Global Technology Company Uses PagerDuty to Navigate Real-Time Operations

This global technology company specializes in mapping and navigational technologies for both corporations and consumers worldwide, and has expanded its product suite into a hybrid software/hardware model, offering cloud services.

A Senior Project Manager who manages the Site Reliability Engineering team explained, “focusing less on personal navigation devices and more on building upon cloud services has opened the door to product opportunities we never thought possible.”

Challenges Faced

But full-scale digital transformation is complex, and the company needed to ensure that its engineering teams were immediately notified of system outages and incidents.

Before PagerDuty, the company’s engineering organization ran into several challenges, including:

• High mean-times-to-respond due to bottlenecks in incident response and management processes that used legacy, home-grown tools
• Delays in incident acknowledgement and emergency communication due to on-call staff needing to share physical pager
• Lack of accountability and ownership in services and applications because of siloed workflows and tool sprawl across engineering teams
• Difficulty in scaling a custom-built paging tool that worked sporadically to notify individuals on call
• Incident management processes not embedded into the engineering infrastructure, which led to manual dependencies and a lack of communication to key stakeholders
• Language barriers that made it difficult for Facilities staff around the world to communicate issues in their buildings through the main, English-speaking Help Desk number

Benefits With PagerDuty

With PagerDuty’s ecosystem of over 500 integrations, the company integrated its entire tool stack into one single point of ingestion to improve visibility into the health of its infrastructure. PagerDuty’s integrations with Slack, JIRA, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Nagios, and Terraform enabled the company’s teams to gain visibility and actionable insights and understanding they need to proactively address incidents from a centralized platform.

Since implementing PagerDuty, the company has seen many benefits, including:

• A culture of accountability that encourages full-service ownership throughout the developer organization, leading to improved code quality
• Improved cross-team coordination in terms of tool standardization and orchestrating a holistic response
• Reduced resolution times by more than 75% across major incidents and events

“PagerDuty helps us gain better insight into what’s going on within our services and adds complete visibility. Before, we had too many silos. PagerDuty helped us break them down and ultimately centralize our operations,” said the Senior Project Manager.

Localizing Support for Facilities Teams Worldwide Using Live Call Routing

Another benefit to using PagerDuty was helping the company’s distributed Facilities teams with urgent issues. Prior to PagerDuty, Facilities teams across the globe would call into an English-speaking Help Desk number, where language barriers delayed response to urgent issues such as plumbing leaks or electrical outages. By leveraging PagerDuty Live Call Routing, the company enables calls to be routed to a local number where the Facilities staff can immediately discuss urgent issues in their own language to the appropriate people on call.

Mapping for the Future

As the engineering organization continues to invest in cloud services and infrastructure automation, they plan to further embed PagerDuty into their digital environment and use Event Intelligence, which combines human behavior and machine learning data, to help broaden their understanding of incidents.

The company also plans to use PagerDuty’s integration with Terraform to automate response plays within the infrastructure as code and expand it across the greater developer organization. Additionally, the company plans to integrate PagerDuty with ServiceNow to further centralize ITSM and digital operations workflows. As the Senior Project Manager explained, “I see PagerDuty as a digital partner. The platform’s ability to create opportunities for team collaboration is invaluable to our digital operations environment.”

Other teams are continuing to expand their use of PagerDuty, including the Security, NOC, Facilities, and Engineering teams. The engineering teams are also looking into PagerDuty Stakeholder Notifications as part of their emergency response processes to improve visibility and ensure all teams are adequately prepared for future events that could disrupt business as usual, like the COVID-19 pandemic. “The more teams we add into the PagerDuty environment, the more prepared we are to tackle future emergencies that could affect day-to-day operations.”

To learn more about how PagerDuty can help transform your team’s digital operations, sign up for a 14-day free trial.