PagerDuty

PagerDuty is an incident management and operations performance solution designed and created for businesses looking to increase the reliability, performance and uptime of their digital operations.

The cloud-based software is tailored to help businesses and organizations improve the reliability and performance of their digital operations by effectively eliminating all unnecessary difficulties and chaos throughout the entire operations lifecycle. PagerDuty provides IT and DevOps teams robust tools and capabilities that will allow them to streamline their workflow and other responsibilities, including on-call scheduling, incident monitoring, escalation policies and alert monitoring; all of which can help resolve any issues or problems that may be present within their websites, servers and applications.

PagerDuty is the kind of operations performance platform that works by connecting individuals/teams, IT systems and digital data into a single cohesive view, thus providing greater visibility and meaningful insights throughout an organization’s entire digital operations. The cloud software solution is equipped with software-as-a-service (SaaS) alerting and incident tracking solutions that are tailored to facilitate IT operations and help DevOps teams and engineers with finding fixes and resolutions to crucial errors within their IT systems in a quicker and more efficient way possible.

This incident management and operations performance platform also allows DevOps teams to offer high-performing applications and topnotch customer experiences to their end users. With impressive visibility and real-time alerts, especially when it comes to critical applications and systems, IT and DevOps engineers can quickly identify, isolate and resolve any incident that may occur during the development stage all the way through the production process.

PagerDuty is specifically designed to support seamless integration with a host of different IT infrastructure monitoring solutions, such as Nagios, New Relic, Zenoss, Splunk and a lot more. The solution effectively handles the people aspect of the equation, alerting the appropriate users and individuals via email, SMS or phone, providing on-call scheduling for IT and DevOps teams, as well as using automation to escalate the critical problems and issues that are detected by the system to the appropriate personnel with the skill and experience to resolve them.

PagerDuty Features

On-call management and notifications

PagerDuty is equipped with on-call management features that make it easier and more efficient to dispense on-call responsibilities across multiple teams and departments. One of its core capabilities is live call routing, which allows anyone to contact or reach your on-call team effortlessly in order to report critical events and other relevant incidents. All they have to do is to call a phone number and one of your assigned teams can respond to it instantaneously. Inbound calls are routed through the same escalation policies and on-call schedules you utilize for your critical services and apps.

PagerDuty provides mobile applications for both Android and iOS devices, which makes it easier and more convenient to take the necessary actions on the go, especially when unexpected events or incidents present themselves. With the mobile app, you have the ability to deploy custom incident actions, escalate, add responders, view schedules and more, directly from your smartphone, tablet or any mobile device running iOS or Android.

End-to-end response automation

With this PagerDuty feature, you and your team should be able to orchestrate the appropriate action or response to effectively handle any type of incident. It gives you the option to design the right action for any incident impact level, send status updates, engage personnel and stakeholders and mobilize the appropriate responders. The response automation function can be initiated automatically from mission-critical services, or it can be executed with a single tap using any device.

The solution also allows you to seamlessly integrate with any IT service management (ITSM) or ticketing solution like ServiceNow, Helix, JIRA and BMC, so the system can automatically generate tickets for major events and incidents within PagerDuty and vice versa. You also have the ability to create conference bridges, track dependencies, sync status information, view incident details and audit history, send status updates, add responders, run response plays and more.

All this, while taking full advantage of the platform’s robust response capabilities in an attempt to modernize your information technology infrastructure library (ITIL)-based major incident management initiatives.

Event intelligence and automation

PagerDuty’s event intelligence is an advanced AI-powered solution specifically tailored for digital operations. It is capable of delivering in-depth contextual insights, automating repetitive work and processes, as well as increasing your team’s efficiency and overall productivity. Event Intelligence has the power to automate repetitive workflows and processes with just a click of a button. It can automatically deploy remediation actions prior to involving any of your responders.

