Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It’s 2 a.m. An alert fires. You acknowledge it, pull up the monitoring dashboard, and immediately hit a wall: Which team owns this? What services does it impact? Worse: this is the third time this month you’ve been paged for the same issue, and you still don’t have a clear path to fix it. What should take minutes stretches into hours of Slack threads, escalation guesswork, and frantic context gathering.

Digital services are the engine of your modern business, but keeping them running feels like a constant battle. The rapid increase in the volume and speed of operational data is a direct result of growing architectures and more intricate workloads. Alert fatigue is causing your teams to be slow and reactive in addressing incidents, and this is a surefire path to burnout. The pace of this new reality is beyond what traditional, human-led processes can match.

Many teams remain bogged down by operational chaos and manual drudgery, even with access to a variety of automation solutions. These tools often operate in silos, creating disconnected islands of automation that require significant human effort to bridge. Agentic AI offers a path forward, creating a cohesive system that can intelligently and autonomously handle complex operational workflows.

The role of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is evolving. The focus has shifted from simply working harder during an outage; A new kind of teammate is here to help: the SRE Agent. But what are the key differences when you compare an SRE agent versus a traditional site reliability engineer? This isn’t just a superficial change. It signifies a fundamental alteration in how teams construct and sustain dependable services.

At PagerDuty, we believe operational excellence and social impact are inseparable. As AI rapidly transforms how nonprofits operate, our AI and agentic technology empower mission-driven teams to automate complexity and focus their limited resources on what matters most: delivering reliable services that create meaningful impact at scale.

The rapid pace of modern software development, fueled by AI-driven coding and accelerated deployment cycles, has resurfaced a challenge that many development teams already struggled with: the speed of incident response must now match the speed of change. Every day, teams ship code faster than ever, which inevitably increases the risk of a new issue making it to production. The traditional approach—where engineers waste time jumping between disconnected tools—is no longer sustainable.

Modern SRE teams face an overwhelming challenge: too many signals, too little time. Incidents are faster, systems are more complex, and reliability targets only get stricter. What if you had a teammate who could jump in instantly—context-aware, tireless, and armed with your runbooks, metrics, and alert data? Introducing PagerDuty’s SRE Agent, the next evolution in AI-driven operations.

New models, new agents, new capabilities. It seems like every week there’s a new must-have AI function. It’s no surprise that leaders are feeling pressure to move quickly. At a PagerDuty on Tour event, a customer joked that they couldn’t fathom having a five-year AI strategy; it makes way more sense to have a five-minute one. There’s truth in that comment.

For years, our annual State of Digital Operations report has been the industry benchmark for understanding how organizations manage incidents, build resilience, and evolve their operational practices. Each year, we survey hundreds of business and operations leaders worldwide to capture the challenges, priorities, and emerging practices shaping digital operations.