The number of tools used by distributed teams to manage incidents has multiplied over the years, leading to a valley of tool sprawl. Throw in manual processes and you’ve got too much toil and multiple points of failure. Maintaining disparate tools and systems isn’t just unwieldy, it’s expensive. 

Our latest capabilities add to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to make it easier than ever for teams to consolidate their incident management stack. New innovations coming to Incident Workflows, Custom Fields on Incidents, and Status Update Notification Templates will further help organizations shift from a manual, reactive state towards a more proactive, preventative approach to incident response.

When used together in an integrated fashion, these features create a multiplier effect, delivering an unparalleled level of operational efficiency and business acceleration. This interoperability is core to what allows the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to empower organizations to manage incidents from ingest to resolution on a unified platform, without the need for third-party tools and homegrown solutions. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new, or check out the updates for yourself in the product tour.

Custom Fields to enrich incident data

No more chasing information across disparate systems–capture incident context in one centralized place with Custom Fields on Incidents! Custom Fields allow teams to pull in important incident data from any system of record and put it at the fingertips of responders so they have the information needed to resolve incidents faster. Custom Fields on Incidents will be available on web, mobile, and through the API. Sign up for early access. 

Enhanced templates for stakeholder communications 

Automate how status updates are created to drive efficiency and consistency, rather than manually crafting update messages from scratch. Response teams now have access to an expanded set of fields in their templates, including “Business Impact,” “Conference Bridge,” and “Slack Channel.” Templates will soon also support Custom Fields (sign up for Early Access). These new fields help response teams add important context about the incident at hand to their communications to stakeholders. They can also create communications from templates as part of an Incident Workflows workflow action.

Integration between Incident Workflows and ServiceNow and Jira Server

Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your ITSM tools. PagerDuty customers can now run PagerDuty Incident Workflows from ServiceNow incident records and Jira issue records. This means customers can access powerful workflow automation from the places they already work. This functionality is now available in v7.9 ServiceNow application (Utah certified) and v4 Jira Server. To learn more, check out the KB articles for ServiceNow and Jira Server integrations.

Expanded Incident Workflow actions 

Reduce operating costs by automating manual steps of the incident response process using Incident Workflows. Today we’re announcing a new set of actions planned for launch in Q2 which further expands the range of PagerDuty features that can be automated through Incident Workflows. These actions include run Automation Actions, use Status Update Notification Templates to send a status update, create a Microsoft Teams meeting or channel, add a note to an incident, reassign an incident, and change incident priority. 

Conclusion

Today’s announcement summarizes a few of the ways that PagerDuty is designing our products and features to help our customers mitigate risk to revenue and minimize toil by helping them manage incidents end-to-end. In building our products cohesively as a platform for action, we can enable teams to automate and accelerate critical work–to ultimately transform operations and move business forward faster. The power of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud lies in the synergies provided through the seamless integration across the entire product suite, and these features work together in concert, lowering the barrier to adopting more proactive, preventative processes. 

If you’d like to learn more about the latest release, register for our launch webinar. Our product team will be diving into and demoing these features. 

To see the latest features in action, check out our product tour.