Earlier this year, as COVID-19 appeared, our global community of almost 800 employees became a fully remote workforce—effectively overnight. Now, all of us have had a taste of what it’s like to work from home all the time, from embracing the benefits of less time commuting and more time with our families, to the downsides of feeling isolated and missing seeing our colleagues in “real life.”

This is the first in a two-part blog series deconstructing AIOps for ITOps leaders. If you gave me a dollar for every company that claims that they use “A.I.,” I’d be doing pretty well. But as a marketer, I can’t help but be a little skeptical about those claims. Let me explain.

This is the first in a series of posts we’ll be publishing on trends we’re seeing in the retail industry and how IT organizations tasked with deploying and maintaining flawless digital customer experiences can take advantage of PagerDuty to ensure always-on reliability. It’s been a tough year for retail.

You asked and we’re delivering! We’re introducing several new and exciting features to PagerDuty’s ServiceNow integration that you, our customers, have requested. Our most anticipated new feature utilizes ServiceNow CMDB (Configuration Management Database) data to easily build service hierarchies in PagerDuty through business service dependencies.

At this year’s SaaStr Summit: Enterprise, our CEO Jennifer Tejada talked about why digital acceleration has been one of the positives to come out of the COVID-19 crisis, and why this time for change shouldn’t be wasted. Here are three key takeaways that she shared. The crisis, as Jenn explained, is accelerating permanent change in the role of the CEO.

Many organizations are looking to implement DevOps due to the promise of increased release velocity, better developmental agility, and the ability to free up time for developers to focus on innovation. However, adopting DevOps isn’t a panacea— instead, the idea of communication, collaboration, and blameless retrospectives that a DevOps model encourages can help foster a leaner system where bottlenecks are solved in a manner that not only fixes the problem, but also improves the process.

Anyone who’s ever played the game of chess knows there’s more than one way to reach a desired outcome. There are 400 possible setups after the first turn; 197,742 after the second; and just north of 120 million after the third—all of which are marching toward the same desired outcome. “So, what does any of this have to do with DevOps?” you ask? Fair question.

Agile is a popular buzzword in software development, with some organizations and teams masquerading as “agile” while they are actually doing something very different. I’ve seen it numerous times in my career as an Agile Coach: A leader claims to embrace agile values, but micromanages engineering teams and uses agility as a way to manipulate developers to work long hours. The result?

Earlier this month, many areas of the internet experienced a major incident caused by a router misconfiguration within a highly used service provider. This led to cascading service failures, causing widespread outages and disruptions for several well-known SaaS organizations. When the outage occurred, our teams at PagerDuty immediately noticed a global spike in events and incidents.