>> Welcome back
to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22.
Lisa Martin with you here on the ground.
I've got one of our alumni back with me.
Sean Scott joins me,
the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty.
It's great to have you here in person.
>> Super great to be here in person.
>> Isn't it nice?
>> Quite a change, quite a change.
>> It is a change.
We were talking before we went live about it.
That's that readjustment
to actually being with another human,
but it's a good readjustment to have
>> Awesome readjustment.
I've been traveling more and more in the past few weeks
and just speaking the offices,
seeing the people
the energy we get is the smiles,
it's amazing.
So it's so much better
than just sitting at your home and.
>> Oh, I couldn't agree more.
For me it's the energy
and the CEO of DocuSign talked about that
with Jennifer during her fireside chat this morning,
but yes, finally, someone like me
who doesn't like working from home
but as one of the things that you talked about
in your keynote this morning was
the ways traditionally that we've been working
are no longer working.
Talk to me about the future of work.
What does it look like from PagerDuty's lens?
>> Sure. So there's a few things.
If we just take a step back and think about,
what your day looks like from
all the different slacks, chats, emails,
you have your dashboards, you have more slacks coming in,
you have more emails coming in, more chat
and so just when you start the day off,
you think you know what you're doing
and then it kind of blows up out of the gate
and so what we're all about is really trying
to revolutionize operations
so how do you help make sense
of all the chaos that's happening
and how do you make it simpler
so you can get back to doing the more meaningful work
and leave the tedium to the machines and just automate.
>> That would be critical.
One of the things that such an interesting dynamic two years
that we've had obviously here we are
in San Francisco with virtual event this year
but there's so many problems out there
that customer landscape's dealing
with the great resignation.
The data deluge, there's just data coming in everywhere
and we have this expectation
when we're on the consumer side,
that we're going to be
that a business will know us
and have enough context
to make us that the next best offer
that actually makes sense
but now what we're seeing is like the great resignation
and the data overload is really creating
for many organizations,
this operational complexity that's now a problem
really amorphously across the organization.
It's no longer something
that the back office has to deal with
or just the front office, it's really across.
>> Yeah, that's right.
So you think about just the customer's experience,
their expectations are higher than ever.
I think there's been a lot of great consumer products
that have taught the world,
what good looks like,
and I came from a consumer background
and we measured the customer experience in milliseconds
and so customers talking about minutes
or hours of outages,
customers are thinking in milliseconds
so that's the disconnect
and so, you have to be focused
at that level and have everybody
in your organization focused,
thinking about milliseconds of customer experience,
not seconds, minutes, hours,
if that's where you're at,
then you're losing customers.
And then you think about,
you mentioned the great resignation.
Well, what does that mean for a given team or organization?
That means lost institutional knowledge.
So if you have the experts
and they leave now, who's the experts?
And do you have the processes
and the tools and the runbooks
to make sure that nothing falls on the ground?
Probably not.
Most of the people that we talk to,
they're trying to figure it out as they go
and they're getting better
but there's a lot of institutional knowledge
that goes out the door when people leave.
And so part of our solution is also
around our runbook automation and our process automation
and some of our announcements today
really help address that problem
to keep the business running,
keep the operations running,
keep everything kind of moving
and the customers happy ultimately
and keep your business going where it needs to go.
>> That customer experience is critical for organizations
in every industry these days
because we don't to your point.
We'll tolerate milliseconds, but that's about it.
Talk to me about you did this great keynote this morning
that I had a chance to watch
and you talked about
how PagerDuty is revolutionizing operations
and I thought, I want you to be able to break that down
for this audience who may not have heard that.
What are those four tenants or revolutionizing operations
that PagerDuty is delivering to ORGS?
>> Sure, so it starts with the data.
So you mentioned the data deluge
that's happening to everybody, right?
And so we actually do,
we integrate with over 650 systems
to bring all that data in,
so if you have an API or webhook,
you can actually integrate with PagerDuty
and push this data into PagerDuty
and so that's where it starts,
all these integrations
and it's everything from a develop perspective,
your CI/CD pipelines, your code repositories,
from IT we have those systems are instrumented as well,
even marketing, more tech stacks we can actually instrument
and pull data in.
The next step is now we have all this data,
how do we make sense of it?
So, we think we have machine learning algorithms
that really help you focus your attention
and kind of point you to the really relevant work,
part of that is also noise suppression.
So, our algorithms can suppress noise
about 98% of the noise can just be eliminated
and that helps you really focus
where you need to spend your time
'cause if you think about human time and attention,
it's pretty expensive
and it's probably
one of your company's most precious resources
is that human time
and so you want the humans doing the really meaningful work.
