PagerDuty Focuses Incident Response Efforts on the Cloud

After helping to pioneer the adoption of incident management software in on-premises IT environments, PagerDuty is now focusing its attention on the cloud with the launch of PagerDuty for Cloud Operations.

Jukka Alanen, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy for PagerDuty, said that as cloud computing evolves to include containers and serverless computing frameworks, it’s becoming apparent that managing IT incidents on public clouds is fundamentally different than on-premises IT environments. As such, demand for incident management platforms optimized for specific cloud platforms is increasing, he said.

PagerDuty initially will focus its efforts on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform because that’s where most of the initial demand is coming from, Alanen noted. As part of that effort, an instance of the PagerDuty digital operations management platform running on AWS has been integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudTrail cloud services.

Rather than replace all the capabilities already being provided by cloud service providers, Alanen said PagerDuty is committed to making them more accessible within the context of an incident management platform. With the rise of DevOps, the types of IT professionals who need to be able to access an incident management platform in the cloud era is also expanding. To resolve issues as quickly as possible, Alanen said it’s more critical than ever to make sure the right problems are being presented to the right teams within an IT organization.

In terms of making that transition, however, IT organizations are all over the map. Many are trying to extend existing IT operations processes developed for on-premises IT environments. To the extent that organizations are essentially lifting and shifting monolithic applications running on-premises into a public cloud, that approach is feasible. However, once organizations also begin deploying cloud-native applications based on microservices and serverless computing frameworks, most will need to rely more on management and monitoring tools provided by cloud service providers.

The next challenge then becomes defining workflows that automate responses to potential service disruptions or a security breach. At the same time, many organizations are adopting best DevOps practices that shift responsibility of many aspects of incident response on to the shoulders of developers who now need access to an incident management platform. The existing reactive approach to managing IT needs to be replaced with a proactive approach that automates responses to incidents whenever possible, Alanen said.

To help organizations accelerate their move down that path, PagerDuty has crafted a Digital Operations Maturity Model, which provides benchmarking data and best practices for organizations looking to modernize their IT operations as part of a larger transition to increased reliance on automated workflow processes.

Of course, once IT organizations define these workflows it won’t take long before IT organizations find themselves needing to extend more proactive approaches to incident management across multiple cloud computing environments. The challenge then becomes finding a way to weave all the application programming interfaces (APIs) and services exposed by multiple cloud service providers into what one day will become a truly hybrid cloud computing environment.

— Mike Vizard