PagerDuty seeks to ease incident response with generative AI

Rende said that one of the better additions is PageDuty Copilot’s enablement of natural conversation interactions. He gave an example of a large retailer experiencing an unexpected shutdown of all shopping carts. 

IR managers “could create a virtual war room via a Slack channel. Someone could ask, ‘What just changed?’” and PagerDuty Copilot would list all system changes, with a focus on the elements that it thinks are most likely the cause, Rende said. 

One IT challenge today is a lack of full visibility into global environments. Large cloud environments provide an example of this, as do SaaS platforms and third-party partner systems in IT supply chains. Although Rende said that PagerDuty does not have visibility into systems IT cannot access, it’s generative AI systems could extrapolate from what it can see to analyze and potentially suggest the third-party platform that is likely responsible — by ruling out everything else. 

Stephen Elliot, an IDC group vice president who tracks cloud and DevOps, saw much to like in the announcement. Asked about how an enterprise would fare differently from using these new capabilities and doing it themselves with their existing AI-based automation, Elliot pointed to consolidation.

“The difference is that this is from a single platform/technology and not a set of separate best-of-breed tools that do AIOps, automation, root causes, etc., separately. Automation is part of the platform,” Elliot said. “The data is collected onto the platform and the genAI applied to it. They have a large customer base so, for many tech shops with generalists, this might make sense.”

The PagerDuty Operations Console is currently in Early Access and will be generally available in Q3 2024, the company said. Workflow Automation is generally available. Runbook Automation’s project-based runner management is currently in Early Access and will be generally available in Q3 2024. PagerDuty Copilot is currently in Early Access and will be generally available in Q3 2024. The enterprise plan for PagerDuty Incident Management, including Jeli Post-Incident Reviews, is generally available.