In the digital era, the importance of remaining competitive and customer-centric places more pressure on ITOps and DevOps teams who support critical services within the business. These teams are the unsung heroes driving and supporting modern businesses, despite the growing complexity of the technology stacks required for seamless customer experiences. At PagerDuty Summit 2016 we recognized companies embracing and overcoming operational complexity with two awards: the PagerDuty Operational Excellence and the PagerDuty Innovation Awards.

The PagerDuty Operational Excellence Awards

The PagerDuty Operational Excellence Awards celebrate customers with ITOps and DevOps practices and teams that are accelerating delivery while ensuring services and systems are available to meet the demands of the business. These teams exhibit operational maturity and have made strides toward embracing digital transformation.

The winners of the PagerDuty Operational Excellence Award:

Yelp – Silver Winner

Yelp is a website and mobile app that connects people with great local businesses. In order to provide the best experience and keep customers coming back to their site, the company relies on their operations and infrastructure teams to keep the site up and running 24/7, 365 days a year. PagerDuty has played a significant role in helping Yelp democratize incident management, making sure every development team gets the right alerts for the right services at the right times. Using PagerDuty has allowed Yelp to improve global site availability and maintain customer satisfaction. The company leverages PagerDuty to keep these teams working efficiently and collaboratively by notifying the appropriate subject matter experts when an incident arises, then provides actionable information to streamline incident response. By tracking the lifecycle of incidents with PagerDuty, Yelp is able to respond quickly, resulting in decreased mean-time-to-acknowledge (MTTA) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR).

Dropbox – Gold Winner

Dropbox simplifies the way people work together by providing a solution that enables users to access files from anywhere, on any device, and share with anyone. Delivering on the promise of agility, performance, and uptime to deliver customer delight, pushed Dropbox to take operational maturity to new levels. The company uses PagerDuty’s platform as a key part of their incident management strategy, organizing effective incident response, identifying noisy infrastructure and apps, and continuously improving their operations. Real time analytics became powerful business intelligence tools for Dropbox, giving them an edge over the competition, the ability to learn from existing processes and helping them avoid future incidents. By taking advantage of the PagerDuty REST API, Dropbox teams have built custom services and incident management workflows, cutting down on noise and improving overall team efficiency and productivity.

The PagerDuty Innovation Awards

The Innovation Awards honor inventive and exceptional use cases with the PagerDuty platform. These companies have applied unique approaches to incident management.  

The winners of PagerDuty Innovation Awards:

Etsy – Silver Winner

Etsy operates marketplaces where millions of people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. Etsy also offers a wide range of seller services and tools that help creative entrepreneurs start, grow and manage their businesses. With more than 1.7 million active sellers and 26.1 million active buyers, Etsy maintains an advanced technology stack that powers the site and its ongoing e-commerce transactions. By enabling its operations teams to work collaboratively to address issues in real time, PagerDuty has helped Etsy release and integrate deployments quickly. PagerDuty supports the company’s ability to identify alerts that didn’t produce an action, incidents that have the most impact, the top notifying hosts and services, and how incident rates have changed over time. This data, pulled into innovative health reports, has allowed the team to operate more effectively and efficiently when incidents occur, as well as helped the team learn from past incidents, leading to faster resolution times.

GitHub – Gold Winner

GitHub is a web-based, repository hosting service that enables developers to build better software by helping them discover, use and contribute to powerful, collaborative workflows and open source projects. Maintaining their service for over 25 million projects – small and large, free and paying – requires advanced operations.  In fact, over one third of the company is on-call developers and engineers ensuring GitHub is up and running at all times. PagerDuty enables GitHub to identify critical issues with actionable alerts as well as leverage integrations with Puppet, CloudWatch, Nagios and Datadog. The company has built advanced, custom dashboards using the PagerDuty REST API to contribute to streamlined incident management that results in increased uptime, ensuring their business maintains its promise to customers and users around the world. By improving uptime, surfacing critical issues with actionable alerts, and gaining a unified view across the entirety of operations to improve operational reliability and agility, GitHub has taken team and business operational health to new levels.

These awards recognize and honor outstanding organizations that are accelerating digital transformation and have built operationally mature ops environments that benefit their customers. Congratulations to each and every one of you for a well-deserved award!