Forrester Names PagerDuty a Leader in first-ever Process-Centric AIOps Wave

From helping pioneer the DevOps movement to establishing best practices around service ownership to being the standard in incident response, PagerDuty has a long history of leadership. PagerDuty is honored to add to this list and now be recognized as a leader in the AIOps and Automation space by Forrester. To explain why PagerDuty was listed as a leader, it’s important to look at our current economic climate and compare it to the past.

It’s been more than a decade since the last time the Three C’s–Cost Control, Consolidation (of vendors) and Compliance–received so much oversight and scrutiny. Just like in 2008, centralized decision making and cost controls are driving organizations to consolidate entire vendor suites versus only best of breed products to do the job.

It’s no surprise that additional financial oversights are now a part of every purchase, every budget item, and every activity for IT and development. Everyone expects more–and they expect it right now, not next quarter or even next year. 

AIOps, however, has always promised to do more. For us, more is about exceeding SLAs, and improving availability and reliability. More is about cost savings because fewer humans should be needed in a major outage and incident. More should not only be about being more responsive, but be about preventing issues in the first place.

What’s Changed Since the Last Financial Crisis

In 2008, important financial institutions failed given credit and lending practices. This started a market downturn where the global economy contracted. This resulted in cost controls and the need to improve business efficiencies which in turn drove more central decision making. It was a stark contrast from the strategy of top line growth at all cost which typically results in distributed decision making and vendor/tool sprawl.

So, what’s different now and why is PagerDuty’s AIOps a leading solution to look into?

• Now (vs 2008) machine learning is and should be an operational part of every data centric digital business. PagerDuty’s AIOps solution has progressed fast over the last four years to help both reduce the time to resolve issues by 25% and reduce unnecessary interruptions (noise) by over 90%. 
  • By combining our event correlation (Intelligent event grouping) and event orchestration (event rules engine) with existing observability processes, we better target which experts are needed for which problems. We make escalation policies more effective and powerful.
  • PagerDuty’s AIOps product can make those experts more productive as well when they do get called in to a major incident by automating the diagnostics process and pinpoint offending or culprit services responsible for the problem.
  • Equally important, by combining event rules with automation jobs (event driven automation), an entire class of lower priority problems can be remediated without human intervention and eliminate the need for responders or experts to engage at all. 
  • Lastly…with Generative AI, we just potentially democratized the tools that will further broaden use even faster. 
• Now (vs 2008) there is no need to hire expensive professional services or bring in tons of white lab coat experts to configure systems. You can and should demand to see the value in days and weeks, not months or longer. PagerDuty’s AIOps offers 5-10x reduction in time to value over alternative solutions.
• Now (vs 2008) we have proven, high value products that offer AI as an integrated part of your existing practices vs separate bespoke solutions in event management. Whether you have centralized IT Operations (e.g., network operating center with SREs) or decentralized operating models with service ownership by developers or a combination of both (hybrid model), there is no need to have or add new vendors or build new approaches. PagerDuty’s AIOps solution works in all models. 

The promise of AIOps off the shelf products is a reality. There are real products from established leaders like PagerDuty to apply against your needs and requirements. 

And now, we’re proud to share PagerDuty’s AIOps leadership as part of the recent Forrester Wave. Consider this your personal guide to help in your AIOps journey. Enjoy.