It’s that time of year where you may feel pressured to pick your New Year’s resolutions. Well, we went ahead and tried to give you a head start. 2023 is the year we tame toil so we can focus on the fun stuff like engineering and innovation. Hopefully you have had the chance to follow along with us for the month of December for Seasons Freezings, the time of year you are locked out of production, so you have time to explore new ideas like automation 🙂.

IT Operations has always been difficult. There is always too much work to do—and not enough time to do it. The frequent interruptions and high levels of toil certainly don’t help. Moreover, there is relentless pressure from executives that question why everything takes too long, breaks too often, and costs too much. In search of improvement, we have repeatedly bet on new tools to improve our work.

How many of us can say with confidence that we know a tool inside and out? If you’re like most, you probably use just a small fraction of a product’s features. When it comes to feature-rich software like Microsoft Word or Excel, it’s a safe bet that most users are aware of less than half of the features, and use even less on a regular basis. And the longer we’ve been using a piece of software, the more likely we fall into this trap of feature underutilization.

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.

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.

It’s that time of the year! PagerDuty is coming back to sin city for AWS re: Invent 2022! The global conference brings organizations of all sizes and is set to explore themes of modernization, automation, and resiliency in the cloud. With current economic conditions, enterprises are looking to scale operations and optimize costs while delivering always-on, digital experiences to their customers. Automaton plays a key role in helping support operational and cost efficiency.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or in the Fortune 500: cost optimization, tool consolidation, and efficiency efforts are top of mind. Removing toil and automating more often during the incident response process doesn’t only help teams resolve faster, it also helps them become more efficient. In a resource-strapped world, protecting developer and responder time and focus is critical to reducing total cost of operations and optimizing customer experience.

Hybrid and remote work is now the status quo. Companies campaigning for workers to return to the office are facing resistance, with some employers finding that they’re losing employees to jobs that give prospective hires the flexibility they want. Flexible work models have become a competitive advantage in a strained labor market. According to the latest Future of Work report from Accenture, 63% of high-growth companies have adopted a “productivity anywhere” workforce model.