PagerDuty Looks to Streamline IT Incident Management

PagerDuty has added more automation and analytics capabilities into its portfolio of incident management tools, at a time when organizations are looking to significantly reduce the total cost of IT.

Jonathan Rende, senior vice president of product at PagerDuty, said the general release of Intelligent Triage advances the level of AIOps that can be applied to incident management by eliminating a raft of manual tasks.

Intelligent Triage aggregates signals from more than 375 monitoring, observability and ticketing tools, which are then grouped based on relationship and elevated depending on the impact on the business. That level of contextual data makes it possible for IT teams to increase productivity while dramatically reducing alert fatigue, said Rende.

At the same time, PagerDuty is adding support for integration with Microsoft Teams alongside existing support for Slack. IT teams are increasingly relying on these collaboration tools to process requests for help from end users, he noted.

In some cases, IT teams are communicating with one another via these media or employing built-in tools embedded in the PagerDuty incident management platform. In either case, workflows across IT teams are now occurring in near real-time, said Rende.

Finally, PagerDuty is adding a Dynamic Service Directory to give DevOps teams a central knowledge base that identifies owners and experts for each service and their associated run books, in addition to making available a mobile status dashboard to allow remote teams to collaborate more effectively when incidents arise. That capability is especially critical at a time when many IT staffs continue to work from home as part of the effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, said Rende.

In general, IT organizations are looking to automate incident response whenever possible to both minimize costs and potential disruptions. Businesses are more dependent on IT services than ever. However, as more applications are deployed the nosier the IT environment becomes. Discerning which alerts are stemming from the same root cause issue becomes more relevant as organizations either limit headcount or even look to reduce it during a time of widespread economic uncertainty.

Of course, regardless of the state of the economy, most IT professionals would rather not have to waste time on manual tasks that don’t add a lot of value to the business. Most IT professionals need to free up more time to achieve more pressing goals. Every minute spent on chasing down an alert that winds up being yet another wild goose chase just piles on more stress.

Advances in automation and AIOps have been coming at a steady pace for the last several years. The adoption of these new capabilities to manage incidents has been uneven at best. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, it’s now more a question of how soon IT organizations will be tapping into these capabilities to streamline the management of IT. After all, many IT managers are going to conclude there’s no sense in letting a good crisis go to waste.