PagerDuty has always been purpose-built to ingest and triage data from virtually any source, so that our customers’ NOC teams, DevOps, IT Ops, Help Desk responders, and critical stakeholders all have a complete view of everything going on within their infrastructure stacks. A couple months ago, PagerDuty announced significant updates (such as our Custom Event Transformer) to highlight our continuous commitment to, and investments in, developer success and the extensibility of our platform.

However, up until this point, much of the focus of our platform story has been on ingesting data. 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. Today, we’re broadening the scope of our platform extensibility capabilities by making it easier for developers and non-developers to configure workflow extensions.

Integrations vs. Workflow Extensions

What are Workflow Extensions? How are they different from integrations? What’s the importance behind introducing them now?

In a nutshell:

• Integrations: Connection with any tool that provides incoming event data to PagerDuty (inbound data).

• Workflow Extensions: Functionality which serves to extend the PagerDuty workflow to your existing tools.

Workflow Extensions Features

The Workflow Extensions solves this problem by providing a centralized location within the product where customers can configure all of the tools with which they want to extend their PagerDuty workflow.

Workflow Extensions provide a wide range of extra functionality:

• Embed live service metrics from Datadog directly into your incidents with the Datadog add-on
• Bring PagerDuty into your discussions on Slack or HipChat
• and so much more!

If you can’t find the tools you need among our dozens of selectable extensions (easily filter with the green ‘Extensions’ button), use a custom extension written by the community of PagerDuty developers — or dust off your keyboard and write your own!

Our Long-Term Vision

The broader, long-term vision of this feature is to become the central hub for discovery of new add-ons, widgets, and other workflow functionalities that you can easily add to your PagerDuty instance. This will enable customers to customize and enrich every stage of their incident management workflow — from how incidents are represented all the way through to collaboration and resolution. With Workflow Extensions, our platform truly sits at the center of your operations workflow. We want all customers to take advantage of Workflow Extensions to enhance their PagerDuty experience, so we’ve decided to make the new Workflow Extensions available at no additional cost on all PagerDuty plans.

Check out the support documentation to learn more and get started with configuring Workflow Extensions for your PagerDuty instance. Many thanks to all those who provided feedback. If you have any thoughts on Workflow Extensions, please contact me at steve@pagerduty.com. I’d love to hear about what you think!