PagerDuty – What is it?

We all know the importance of identifying incidents, containing them, and minimizing damage to our businesses. So we invest in multiple monitoring IT systems that sound the alarm when incidents happen.

The problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to track incidents as we scale our security infrastructure.

The reason? We have too many monitoring tools! The average organization uses 12 different monitoring systems, and learning to navigate all this software can be an uphill struggle. 

But how does PagerDuty work? What are its benefits? Will it improve your incident response management workflows? We'll answer these questions below. 

PagerDuty explained

PagerDuty is a cloud-computing company launched in August 2009 to improve incident responses and safeguard users from IT threats.

Its software-as-a-service (SaaS) incident response management platform provides IT teams with knowledge about incidents as soon as they occur.

The incident response management platform PagerDuty could solve the problem of too many monitoring tools by integrating data from systems into a single, unified view.

That provides you with a single source of truth for all the monitoring data in your enterprise.

PagerDuty has four main products:

1. PagerDuty Incident Response

This product generates insights that solve critical incidents and prevent future incidents from happening.

• Automate incident response management by keeping teams and stakeholders informed about unplanned events at all times
• Trigger escalation alerts about critical incidents that might jeopardize your business
• Improve incident best practices

2. PagerDuty On-Call

This on-call management product features escalations and flexible scheduling, helping you notify the right people about incidents at the right time.

• Add IT team members to weekend and after-hours call schedules and manage monitoring alerts outside regular hours
• Enforce accountability in your organization
• Generate 24/7 incident response management

3. PagerDuty Automation Actions

This add-on connects responders and event rules in the PagerDuty platform.

• Remedy issues in your production infrastructure 
• Delegate automated incident tasks in PagerDuty

4. PagerDuty Runbook Automation

This SaaS platform automates runbook procedures and lets you allocate them to stakeholders.

• Create self-service IT operations
• Help teams complete incident response management processes more effectively
• Integrate runbook automation into other cloud and SaaS tools

Benefits of PagerDuty

Here are some of the advantages of incorporating PagerDuty into our tech stacks:

Reduce time to repair

Time to repair is the average time it takes to repair a system or other component of IT infrastructure after an incident like unplanned downtime.

PagerDuty can reduce time to repair by notifying team members about that incident. Team members can then rectify the issue and limit any disruption to business operations. 

Allocate incident response management to the right person

One of the best features of PagerDuty is that it notifies the member of an IT team who is most capable of addressing a specific incident. For example, the platform will alert your most experienced server technician if there's a problem with your server. 

If the most appropriate member of a team doesn't respond to an incident alert from PagerDuty, the platform will escalate the issue to the next most capable person, such as a secondary server technician.

That can improve incident response management and ensure we resolve technical problems in the quickest possible timeframe. 

Customize alerts

We can choose how we want our teams to receive incident alerts with PagerDuty. The tool can notify team members in the following ways:

• Phone
• Email
• SMS
• Push notifications

Filter notifications

Monitoring tools can be overly sensitive at times and send users notifications about perceived threats when no dangers exist.

Enterprises that use a handful or more of these tools might receive tens or even hundreds of notifications every day, making it difficult to know whether alerts are genuine or false alarms. 

PagerDuty lets us choose which notifications to receive about incidents based on our unique security parameters.

You might only want to subscribe to high-level notifications that warn you of real and impending threats rather than receive multiple "alerts" that don't amount to anything. 

Reduce duplicate IT alerts

As previously mentioned, multiple monitoring tools can result in teams receiving similar alerts from different platforms about the same incident.

By centralizing incident response management, we can reduce duplicate alerts and streamline the amount of event intelligence our teams receive. 

Single source of truth

PagerDuty makes incident response management simple. The platform has a wealth of real-time dashboards and reports that let us identify patterns and trends in all the monitoring data that flows through our organizations.

PagerDuty users can learn about: 

• Average response times to incidents
• Response efforts in hours
• Incident volume by team
• Number of escalations
• Interruption volume
• Interruption volume by team
• Response hours cost
• Mean time to engage (MTTE)
• Mean time to mobilize (MTTM)
• Mean time to repair (MTTR)

What users think about PagerDuty

PagerDuty currently has an average user score of 4.5/5 on the software review website G2. 

Here is what users really think about the platform:

• "PagerDuty is an effective incident response tool that helps simplify and automate the incident response process so as to identify incidents early and resolve them quickly and efficiently. It offers a copy of previous remediation details which helps solve similar incidents fast."
• "PagerDuty is an easy-to-use incident management tool with excellent and effective features which are simple to access and use. It has very good customer support staff that offer professional support whenever you need it."
• "PagerDuty makes it challenging to keep track of people and their jobs on the platform if one does not use it frequently. Another downside is that PagerDuty does not support two-factor authentication, which should be industry standard by now."

Final word

Identifying incidents and quickly rectifying them is critical when protecting IT infrastructure. However, we know that too many enterprise monitoring tools can complicate incident response management.

PagerDuty is a platform that integrates data from multiple monitoring tools, helping us respond to incidents more successfully and improve digital operations.

Adservio specializes in solving complex problems like incident response management with the latest digital capabilities. We help organizations in optimizing digital technologies to better achieve business objectives.