Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.

Teams are locked into a cycle of suffering characterized by the feeling that they are sprinting just to stay still. This morale and productivity-destroying state is caused by an inability to find time to save time. Our new research, The State of Availability Report 2022, discovered that teams know what they want to do—harness cloud and DevOps practices and tools to advance digital transformation—but something’s getting in the way.

Incident management is your organization’s first line of defense. When incidents occur, internal teams must be ready to respond quickly. While incidents can happen anytime, it’s unrealistic to expect incident managers to be prepared to perform manual root cause analysis. Manually monitoring and analyzing applications on multiple servers is extremely difficult, which is why human reaction times have traditionally limited the speed of incident management.

We’re excited to announce a new set of updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud in addition to the November Product Launch announcements made earlier this month. Recent development and app updates from the product team include Incident Response, PagerDuty® Process Automation, the PagerDuty Mobile App, Integrations, as well as Community & Advocacy Events updates.

Think about the last time your IT systems had an outage: How did your team react to it? Were they organized with a clear idea of how best to resolve the issue? Or was it chaotic, with people firing questions from all directions and customer service channels ablaze with requests for help? Digital technology disruptions are typical (and even expected) at the workplace, but it doesn’t have to be chaotic, with teams rushing around to extinguish the metaphoric fire.