When we launched our first-ever training webinar, PagerDuty 101, the PagerDuty team was eager to help new users hit the ground running and provide a quick on-ramp to educate customers about the PagerDuty platform. In that one hour session, users learned how to configure the basic objects in their account to best suit their team’s needs—from adding users, schedules, and escalation policies, to technical and business services.

Since then, our product (and our customers) have come a long way. Technical complexities continue to increase with unforeseen circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving teams with fewer resources to resolve incidents. So, we asked ourselves: “how do we ensure users are using the PagerDuty platform best practices to make their lives a little bit easier?” To answer this question, we looked inward. We know that the platform is a huge asset that helps automate the incident response process and mobilize Dutonians across teams, offices, and countries when incidents occur. In other words, PagerDuty is there to help during difficult times. Our leadership team used the tool to share real-time, localized information when the company decided to work from home indefinitely across the world.

But this type of seamless, automated action only works when an organization’s PagerDuty account is set up according to our suggested practices. There was a lot of time and intention put into our internal subdomain to ensure that the global and local leadership teams were empowered to use PagerDuty capabilities quickly and effectively—even when faced with a global pandemic. Since then, local teams have continued to take advantage of the PagerDuty platform as offices discuss safe reopening practices.

The Gold Standard

So how does a team learn best practices without having to go through the painful process of making costly, time-consuming mistakes? We learned that, unless you had been guided by experts like our Customer Success Managers or Solutions Consultants, users did not have a good idea of the different suggested and best practices laid out in the robust (but dense) PagerDuty Knowledge Base. So how can we provide this necessary knowledge for the many diverse teams using the PagerDuty platform?

To help fill the gap, PagerDuty University is excited to announce our newest webinar series, PagerDuty 201, to help our customers apply their learnings and configure their account according to our gold standard best practices. PagerDuty 201 goes through suggested practices and looks at more advanced functionality to maximize your investment.

Using the methods learned in PagerDuty 101, you can learn how to set up Technical and Business Services and look at why one model might benefit your team more than another. You can also learn about the extensive API functionality, as well as the creation of blameless postmortems and the huge benefit we see with organizations who use them. We know that seeing live examples and being able to ask questions to our Technical Trainers is a key to success. One of our inaugural attendees shared: “Absolutely thrilled that [PagerDuty 201] is going to be a regular event, will recommend it to dev managers and interested [individual contributors].”

To ensure you are ready to uplevel your PagerDuty use, PagerDuty 201 will cover:

• PagerDuty Overview
• Technical and Business Services
• Status Dashboard & Communicating with Stakeholders
• API Documentation
• Event Rules
• Triggering an Incident via the API
• Postmortems

Don’t forget that, in addition to these webinars, the PDU e-learning courses, online resources, and Support Knowledge Base are always available to you! We hope to see you at PagerDuty 101 (offered twice monthly) and PagerDuty 201 (now offered monthly) soon!