When we’re talking about incidents, we know it’s not a matter of if, but when. It spares no systems: ours, yours or your vendors’. We’ve all seen widely-used products experience incidents, and the domino effect it has on all operations relying on them for seamless functionality. Vendors offering narrow, chat-centered incident management tools might seem attractive at first glance, but they fundamentally misunderstand the complexity of enterprise operations. When critical systems fail, you need more than just a pretty chat interface – you need a battle-tested, comprehensive incident management platform.

Betting your entire incident response strategy on a single point of failure with these point products is dangerously short-sighted and can put your operations at risk. These limited tools might work fine when everything else is functioning perfectly, but what happens when your chat system goes down during a critical incident? Or when your team needs to coordinate across multiple channels while in the field? You need a robust backup plan and multiple channels of communication and response.

PagerDuty sees this automation-led, multi-channel approach as table stakes for modern incident management and handling time-critical operations. It’s why we continue to iterate our product experience across chat, mobile, web and API. This ensures our customers can respond and coordinate from wherever they are, using whichever interfaces best suit the moment—so much so that even point products use PagerDuty as a failover.

Beyond Chat: Enterprise-Grade Incident Management

While newer point products focus solely on basic chat experiences, PagerDuty’s platform delivers comprehensive incident management across multiple surfaces. Yes, we offer a powerful chat experience in Slack and Microsoft Teams, but that’s just one piece of a much larger operational puzzle. You can see the new Slack experience for yourself with this product tour, but a few highlights include:

• Dedicated incident channels allow users to trigger any incident (or workflow) action with simple slash commands.
• Guided remediation capabilities, like Incident Roles and Tasks, eliminate guesswork from the response process, so teams can coordinate and act faster.
• Built-in genAI, powered by PagerDuty Advance, quickly surfaces and summarizes key information directly from the chat, providing contextual support and enhancing collaboration and communication.
• Intelligent post-incident reviews collect and collate all chat history for an in-depth analysis of what happened, when, and how, helping teams to improve over time.

  

Why Enterprise Organizations Can’t Rely on Point Products

Point products focused solely on chat-based incident management are setting their customers up for failure. When critical systems go down, you need more than just a chat tool. You need:

• Multiple independent, automated channels for notifications and critical data access
• Robust failover capabilities that ensure business continuity even when primary systems fail
• Deep integration capabilities across your entire tech stack, not just your chat platform
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance features that meet stringent requirements

The PagerDuty Advantage: Building Resilience with Redundancy

Built-in redundancy is an enterprise-grade requirement to ensure uptime of critical services. Effective failover methods must include independent, automated channels (online and offline) for both notifications and critical data access, and a distributed system architecture, integrated with backup systems and tools. Paired with regular system testing, this helps teams to quickly understand and resolve incidents, even when primary systems fail.

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is an end-to-end enterprise-grade platform that delivers on all these strategies, helping teams stay connected during system disruptions, across multiple channels:

• Web: Offers comprehensive alert visibility from a single dashboard with the recently enhanced Operations Console. Including a side panel with alert information and timeline tabs, and enriched responder views with custom fields, this feature can increase efficiency, reducing MTTA and MTTR. Generally available for AIOps customers.
• Mobile: The PagerDuty mobile app provides critical functionality natively, allowing responders to acknowledge, escalate, and resolve incidents from anywhere, ensuring rapid response. And, teams can manage it securely while meeting compliance standards thanks to Intune support (in Early Access for Enterprise Incident Management customers).
• Extensive APIs: Enables automation and custom tooling, allowing organizations to build specialized workflows and integrations to support their operational processes.

PagerDuty’s 700+ integrations mean the incident management platform fits seamlessly into customers’ tech stacks. We know our customers want to work where they are, so beyond our own platform, we also prioritize making critical incident data available on other core applications that our customers use, including:

• ITSM: Bidirectional integrations with ServiceNow and Jira means customers can view important incident data directly in the preferred system of record. And with advanced integrations, PagerDuty’s incident response actions can be triggered directly from the ServiceNow interface.
• Customer Service Applications: PagerDuty for Customer Service integrates with Zendesk, ServiceNow CSM, and Salesforce Service Cloud to keep agents and stakeholders of critical issues up to date on critical incidents directly from where they’re already working: in customer cases. These integrations facilitate cross-team communication between front-line customer service and back-office engineering teams.

Making the Right Choice for Your Organization

When evaluating incident management solutions, ask yourself: Can you afford to bet your operations on a point product that only works when everything else does? Your teams deserve better than narrow tools that collapse under pressure. They need a comprehensive platform that’s been proven in the most demanding environments.

PagerDuty has spent over a decade building and refining the most robust incident management platform in the industry. Our commitment to flexible, multi-channel collaboration ensures teams always have access to the contextual information and collaboration tools needed for rapid triage and resolution, regardless of where they work or which systems are impacted.

Take the next step toward true operational resilience. Learn more about the PagerDuty Operations Cloud platform and how we can help teams like yours stay ahead of outages by taking this product tour. Or, get hands on and sign up for a free trial today.