PagerDuty Applies AIOps to IT Incident Management

PagerDuty, at its online Summit20 conference today, unveiled a bevy of updates that apply machine learning algorithms across a wide range of workflows across the PagerDuty incident response platform.

In addition, PagerDuty today announced it will acquire Rundeck, a provider of an IT automation platform that auto-remediates incidents by enabling playbooks to automatically execute whenever there is an issue, for $100 million.

Jonathan Rende, senior vice president of products for PagerDuty, said the overall goal is to make IT teams more efficient by applying AIOps at a time when organizations are trying to reduce to the total cost of managing increasingly complex IT environments.

At the same time, Rende said PagerDuty is also moving to reduce the fatigue that inevitably ensues when trying to determine the relationship between the thousands of alerts that all the elements of an IT environment can now generate. The goal is to provide IT teams with more context and actionable intelligence, said Rende.

As part of that effort, PagerDuty is now integrating change events that occur in code repositories via new integrations with GitHub, Puppet and Evolven. The bulk of IT incidents stem from changes made to the IT environment so via these integrations it will become easier to identify the most likely root cause of an issue, said Rende.

PagerDuty has also added new capabilities to its Service Directory that employs machine learning algorithms to dynamically surface dependencies between people, changes, incidents and services in real-time. As IT environments become more complex thanks to the rise of microservices, he said it’s now more critical than ever to track relationships across workflows spanning multiple IT teams. The challenge is that existing manual processes can keep pace with the rate of change now occurring in IT environments, Rende added.

PagerDuty is also moving to reduce the number of alerts that are generated by enabling the PagerDuty Event Intelligence module to surface recommendations generated by machine learning algorithms that suggest ways to group alerts to better streamline incident responses. In addition, IT teams can now pause alerts if they decide to allow systems to auto-remediate before they decide to intervene.

The company is also extending the reach of an application programming interface (API) for analytics it created to enable IT teams to launch queries against the data collected by PagerDuty. In addition, PagerDuty is making available an Analytics Maturity Model that provides access to benchmark data from more than 13,300 customers to both compare their efforts with other IT teams and discover additional best practices.

PagerDuty today also announced one-click integration with the Zoom video platform to enhance collaboration, as well as extending its existing integration with Microsoft Teams to include a similar one-click capability.

Finally, PagerDuty also launched an instance of its platform for customer service teams that also provides enhanced integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud. With more organizations dependent on digital business processes to survive, Rende said the need to automate customer service processes has never been more pressing.

At the same time, IT teams are struggling to keep pace with the rate of tickets being generated by employees who are now working from home. Put it all together and it becomes abundantly clear that continuing to rely on legacy approaches to IT incident management will simply not suffice.