Blog

Announcements, Partnerships

Introducing PagerDuty Integration for Threat Stack

We love PagerDuty and are big users ourselves. We love the ease of integration with our other platforms. We love the scheduling and overrides. We love the per-service escalation groups. We love the sound of our default alert setting, the sad trombone (Though, the more we think about it, “love” isn’t the right word on that last one. That infernal trombone wakes up our team to let us know there is trouble in the Cloud. We dread that trombone).

Sam Lewis

3 min read

Alerting

London Conference Wrap-Up

Last week our team went on an overseas adventure, sponsoring AWS Summit London and Puppet Camp UK. We heard over and over at AWS Summit that our international customers love our reliable multi-provider SMS, phone, push, and email alerting to over 175 countries (and growing!). Our international SMS alerts all come from local numbers in the countries we alert, so when engineers ack, they don’t incur international fees. International customers are also big fans of UTF-8 support throughout our incident pipeline, so messages in non-western character sets render correctly.

Melanie Salman

2 min read

Alerting, Announcements, Community, Events, Partnerships

Cut Your Resolution Time with AppDynamics and PagerDuty

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) systems like AppDynamics can provide incredibly rich information about what’s happening with your IT infrastructure, and can identify performance issues before they create big problems. However, this information is only as good as your ability to respond to it. PagerDuty can extend the capabilities of AppDynamics Alert & Respond policies to ensure incidents are noticed, responded to, and fixed quickly.

Sam Lewis

2 min read

Tech Talk

All, None, and One: The SQL Left Join Trick

PagerDuty released Multi-User Alerting in early 2014, which allowed notifying and assigning multiple people when an incident is triggered. In addition to assigning multiple users to an incident, multi-user alerting also makes it possible for an incident to have multiple acknowledgers. This post will demonstrate the changes we made to our data model to implement multi-user alerting and the resulting sophistication added to our SQL queries to maintain their performance.

Kenneth Rose

10 min read

incidents, SQL
Events

PagerDuty Recap: AWS Summit – San Francisco

Last week, PagerDuty had the pleasure of attending AWS Summit on our home turf in San Francisco. It was nothing short of epic. The Amazon Web Services crowd is definitely our niche. AWS is a critical component of the PagerDuty platform, and our three founders actually came up with the idea for PagerDuty while working at Amazon! So, naturally, we feel totally in our element surrounded by other AWS fans at these types of events.

Angela Chapman

2 min read

Features, On-Call Life, Reliability

PagerDuty Introduces Team Organization Feature

No matter what team you’re on, PagerDuty helps you resolve incidents faster. DevOps involves collaboration across multiple teams for better reliability and quality assurance. Having a central, shared tool like PagerDuty to manage incidents across the company makes that collaboration a heck of a lot simpler. Our new team organization feature makes it even easier for different teams like Operations, Development, and Customer Support to work together. Here’s how

Sam Lewis

2 min read

Alerting, Best Practices & Insights

Best Practices in Outage Communication: Incident Team

You’ve just realized that something has gone critically wrong, and you can’t fix it yourself. Particularly if you work within a collaborative DevOps environment, it’s better to get by with a little help from you friends. Effectively coordinating the incident response across subject matter experts and front-line responders is a secret to operational success that differentiates top teams. So it’s important that you have an effective and efficient way to to sound the alarm, and make sure that your conversations are recorded and actionable.

Sam Lewis

4 min read

Community, Events, On-Call Life

PagerDuty User Group

We hosted our first user group last week at PagerDuty HQ! Not only did we gather our awesome customers and enjoy the taco bar and cervezas, but we got to learn a lot from our them, share our roadmap - and our customers learned from each other, too. We really value user feedback as part of how and why we build our product. We wanted to share some key takeaways from our sessions during the event.

Kristen Ribero

2 min read

Alerting

Not Enough Cat Photos? Introducing OkCats

PagerDuty alerts. Feeding a newborn gremlin. FOMO. These are the things that keep us up at night. Here at PagerDuty, we know that nothing settles the nerves like eye cuddling a fluffy, adorable cat. That why we’re proud to announce OkCats.

David Hayes

1 min read

Alerting, Announcements, Partnerships

Flowdock and PagerDuty Integration Update

When your service goes down, there’s no time to waste. With sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate, you need to figure out what’s wrong, all while communicating your status to your users. Coordinating with your team is complex enough – there’s no room for unnecessary actions. This is where Flowdock's new and greatly improved PagerDuty integration comes into play.

Sam Lewis

2 min read

Alerting, Best Practices & Insights, Reliability

Best Practices in Outage Communication: Customers

Outages are chaotic, and it can be difficult to figure out the best way to let your  customers know what is going on. One of the first big decisions you’ll need to make is whether you’re going to respond only to people who inquire about the issue, or if you’re going to be more proactive and post updates publicly. Many of the leading technology companies have begun to transparently discuss outages with their customers, and there are a number of good business reasons for doing so. Regardless of your approach, here are 6 things you can do to ensure successful customer communication during outages.

Sam Lewis

8 min read

Alerting

Cool Things You Can Do with the PagerDuty API

One of the great things about PagerDuty is our API. With our API, you can integrate with a wide variety of partners, and also extend and customize your PagerDuty experience. Our customers have done a number of cool things, including creating custom reports and dashboards, creating status pages to let customers and internal stakeholders know about incidents, and automating the details of their incident response. The PagerDuty API helps you respond to incidents more efficiently. But where do you get started? We highlight some examples of cool tools.

Sam Lewis

5 min read

Alerting, Announcements, Operations Performance, Partnerships

Eliminate Alert Fatigue with PagerDuty and Event Enrichment

We, as IT professionals, have ever-expanding access to more accurate Ops telemetry. With this data, we have an incredible amount of visibility into what’s going on. However, more information isn’t always a good thing when it comes to alerting. You can definitely have too many alerts, and alert fatigue is a growing problem among Operations teams. More detailed telemetry isn’t bad; it’s just that much of this information is generally better suited for forensics rather than alerting. Event Enrichment and PagerDuty team up to help you battle alert fatigue.

Julie Arsenault

4 min read