The system has a smart noise reduction feature, which in layman’s terms, silences alerts that don’t necessarily need a response. This should allow your team to focus solely on mission-critical events and incidents that truly matter. PagerDuty’s event intelligence function automatically groups alerts together into a single specific incident according to their context/content, past groups, time period and even their custom thresholds.

PagerDuty analytics

The analytics feature of PagerDuty effectively transforms captured data into meaningful insights and recommendations, which serves to drive smarter decision-making and help develop your organization’s operational maturity. PagerDuty’s analytics capabilities have the power to deliver curated insights, which allow you to acquire immediate answers to queries with pre-built questions throughout every aspect of your operation, including service performance, business impact, team health and incident activity. It is capable of surfacing the most crucial analytics queries for more in-depth insights.

PagerDuty analytics also features intelligent dashboards, which enables you to dig much deeper into the core of your data, especially when it comes to service health and status as well as team performance and productivity, with pre-built dashboards. You should be able to effectively benchmark your teams to pit them against the company average and see how they stack up.

PagerDuty Benefits

PagerDuty is a feature-rich incident management and operations performance platform. However, some of its core benefits lay within its smart notification features, incident management solutions and its collaboration tools.

Smart notification features and capabilities

With PagerDuty’s smart notification features, users are given the ability to set and configure specific alerts for their teams via the standard email service, but with voice messaging and SMS serving as backups. The backup notification options can then be configured to automatically trigger once a team member or agent somehow fails to respond to the email alert on time. Failure to respond to the email alert will force the system to automatically send an SMS or voice message to the non-responding personnel just a few minutes after the predetermined time has elapsed.

PagerDuty, through its smart alerts and notifications, also empowers users to change or reconfigure the order in which team members are notified based on the date and their schedule. This is made possible through the deployment and configuration of on-duty calendars.

More efficient incident management

PagerDuty is equipped with robust incident management solutions that are tailored to maintain an organization’s real-time operations constantly at the highest level of efficiency. This is achieved by making use of streamlined incident resolution methods and strategies. The main objective is to transform individual events or incidents into a series of actionable alerts by simply enriching and bringing together all related incidents into a single category.

This kind of approach to incident management can lead to the significant reduction of unnecessary distractions and noise as well as resolution times, which in turn should result in a well streamlined, smoother and much more efficient incident management lifecycle.

Better collaboration

PagerDuty has the ability to streamline the entire incident management lifecycle of any organization, specifically in terms of communications and connections with the aid of its integration capabilities with hundreds of third-party applications. The cloud-based platform boasts an advanced on-call management system that effectively reinforces the accountability of every team within the company.

PagerDuty also features a modern incident response system, which ensures mission-critical events will always receive the optimal response required for their immediate resolution, through proper stakeholder communication, automated precision response and incident priority.

PagerDuty Pricing

PagerDuty has four core pricing options available: a free version, Professional, Business and a Digital Operations package. The billing cycle for the premium subscription plans is either monthly or yearly. The latter option will give you up to 17% on total savings. PagerDuty Free is ideal for smaller teams and startups looking to begin their digital operations journey with basic on-call management and incident response capabilities.

The Professional plan starts at $23/user per month or $19/user per month if you opt for the annual billing option. This is suitable for small to midsize teams looking to enhance their on-call and incident response capabilities with more features and tools. The Business package is priced at $47/user per month or $39/user per month when billed annually. This subscription is best for teams looking for a more streamlined incident response with enterprise-grade capabilities.

The custom digital operations package is quote-based only, so interested parties will need to contact the vendor directly for their custom pricing. This package offers end-to-end digital operations solution tailored for the organization implementing it.

Conclusion

PagerDuty is quite a good and fully capable incident management and operations performance platform. It is a feature-rich incident response and notification service that doesn’t bog users down with technical complexities. Instead, it offers user-friendly tools and solutions to ensure workflow efficiency and productivity. It has powerful on-call management, integration and collaboration features that can make life easier for companies and teams of any size. The free version of the platform should be worth checking out.