Size: 2,000-5,000
Industry: Nonprofit
Location: San Francisco, California
Customer Since: 2018
The Incident Management Transformation Journey
Anaplan, a leading connected planning platform, aims to help its customers align their strategic objectives and make decisions that drive profitable growth. Their goal is to provide exceptional customer experiences and service, ensuring its platform is always on and available.
When they began their digital transformation journey six years ago, they had challenges identifying and resolving incidents before they were noticed by customers. Before adopting PagerDuty, Anaplan’s tool-centric approach led to a fragmented and reactive incident management process. The mean time to acknowledge incidents (MTTA) averaged 2-3 hours and the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for high-severity incidents was around 3 hours. Engineers were constantly interrupted with irrelevant alerts, especially during off hours. This posed challenges for internal teams as well as customers. “When our platform is down, it impacts our customers’ ability to visualize demand and do sales forecasting, which is critical in the wholesale and retail sectors,” said Ankush Mattoo, Senior Service Manager at Anaplan.
Revolutionizing Digital Operations with PagerDuty
Mattoo and his team have led Anaplan’s incident management transformation since its inception. Responsible for platform service management, including incident management, problem management, and continuous service delivery, his team started using PagerDuty for tool-based monitoring, later transitioning to service-based alerting. This shift ensured that only the responsible teams were notified, reducing irrelevant alerts and enabling quicker identification and resolution of service disruptions.
Because customers depend on the reliability of their platform, ensuring that backend processes and systems work efficiently and effectively is a top priority. It is critical that Mattoo’s team finds and resolves issues immediately, before they impact customers. To address these challenges, they overhauled its incident management process, transitioning to a proactive, service-based alerting system with PagerDuty as the central platform.
After expanding their use of PagerDuty, Anaplan dramatically enhanced its operational efficiency. By leveraging PagerDuty AIOps, the team eliminated nearly 48,000 unnecessary alerts, resulting in improved incident management efficiency and allowing engineers to focus on critical issues. The results were remarkable. MTTA has reduced from 2-3 hours to just 5 minutes while MTTR for critical incidents has dropped from 3 hours to under 30 minutes.
The financial benefits have been equally impressive. With a 95% improvement in detecting and addressing incidents, the streamlined incident management process has resulted in an estimated quarter million dollars of savings per year and has significantly increased customer satisfaction. “By leveraging PagerDuty, Anaplan has minimized the resources needed for an incident, and helped reduce our outage times, customer escalation, and, in the end, helped save Anaplan a lot of money,” said Mattoo.
“By leveraging PagerDuty, Anaplan has minimized the resources needed for an incident and helped reduce our outage times, customer escalations and – in the end –helped save Anaplan a lot of money.”
– Ankush Mattoo, Senior Service Manager, Anaplan
What’s Next?
The PagerDuty partnership has been critical to Anaplan’s digital transformation, and has helped deliver clear, measurable business outcomes. Looking ahead, Anaplan plans to continue to expand its use of PagerDuty to automate more aspects of the incident management lifecycle. The team is exploring how PagerDuty Automation can auto-remediate alerts even before they page someone, reducing human intervention and allowing teams to focus on innovation.
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