Ping Identity: Keeping Identities Safe With PagerDuty

Organizations all over the world trust Ping Identity to keep their employees’ identity safe. Their identity and access management platform gives enterprises one-click access to any application from any device. Ping Identity’s purpose is to enable and protect identity, defend privacy and secure the Internet.

Early Ping Identity Challenges

Keeping identities secure is a difficult task. Ping Identity takes their responsibility seriously and have heavily invested in their infrastructure to make sure their solutions are highly reliable. Their world-class distributed system means that if they experience data center failures because of a hurricane in the East Coast or a earthquake in the West Coast, their customers will not experience a disruption in their service. Ping Identity’s infrastructure team is responsible for ensuring all Ping Identity’s services are always up, extremely fast, all the time. To keep a pulse on how their systems are functioning day-to-day, they have created a multi-layered stack architecture to monitor their systems. Using a variety of solutions from New Relic for applications to Splunk for machine data, Ping Identity takes care of their IT systems so their customers never have to worry. However, having multiple monitoring tools presented a set of challenges.

Alerts from various monitoring tools became difficult to manage and distribute. On-call responsibility was rotated weekly, but whenever someone went on-call they had to log into every monitoring system to change the alert notifications to their email. This process was cumbersome and error-prone. Also multiple teams worked with each monitoring tool so routing issues directly to the right person was difficult. Since there was no way to centrally manage alerts, alerts were missed or sent to the wrong person causing delays. This inefficient alerting process extended costly downtime.

“As the team scaled, our method of changing email addresses was not going to work.” – Beau Christensen, Manager of Infrastructure Operations

To provide a highly reliable service for their customers, Ping Identity needed to add an incident management solution to their infrastructure to resolve issues more quickly.

How did PagerDuty Help?

Since extreme reliability is important to Ping Identity, they require the same tenancy from the solutions they add to their infrastructure. Like their customers, they need to trust the tools that help keep their business going. Ping Identity has been relying on PagerDuty to reduce their incident response times. With dependable alert routing and escalation, the right person is reached faster, every time. There is no need to go into every monitoring tool to change contact information before every on-call rotation anymore. On-call engineers can maintain their contact information in PagerDuty and when it’s their turn to be on-call, PagerDuty routes alerts directly to them via multiple methods. Missed alerts were one of the biggest pains that Ping Identity experienced before PagerDuty. With multiple alerting methods, every engineer can personalize the combination of alerts that works for them. Additionally, by automatically escalating missed alerts Ping Identity never has worry about extended outages again.

Not only are the right alerts going to the right person, but PagerDuty has helped to decrease alerting noise. With alert deduplication, PagerDuty has alleviated alert fatigue by bundling alerts to prevent event storms during an outage. Each incident can be analyzed to report how well each person and team is performing. By visualizing alerts, Ping Identity can spot trends and make informed decisions about how to improve their infrastructure.

“If everything is going smoothly, no one should experience an interruption of service. With PagerDuty, it’s easier to keep that promise.”

– Beau Christensen, Manager of Infrastructure Operations

PagerDuty was initially adopted within the infrastructure team and has expanded to support, developers and help desk teams. PagerDuty has seamlessly integrated into Ping Identity’s culture and has made it easy for cross-functional teams to collaborate on incidents. Easier collaboration combined with more effective alerting has decreased incident repair time by 100%.

“PagerDuty has blossomed within Ping Identity. It has become a core piece of our infrastructure.”

– Beau Christensen, Manager of Infrastructure Operations

If Ping Identity services are down, people cannot do their jobs. With PagerDuty, Ping Identity can deliver a highly reliable service so its customers can always have secure access to their favorite applications.