PagerDuty wants to change the way companies respond to technology problems.
Speaking to TechDay, Abhijit Pandial, Solutions Consulting Manager at PagerDuty, explained how the platform is reshaping the field of digital operations management, especially as companies race to keep pace with rising digital demands.
PagerDuty was established on the idea that software development and IT operations, traditionally distinct arms of a business, could collaborate more effectively. The aim? To deliver strategic benefits not just for IT professionals, but "for every company", Pandial said.
Organisations around the globe are leaning on PagerDuty to streamline their incident response, ensuring potential outages and disruptions are handled swiftly – often before end customers even notice there is a problem. "PagerDuty is a leader in digital operations management," Pandial stated, adding, "13,000 organisations in 80 different countries use PagerDuty to detect, triage, resolve and prevent incidents before they impact their end customers."
The platform's popularity is reflected in its impressive reach: "Our SaaS platform supports 500,000 users globally, who build, ship, and run services to deliver resiliency to their customers through use of machine learning, 360-plus out-of-the-box integrations and automation," he said.
With technology increasingly forming the backbone of every business operation, minutes – even seconds – matter. "We bring together the right people with the right information in real time so that they can address unplanned issues in minutes and seconds, not hours," Pandial stressed. "No one wants their customers to find problems before they do, and we help our customers maintain that trust with their customers."
Citing a recent customer win, Pandial explained: "By leveraging PagerDuty, Xero reduced major incidents by 50% while adding major efficiencies to their incident response process. They saw a mean-time-to-resolution reduction of 75% in just one year."
The conversation soon turned to the urgency of digital transformation – especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Due to the pandemic, we have all fundamentally shifted to a digital default world, seemingly overnight," Pandial said. Remote work, digital commerce, online learning and virtual services are now the norm, and businesses must "rapidly shift their operating models to a digital default as well."
With more distributed and decentralised workforces, pressure on IT teams has mounted. "Our survey with IT teams in Australia and New Zealand showed a 79% increase in alerts and incidents," Pandial revealed. "Orchestrating teams is harder when people are working from home."
He pointed out that digital acceleration is no longer optional – it's critical to ensure the reliability of consumer-facing applications. "It's important that companies adopt full-service ownership and modern operational best practices like DevOps," he said.
In recognition of these trends, governments are also taking action. Pandial noted, "In great news for Australia, even the government recently announced an $800 million support package for businesses to go digital."
PagerDuty's consulting team, Pandial added, is working with some of Australia's largest companies to assess and overhaul their incident response. "We are helping with best practices that are increasing employee productivity and reducing downtime," he said.
Asked how exactly PagerDuty helps its customers, Pandial broke down the company's three-pronged approach: tuning, people, and processes.
"Tuning is about integrating all your logging, monitoring, incident management, ticketing, and collaboration tools with PagerDuty," he explained, allowing organisations to consolidate information and "get high signal to noise ratios". For example, "Telstra, by utilising our event intelligence capabilities, reduced the number of actionable events for the cloud teams from 200,000 a month to 4,000. These are tremendous gains," he said.
The "people" aspect is equally important. PagerDuty's tools make it easier to manage on-call teams and make sure "only the right people are being notified at the right time of the right issue." This, Pandial said, goes a long way to preventing responder burnout and fatigue. He highlighted another success: "REA Group brought down their mean time to action by 50% in the last six months, while reducing the number of high urgency incidents."
Finally, "Processes for alert triage and incident response can be significantly improved through automation and efficiencies," Pandial continued. From executing run books to stakeholder updates and post-incident analysis, PagerDuty, he said, "can help with the entire life cycle of that unplanned issue."
This focus on operational excellence, he asserted, leads to "reducing service outages and disruptions, thereby increasing revenue, reducing operational costs, retaining great technical talent, and improving their brand."
Recent months have been busy for the PagerDuty team. "We just concluded our 2020 global summit series with the final virtual conference in Sydney this week, where we announced 28 new capabilities in AI Ops, incident response automation, and service dependency insights," Pandial said.
The company has also rolled out "major integration updates with Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams." Teams can now "quickly initiate incident meetings from within the PagerDuty platform with just one click for any of these collaboration tools."
In a move set to strengthen its automation capabilities even further, PagerDuty recently acquired Rundeck, a "leading provider of DevOps automation for enterprises." Pandial described the acquisition as "really strengthening PagerDuty's leading incident response offering with machine automation, especially auto-remediation and self-healing. Super, super excited about that," he said.
As the interview concluded, Pandial reiterated PagerDuty's commitment to supporting businesses through their digital transformation journeys. "We're always happy to talk to them… me and my team would be simply glad to chat and help with any of these operational challenges that they're looking to solve," he said.