Next step is automation, which is okay.
We want the humans doing the special work,
so what's the TDM?
What's the toil that we can get rid of
and push that to the machines
'cause machines are really good
at doing very easy, repetitive task
and there's a lot of them that we do
day in, day out.
The next step is just orchestrating the work
and putting, getting everybody in the organization
on the same page
and that's where this morning
I talked about our customer service operations product
into the customer service is on the front lines
and they're often getting signals from actual customers
that nobody else in the organization
may not even be aware of it yet
So, I was running a system before
and all our metrics are good
and you get a customer feedback saying,
"This isn't working for me,"
and you go look at the metrics and your dashboards
and all looks good
and then you go back and talk to the customer some more
and they're like, "No, it's still not working,"
and you go back to your data,
you're back to your dashboards, back to your metrics
and sure enough,
we had an instrumentation issue
but the customer was giving us that feedback
and so customer service is really on the front lines
and they're often the kind of the unsung heroes
for your customers
but they're actually really helping
and make sure that everything, the right signals are coming
to the dev team, to the owners that own it
and even in the case
when you think you have everything instrumented,
you may be missing something
and that's where they can really help
but our customer service operations product
really helps bring everybody on the same page
and then as the development teams
and the IT teams and the SRA has pushed information back
to customer service,
then they're equipped, empowered to go tell the customer,
"Okay, we know about the issue. Thank you."
We should have it up in the next 30 minutes
or whatever it is, five minutes,
hopefully it's faster than longer,
but they can inform the customer
so to help that customer experience
as opposed to the customer saying,
"Oh, I'm just going to go shop somewhere else,"
or "I'm going to go buy somewhere else or do something else."
And the last part is really around,
how do we really enable our customers
with the best practices?
So those million users,
the 21,000 companies in organizations we're working with,
we've learned a lot around what good looks like.
And so we've really embedded that back
into our product in terms of our service standards
which is really helps SRES and developers
set quality standards
for how services should be implemented at their company
and then they can actually monitor
and track across all their teams,
what's the quality of the services
and this team against different teams in their organization
and really raise the quality of the overall system.
>> So for businesses and like I mentioned,
DocuSign was on this morning,
I know some great brand customers that you guys have.
I've seen on the website, Peloton Slack,
a couple that popped out to me.
When you're able to work
with a customer to help them revolutionize operations,
what are some of the business impacts?
'Cause some of the things that jump out to me
would be like reduction in churn, retention rate
or some of those things that are really overall impactful
to the revenue of a business.
>> Absolutely.
And so there's a couple different parts of it.
One is, all the work what PagerDuty is known for
is orchestrating the work
for a service outage or a website outage
and so that's actually easy to measure
'cause you can measure your revenue
that's coming in or missed revenue
and how much we've shortened that.
So that's the, I guess that's our kind of the history
and our legacy
but now we've moved into a lot of the cost side as well.
So, helping customers really understand
from an outage perspective where to focus our time
as opposed to just orchestrating the work.
Well now, we can say, we think we have a new feature
we launched last year called Probable Origin.
So when you have an outage,
we can actually narrow in where we think the outage
and just give you a few clues
of this looks anomalous, for example.
So let's start here.
So that still focus on the top line
and then from an automation perspective,
there's lots and lots of just toil and noise
that people are dealing with on a day in, day out basis
and then some of it's easy work,
some of it's harder work.
One of the ones I really like is our automated diagnostics.
So, if you have an incident,
one of the first things you have to do is you have
to go gather telemetry of what's actually happening
on the servers, to say, is the CPU look good?
Does the memory look good?
Does the disc look good?
Does the network look good?
And that's all perfect work for automation.
And so we can run our automated diagnostics
and have all that data pumped directly into the incident
so when the responder engages, it's all right there waiting
for them and they don't have to go do all that basic task
of getting data, cutting and pasting into the incident
or if you're using one of those old ticketing systems,
cutting and pacing into a
a tickety system, it's all right there waiting for you.
And that's on average 15 minutes
during an outage of time that's saved.
And the nice thing about that
is that can all be kicked off at time zero
so you can actually call
from our event orchestration product,
you can call directly into automation actions
right there when that event first comes in.
So you think about,
there's a warning for a CPU
and instantly it kicks off this diagnostics
and then within seconds or even minutes,
it's in the incident waiting for you to take action.
>> One of the things
that you also shared this morning that I loved
was one of the stats around customer sale point
that they had 60 different alerts coming in
and PagerDuty was able to reduce that to one alert.
So, 60 X reduction in alerts, getting rid of a lot of noise
allowing them to focus
on really those probably key high escalations
that are going to make the biggest impact to their customers
and to their business.
