise company. Expectations of consumers have changed — making outcomes more important than transactions.
2. Everything must work perfectly: Because of rising consumer expectations, organizations need to ensure that everything works perfectly — even if it might necessarily not; but to the consumer, it needs to feel seamless. When slow is the new down, there isn’t any room for error.
3. Digital operations is business-critical: Digital operations is no longer just for the IT department. It now spans across the organization and critical to the success of the entire business.

#4. We <3 DevOps

We support a culture of empowerment and enablement

As software becomes the de facto medium through which business is conducted, the quality of the digital experience defines an organization’s success. That’s why at Summit, we introduced new capabilities in machine learning and advanced response automation that enable businesses to orchestrate the right business-wide response to any situation. Customers can now take advantage of the following capabilities for intelligent real-time decisions, automated precision response and business-wide orchestration:

• Alert Grouping: drive down resolution times while reducing responder noise.
• Similar Incidents: see previous related issues and surface information around incident severity, impact, remediation steps and much more.
• Response Automation: design and execute an automated response pattern, recruiting responders and stakeholders in seconds.
• Dynamic Notifications & Event Routing: dynamically select notification and assignment behavior and automatically route events to the right teams and services.
• Redesigned, Live User Experience: our new live incident details page provides improved information discoverability and ease of use.

You can dive into all of our latest features by checking out our launch blog post. Or, if you’d like to see them in action, be sure to register for our upcoming PagerDuty Pulse webinar — a release notes webinar in which we’ll showcase demos of them all and answer your questions.

#5. Digital operations transformation is necessary

With all the changes taking place in the technology landscape, digital operations is more critical than ever, as it integrates machine-based signals with people and teams through DevOps-centric workflows. Operations today must:

• Be proactive and automated: recognize patterns to automate resolution before customers are affected
• Drive innovation: free up time and resources for innovation and improvement
• Take a holistic approach:
  drive agility across every part of the organization, including customer support, ITOps, network ops — even sales ops and more

Across the Social Space

You can check out the conversation on Twitter by checking out #PDSummit17. Here are a few of our favorite tweets from the day!

Customer Awards

This year’s customer and partner awards we give to individuals and organizations who are implementing an innovative and transformative approach to digital operations management. We gave out a total of 8 awards to partners and customers. Check out the full list of winners and learn about how they’re using PagerDuty to demonstrate excellence.