The Sporting Group Doubles Down on Real-Time Digital Operations With PagerDuty

The Sporting Group is one of the world’s leading names in sports betting technology and trading. The company has two principal divisions—Sporting Index, the pre-eminent sports spread betting company, and Sporting Solutions, a rapidly growing B2B operation that supplies real-time pricing and sports trading capabilities to sportsbooks around the world.

Sporting Group prides itself on delivering an unrivaled customer experience. Ash Patel, Head of IT Operations, leads the UK-based technology team responsible for ensuring that the Sporting Group’s entire infrastructure remains highly available for all of its customers. 

A Drive for More Operational Efficiency

With peak traffic occurring in the evenings or on weekends due to sporting events around the world, various members of his team would be on call. “Minimizing the disruption of people called out of hours is something that we were looking for,” said Patel.  

With a mix of manual processes and a slew of alerts coming from monitoring tools like SumoLogic, SolarWinds, and Turbonomic, the Sporting Group wanted to improve operational efficiency even further. For instance, the company would manually create incident reports for Sporting Solutions clients when customer-impacting incidents occurred. The existing process had continuous alert traffic that did not provide full context into incidents, which led to:

• Lack of visibility into prioritizing events 
• After-hours business disruption for on-call teams
• Time and resources spent on manually writing incident reports

 “We want to streamline the process and ensure the team is quickly focused on the critical issues when they occur,” said Peter Wallis, Chief Technology Officer, the Sporting Group.

Improving Real-Time Operations 

By leveraging some of the 350+ integrations available through PagerDuty, Sporting Group centralized all of the alerts coming from its multiple monitoring tools, which enabled the Technology Operations team to streamline their incident response process even further. Using multiple products available on the PagerDuty platform, Sporting Group could apply machine learning and automation to proactively identify issues and notify the best teams to take action in real time via Slack, push notifications, text, or telephone.

“PagerDuty allows us to capture things we were not able to measure before, providing a truer picture of what’s transpired.”

– Peter Wallis, The Sporting Group

PagerDuty’s platform helps the Sporting Group to:

• Reduce alert noise and prioritize P1/P2 incidents using PagerDuty Event Intelligence
• Gain immediate insights into the availability and performance of business services using dashboards from PagerDuty Visibility and Status Page
• Improve work-life balance for on-call teams during “sporting hours” by leveraging PagerDuty On-Call Management and Live Call Routing
• Automate incident reporting for clients through postmortems available through PagerDuty Modern Incident Response 

“Everything is much more efficient, automated, sleeker, visible, and effective. PagerDuty allows us to capture things we were not able to measure before, providing a truer picture of what’s transpired,” said Wallis.  

Looking Ahead

Other teams within Sporting Group are also using PagerDuty, including teams within customer service and risk management, as well as the senior leadership team. In the future, Sporting Group seeks to further customize its Slack integration with PagerDuty to improve collaboration, transparency, and response across the global organization. With the increasing number of sport events 24/7, Sporting Group hopes to expand the use of PagerDuty to enable business and technology teams to respond to critical business events whenever they happen, from wherever they are.

“PagerDuty is such a good fit for us because it builds upon much of the technology we already have. Because it’s so flexible, we can drive a lot of different use cases through it to maximize the business value gained from using the solution,” said Patel.

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