There’s an incident. Your teams need to communicate with the development team that owns the service, but that team is too busy to stop and chat. Meanwhile, you in central IT have business leaders asking for updates, angry internal users calling the help desk, and customer service representatives asking for information. You have hundreds of tickets all pertaining to the incident in your ticketing system. You need to ensure the incident is moving forward, the right teams are working on it, and stakeholders and customers are receiving accurate and timely updates about the outage.

This is a story we hear often. It’s a growing pain that comes from digital transformation and the shift to cloud, because there are more applications being created by more teams, and they’re increasing in complexity. Your previous incident processes might feel like they’re built for another era.

Digital transformation and the shift to cloud are driving the success of your business. However, customers aren’t interested in how many teams you have or the complexity of your architecture. They only care that your services work when they need them to. In these moments, you need a partner for your ticketing tool. You need something that’s attuned to the urgent nature of your work, surfacing it for immediate action rather than intermingling it with lower-priority issues like someone’s laptop being broken.

Pairing ITSM with a digital operations platform like PagerDuty bridges the gap between central IT and decentralized, line-of-business teams during the moments that matter by:

• Providing automation at the fingertips of responders to drive action without delay or toil
• Driving accountability/ownership and real-time response in seconds, while maintaining a complete history of all activities in the ITSM system of record
• Streamlining business response and the ability to keep stakeholders updated in real-time without distracting the team that’s working on the technical response

In this blog post, we’ll share how you can benefit from the dynamic duo of your ITSM tool and PagerDuty, plus provide resources to learn more about managing real-time work.

To ticket, or not to ticket? That is the question.

Your ticketing solution is indispensable. You need it for everything from non-urgent information security requests to helpdesk tickets. And in these cases, your solution is probably making the grade. After all, your entire technology workflow depends on it. You’ve invested time and resources into customization. It’s a good system of record and it’s how you understand work in flight all across the business.

But, these tools are purpose-built for managing queued work rather than urgent work. In this context, urgent work means an issue that is causing direct customer impact and must be dealt with immediately—not something that can wait in a queue for an hour or two for someone to look at it.

The cost of downtime is increasing each year, as are customer expectations. For some companies, downtime can cost companies thousands of dollars per minute.

Instances where ticketing systems should be augmented include:

• Customer-impacting incidents, especially when SLAs could be breached
• Incidents where stakeholders across multiple lines of business need to be involved
• Incidents that have an effect on employee productivity, like a failure with the CI/CD system that has developers unable to ship new features, which is akin to the entire digital assembly line grinding to a halt

Many of your incidents may fit into these categories. At this point, ignoring your current solution’s shortcomings is not possible. Thankfully, you have a few options. You can try to retrofit your ticketing system to accommodate this type of work, requiring a hefty time and money investment and an army of consultants. Or you could extend your ITSM tool with a platform purpose-built to handle this kind of work.

How PagerDuty and your ITSM tool work together

PagerDuty is the leading digital operations platform that serves as the central control point for all time-sensitive and business-critical work across organizations. We integrate with ITSM tools like Atlassian Jira Service Desk, ServiceNow, and more. With our service-based architecture, we’re easy to onboard and offer a detailed view of your system as a whole. Additionally, in the time you’d take to install PagerDuty, you’d only be in the planning stages of a six-month to two-year initiative to modernize your ticketing tool, so you’re able to gain a return on your investment faster.

When you experience a failure, PagerDuty takes signals from all of your tools and automatically routes alerts to the proper services. These alerts are filtered through our noise reduction feature to help your teams stay focused. And, with automatic incident creation and team assembling, you can reduce the engagement time required to get everyone on the same page. Last but not least, runbook automation ensures that context gathering and remediation efforts can be delegated to computers while humans focus on the problems that require critical thinking.

What about your ITSM tool? It’s still there, and acting as a system of record for the incident. Our bi-directional syncing capabilities allow you to capture full, precise records of PagerDuty actions in ITSM incident history. In fact, we find that customers using PagerDuty alongside an ITSM tool improve their incident detail and status data by 63%.

The benefits of this combo are hard to ignore. Augmenting your ITSM tool with PagerDuty results in 10X faster response times, a 2.1 month payback period, and 795% ROI over 3 years. To hear how we’re able to achieve these stats, read this IDC report.

Interested in learning more?

Your ITSM tool is an important part of the way you work. But, it can’t do everything. As digital transformation continues and teams are more distributed than ever, it’s key that everyone can stay aligned on providing excellent customer experiences. To do this, you need a process for managing urgent work that keeps up with the pace of your business. With PagerDuty enhancing your ITSM tool, you’ll be able to respond faster, save money, coordinate better across teams—yet keep your stack the way you want it.

If you want to learn more about how PagerDuty can enhance your ITSM tool for faster resolution times and better coordination, check out these resources:

• Enhance your ITSM
• Solutions brief: Extend ITSM Workflows with PagerDuty
• Customer story: PagerDuty Helps ServiceNow Integrate Incident Management for IBM Cloud

And, if you’re ready to see PagerDuty in action, try us out for free for 14 days.