>> That's right.
You think about,
you have a high severity incident
like they actually had a database failure
and so, when you're in the heat of the moment
and you start getting these alerts,
you're trying to figure out,
is that one incident? Is it 10 incidents?
Is it a hundred incidents that I'm having to deal with?
And you probably have a good feeling like there's,
I know it's probably this thing
but you're not quite sure
and so, with our machine learning
we're able to eliminate a lot of the noise
and in this case it was, going from 60 alerts down to one,
just to let you know,
this is the actual incident,
but then also to focus your attention
on where we think may be the cause
and you think about all the different teams
that historically have been had to pull in
for a large scale incident.
We can quickly narrow into the root cause
and just get the right people involved.
So we don't have these conference bridges
of a hundred people
on which you hear about.
When these large cottages happen
that everyone's on a call across the entire company
and it's not just the dev teams and IT teams,
you have PR, you have legal,
you have everybody's involved in these.
And so the more that we can workshop their work
and get smarter about using machine learning,
some of these other technologies
then the more efficient it is for our customers
and ultimately the better it is for their customers.
>> Right and hopefully,
PR, HR, legal doesn't have to be some
of those incident response leaders
that right now we're seeing across the organization.
>> Exactly. Exactly.
>> So when you're talking with customers
and some of the things that you announced,
you mentioned automated actions, incident workflows,
what are you hearing from the voice of the customer
as the chief product officer
and what influence did that have in terms
of this year's vision for the PagerDuty Summit?
>> Sure. We listen to our customers all the time.
It's one of our leadership principles
and really trying to hear their feedback
and it was interesting.
I got sent some of the chat threads
during the keynote afterwards,
and there's a lot of excitement
about the products we announced.
So the first one is incident workflows,
and this is really,
it's a no code workflow based on
or a recent acquisition of a company called Catalytic
and what it does is it's,
you can think of as kind of our next generation
of response plays
so you can actually go in and
and build a workflow using no code tooling to say,
when this incident happens
or this type of incident happens,
here's what that process looks like
and so back to your original comment
around the great resignation
that loss institutional knowledge,
well now, you're building all this into your processes
through your incident response.
And so, I think the incident workflows,
if you want to create a incident specific slack channel
or an incident specific zoom bridge,
or even just in status updates,
all that is right there for you
and you can use our out of the box orchestrations
or you can define your own
'cause we have back to the, our customer list,
we have some of the biggest companies in the world,
as customers and we have a very opinionated product
and so if you're new to the whole DevOps
and full service ownership, we help you through that.
But then, a lot of our companies are evolving along
that continuum, the operational maturity model continuum.
And at the other end, we have customers that say
"This is great, but we want to extend it.
We want to like call this person
or send this or update this system here."
And so that's where the incident workflows
is really powerful
and it lets our customers just tailor it to their processes
and really extend it for them.
>> And that's GA later this year?
>> Later this year, yes, we'll start ING
probably the next few months and then GA later this year.
>> Got it.
Last question, as we're almost out of time here,
what are some of the things
that as you talk to customers day in and day out,
as you see you saw the chats
from this morning's live keynote, the excitement,
the trust that PagerDuty is building
with its customers, its partners, et cetera,
What excites you about the future?
>> So it's really why I came to PagerDuty.
I've been here about a year and a half now,
but revolutionizing operations, that's a big statement
and I think we need it.
I think Jennifer said in her keynote today,
work is broken
and I think our data,
we surveyed our customers earlier this year
and 42% of the respondents were working more hours
in 2021 compared to 2020.
And I don't think anyone goes home
and if I could only work more hours, I think there's some
and if I could only do more of this
like TDM, the TDM, more toils,
if I could only do more of that,
I think life would be so good.
We don't hear that. We don't hear that a lot.
We hear about there's a lot of noise.
We have a massive attrition that every company does.
That's the type of feedback that we get
and so we're really,
that's what gets me excited about,
the tools that we're building that
and especially when I think just seeing the chat
even this morning about some of the announcements,
it shows we've been listening and it shows the excitement
in our customers when they're,
lots of I'm going to use this tool, that tool,
I can just use PagerDuty
which is awesome.
>> The momentum is clear and it's palpable
and I love being a part of that.
Thank you so much Sean for joining me
on theCube this afternoon,
talking about what's new,
what's exciting and how you guys are fixing
work that's broken
that validated me thinking the work was broken
so thank you.
>> Happy to be here and thanks for having me.
>> My pleasure.
For Sean Scott.
I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube's coverage
of PagerDuty Summit 22 on the ground from the San Francisco.
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