The ongoing pandemic and resulting economic downturn have led to dramatically changing market conditions. As a consequence, technology teams have become increasingly concerned with the need to minimize their financial risk and reduce costs to mitigate the effects of abruptly pivoting to a fully remote working environment.

For some, there has been a struggle to maintain business continuity—i.e., keeping the physical components of the business running when everyone is working from home. For others, the issues center on an emphasized reliance on digital services for both internal and external customers. Not every organization and sector is impacted equally, as we found in our recent research.

Regardless of what type of company you are, in this environment, your business objectives boil down to three needs: to reduce costs, protect revenue, and accelerate digital transformation. As daunting as the challenge may seem, there is reason for optimism: With the right technology solutions in place, organizations can stretch budgets, make processes more efficient, and continue to delight customers with a seamless digital experience.

To help our customers rise to the challenge, PagerDuty is proud to announce our latest release, which empowers organizations to improve response team efficiency and protect customer relationships in a digital-first world. Watch the launch webinar on-demand to see how our latest innovations can help you.

Proactive Incident Response

We believe it’s critical for every organization to get proactive with incident response, whether you are facing incredible demand for your digital services today or soon expect to. Being proactive means giving both technical and business staff the tools to orient themselves on their digital services so that if problems do occur, they’re not starting from a state of ignorance. In the digital world, seconds matter, and critical individuals can’t be learning about infrastructure or response procedures on the fly—it’s the time for action. That’s why digital readiness, or preparedness, is so important.

Our new and updated features around proactive incident response deliver a complete view of digital services across all teams, their dependencies, and the relevant operational metrics needed to provide hypercare and prevent issues before they become revenue-impacting crises.

• Service profiles give engineering managers and responders a better way to organize and find structured, relevant information about services, including runbooks, suppressed alerts, past incidents, communication channels, and more.

• Service dashboards analyze operational metrics and KPIs to gain cross-organizational alignment and realize better business outcomes.
• Service dependencies (available for Early Access) help users understand the relationship between services in PagerDuty in order to identify, triage, and remediate issues faster and collaborate more effectively across teams.
• Visibility Console (available for Early Access), which provides a real-time, consolidated view of service performance, just got a UI makeover and now includes advanced filtering and customizable layouts. This tool helps teams take a proactive approach to incident response, providing the context required to meet customer needs during moments of hypercare.

Intelligent Response and Automation

If your team is still thumbing through a handbook to determine how to respond to an issue or manually combing through past incidents to see what might be related, you simply aren’t making the best use of their time or resources. One of the easiest ways to improve team efficiency and protect revenue is to remove low-value activities (or toil) by automating them so that you can re-deploy your valuable resources elsewhere.

Our latest solutions for intelligent response and automation provide focused, real-time information about what’s most important. They also lighten the burden on responders by reducing duplication of work and allowing machines to automate manual tasks. Automation gives organizations the ability to do more with less, improving company resilience and protecting revenue.

• Mobile Intelligent Triage, part of Event Intelligence, prevents teams from duplicating work. Machine learning draws on historical records of issues and collaborations, and merges related incidents, giving teams the ability to more accurately identify who is responsible and working on issues.

• Re-open Incident (available for Early Access) increases responder flexibility and reduces duplication of incidents, allowing faster remobilization when an issue returns unexpectedly.
• Rundeck, Ayehu, Pliant, and Amazon EventBridge integrations allow PagerDuty customers to automate manual IT workflows and improve communication within response teams as part of response plays.

Real-Time Business Orchestration

Today, technology teams are struggling not only with the dramatic increase in customer demand on digital services, but also trying to manage incident communications across teams that are now completely distributed. Meanwhile, customers still expect a perfect experience. We believe it’s critical for business response to be integrated closely with a technical response when incidents arise. It should be a natural extension of your existing technical processes, and it should not involve manual processes or require setting up additional tools.

Our latest enhancements empower people to work and communicate more efficiently during critical moments by breaking down silos and providing the right level of information for all teams, ultimately leading to better customer experiences.

• Mobile Status Dashboard gives business stakeholders convenient, on-the-go access to the most important updates about key business services.

• Status Update Branding increases notification recipient engagement and trust via branded notifications.
• Salesforce integration enables a best-in-class, united front in customer support for digital services by giving teams the ability to customize workflows and mobilize the right resources at the right time. Integrate with any standard Salesforce object to trigger a corresponding action in PagerDuty.
• On-call scheduling timeline (Limited Access) and hand-off notification enhancements improve visibility of on-call shifts and the services for which team members are responsible, giving users an easier way to manage conflicts, workload, and shift overrides.

• Microsoft Teams integration allows responders to view critical incident details within Teams. They can also acknowledge, resolve, and trigger new incidents, plus add incident notes, all from one interface.

New Integrations and APIs

We know that details matter, and even small improvements or expanded integrations can make all the difference in your team’s ability to respond faster to outages and operate at peak performance. That’s why we’ve been working hard to deliver new and enhanced integrations with tools such as Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and more to enable you to maximize visibility across your technology stack and work from the tools you already know and love. In addition, business services and response play APIs allow teams to access key data and functionality.

Check out this link to learn more about our latest release!