Rachel Obstler, VP of Product Management at PagerDuty
Against the backdrop of COVID-19, the use of digital services has accelerated faster than anyone ever predicted. The world is rapidly shifting to become digital by default. Today, digital services power how we buy, sell, connect, learn, and live.
Our world is always on. Organizations must recognize this fact and look to capitalize on the shift to digital, or face the very real risk of extinction. This isn’t a completely new phenomenon, but the speed at which digital has become core to every organization’s competitive advantage is. That’s why we see businesses across the globe rapidly scaling and accelerating their digital business models.
The old way of operations can’t keep up
Yet digital acceleration is being hampered by a melting pot of issues which are leading to more and more unplanned work. Why? Firstly, IT ecosystems have become much more complex. Microservices, billions of dependencies, hybrid, multi-cloud environments, millions of lines of code; it’s become far harder to monitor for issues and predict failure points.
Secondly, when digital incidents do occur, the potential impact on the business is severe. The whole world is relying on digital services to shop, learn, connect and work, and people have zero tolerance for any interruption to those services. The stakes are high and every second counts when it comes to downtime.
Thirdly, the old model of IT operations is no longer fit for purpose. Queued ticketing systems are good for things like, “John needs a new laptop” or “the printer is broken.” But putting an urgent incident into a queue means DevOps teams can’t react in real-time. Likewise, large groups of IT workers and multiple levels of management joining conference calls to troubleshoot problems en mass isn’t the best way to solve an issue – a small focused team familiar with the code is.
Faster, more agile processes need to be put in place. Real time collaboration across the business must be combined with proactive and preventative management to ensure unplanned work is minimized. Ultimately, a new approach is needed to ensure that DevOps teams can give digital transformation and innovation the focus it requires.
A new approach
Enter Digital Operations Management. This approach to operations encompasses all the technology systems that organizations rely on to collect digital signals on performance in real-time.
Digital Operation Management leans heavily on machine learning and automation to help teams focus on only the issues that matter and fix them expediently, minimizing toil. It collects all digital signals on performance and analyzes them in real time to identify when action is needed, and by who. Instead of scrambling to understand what has caused an event, teams can draw context from digital signals to determine probable root cause. It highlights which business services are impacted, and automated updates to the business about these impacts. This allows DevOps teams to quickly respond to and resolve incidents.
Digital Operations Management also goes beyond incident response, helping organizations find ways to identify and prevent incidents before they happen by implementing automated resolutions. This means teams spend less time firefighting unexpected issues, freeing up more time to accelerate innovation, create great experiences for customers, and take advantage of the shift to digital.
Mature your Digital Operations with PagerDuty
In order to mature Digital Operations, organizations need a platform that can operate in real-time to cope with today’s always on world. The PagerDuty platform was built for a real-time world and is designed for full-service ownership.
PagerDuty addresses the unplanned, critical work that arises every day, coordinating teams to respond immediately and effectively. These are the tasks companies cannot plan for, but if they go unaddressed, will impact the customer experience and hurt the bottom line. Using machine learning and automation, PagerDuty brings together the right people with the right information in real-time, so they can address issues and opportunities in minutes and seconds, not hours.
Unlike traditional workflow platforms, which take a manual and sequential approach (i.e. queued ticketing systems, conference calls and war rooms), PagerDuty was born in the cloud, and is built to automatically detect the unpredictable in today’s complex IT environments. The platform goes beyond incident response, helping companies find ways to improve their operations so they can proactively prevent issues.
PagerDuty is trusted by over 13,000 customers, including Zoom, Dropbox, Peloton, American Express and Vodafone, to drive their Digital Operations. The platform works with all parts of an ever-changing technology ecosystem and provides a real-time foundation for digital transformation strategies by facilitating time-sensitive, collaborative, distributed work.
With the advent of an always on, digitally driven world, it’s time for organizations to adopt Digital Operations platforms like PagerDuty to manage incidents in real-time, without taking away focus from digital acceleration and innovation.