Global IT disruptions and outages are becoming the new normal, testing the operational resilience of businesses everywhere. How well prepared your team is to handle major incidents determines how fast the business can return to normal. Operations Centers are relied on to manage these disruptions and ensure quick recovery. They’re the point of entry for incoming data that holds important signals of impending failure that impact customers, the business, and the bottom line.

When we talk to customers about their modernization initiatives for their operations centers, we hear common challenges. Many companies are currently incurring high costs for low-value work while introducing business risks. However, leading companies are using automation to manage chaos, drive innovation, and build the operational resilience required for modern digital businesses. It’s key to ensure that your operations center is using best-in-class capabilities—including AI and automation—to get ahead of issues, let machines serve as the first line of defense, and provide immediate context to the right teams.

Here are four new enhancements to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud that can help Operations Centers do just that.

Operations Console

Many organizations struggle with the increase in data and the disparate observability tools pumping in too much noise. With manual processes and eyes-on-glass methods to handle this information, operations center engineers experience alert fatigue, making them prone to missing key signals and incorrectly prioritizing issues. This puts the company at risk for loss of revenue and poor customer experiences.

However, with the right amount of visibility, Operations Centers can reduce alerts and optimize monitoring signals by correlating data from observability tools, telemetry data, and customer signals into one unified view. This can reduce operating costs, eliminate redundancy, and potentially help streamline tooling. It’s a win-win for the business and the subject matter experts. For instance, if an outage occurs, having a unified view can help teams quickly identify and resolve issues, minimizing the impact on customer experience.

The PagerDuty Operations Console helps teams create a customized live dashboard to triage and take action on issues immediately. Users can leverage configurable tabular and filter components to zero in on relevant information such as priority, severity, and more. This feature ensures that team members are working from a single source of truth in one centralized location. This reduces noise and allows you to mobilize a more focused, effective response when your operations teams are notified.

The Operations Console is generally available to PagerDuty AIOps customers. Take the product tour.

Dynamic Escalation Policy Assignment and Dynamic Routing

Operations Centers need to run as efficiently as possible. And yet, too often resources and capacity are wasted attempting to resolve issues manually at the L1-L2 level when really they need to be routed or escalated immediately. When customer experience is on the line, there’s no room for error and wasted time comes at a high cost.

Operations Centers need to immediately know whether an issue can be resolved via automation or by L1-L2, or whether it needs to be sent to the right team or person. And, if the incident does need to be rerouted or escalated, teams cannot rely on manual processes. Using automation to accomplish this based on historical data and highly customizable rules allows teams to achieve faster resolutions, improve customer experience, and boost team morale.

With Dynamic Escalation Policy Assignment, organizations can centrally and automatically manage how Escalation Policies work during a variety of circumstances, scaling incident management best practices across teams. This reduces cost and customer impact. With Dynamic Routing, organizations can leverage historical data and dynamically configure routing rules to appropriately send problems to the right team at the right time every time. Managing these routing rules is easier than ever and can be controlled centrally for a more standardized approach.

Dynamic Escalation Policy Assignment and Dynamic Routing are now generally available for AIOps customers.

Global Intelligent Alert Grouping

Alert storms are a common challenge in modern Operations Centers, leading to noise fatigue and delayed responses, significantly impacting network performance and customer experience. By intelligently grouping alerts across services using both built-in machine learning models and customizable logic, this feature not only consolidates related alerts into fewer, more manageable incidents, but also improves mean time to resolution (MTTR) by helping responders quickly identify and act on the most critical issues.

NOC teams can consolidate multiple alerts into a single incident, minimizing the creation of redundant alerts and simplifying incident management, so they can focus on addressing real issues rather than getting overwhelmed by a flood of notifications. This is especially crucial during major incidents—like outages—as it allows teams to mobilize a focused and effective response. Deploying automation throughout your incident management process can expedite diagnostics and fixes in the aftermath of large-scale incidents, ensuring services are restored quickly and efficiently.

In addition to reducing alert noise, Global Intelligent Alert Grouping enhances the understanding of the incident scope. By grouping alerts across services, teams gain a clearer view of the incident’s impact, ensuring that the right teams are engaged and coordinating effectively. This leads to a more organized and efficient cross-functional response, ultimately improving operational reliability and customer satisfaction.

Teams can now customize their Intelligent Alert Grouping by selecting their preferred alert fields (up to 5 fields) for textual similarity analysis. Global Intelligent Alert Grouping and Intelligent Grouping with Advanced Options are in Early Access for AIOps customers only. Sign up here.

PagerDuty Advance

Operations Centers often struggle to identify and address the root causes of issues due to the overwhelming data noise, making it challenging to determine what’s important and how issues originated. This leads to wasted valuable time searching for information that AI could easily surface, creating bottlenecks in incident detection and diagnosis and making proactive responses difficult.

PagerDuty Advance modernizes operations, transforming the traditional, human-intensive model of NOCs into a streamlined process that moves from Event to Resolution with minimal toil and increased speed. Our AI assistance allows teams to ask questions to accelerate action, gather context, and receive proactive guidance directly from Slack during incidents, enabling faster triage and remediation. This in-depth contextual support throughout the incident lifecycle lightens the mental load on responders, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities while outsourcing drafting and knowledge-gathering tasks to AI.

PagerDuty customers leveraging PagerDuty Advance have experienced many benefits:

• Reduced and eliminated toil of information gathering and analysis during critical operations work.
• Reduced the time and coordination needed to craft tailored communication updates to all stakeholders.
• Reduced time to create post-incident reviews and provide recommendations for future improvements.
• Achieved a 360° view of customer impact, breaking organizational silos.
• Immediate and relevant insights through a conversational UI, and more.

Learn more about Generative AI (GenAI) at PagerDuty.

Building Resilient Operations Centers

With these latest features, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud is providing customers with an even more robust solution for modernizing their Operations Centers. We’ve been supporting operations centers and positively impacting businesses by saving millions annually through resilient systems and tool consolidation, boosting productivity by reducing noise and manual toil, and mitigating risk by preventing incidents and reducing downtime costs.

And don’t forget to use every unplanned incident as a chance to learn. Although challenging, major incidents offer valuable insights into your process and prevent future disruptions. Investing in your incident management process helps reduce risks when major issues arise. While cost pressures are common, prevention is more cost-effective than dealing with incidents, so it’s key to build resilience and redundancy into your infrastructure. Always consider the long-term costs and risks before consolidating technology for short-term savings.

To further boost your operations center’s resilience, join our upcoming webinar, on September 10, 2024, at 8 AM PT / 11 AM ET / 4 PM BST. Hear from PagerDuty’s Frank Emery and Frances Wang as they explore how AIOps can enhance your incident management and outage response. Register now to gain valuable insights and strategies for future-proofing your operations center.

If you’re looking to harness AI and automation in your organization to get more efficient and respond faster to incidents, try us out today for free.