 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm on the ground with Mandy Walls, developer advocate at PagerDuty. Mandy, welcome to the program. Thanks, Lisa, thanks for having me. So there is great momentum at PagerDuty right now. I just was looking at the fourth quarter fiscal 22 financials revenue rise of 34% year over year with figures at 85.4 million for the quarter for the first time ever. So lots of great stuff going on at PagerDuty. I wanted to talk with you about digital operations, the maturity of that. Why from your perspective is it important for organizations that PagerDuty works with to assess and progress the maturity of their operations? Yeah, it's good for organizations to kind of like have a goal, right? To have a place where they know from industry practice what's going to help them better or best serve their customers, serve their user base in a digital first and sometimes digital only world and have those sort of benchmarks so they can be continuously improving and continuously working towards that better experience that more reliable model that customers expect now. We don't want to get into their app on your phone and not have it work. So everyone's expecting more and more from our organizations that we're working with and then those organizations have to be progressing and improving so that their customer experience is keeping up. Yeah, one of the things that's definitely rising these days is customer expectations to your point. We just expect that whatever app we're engaging with or whatever it is that we're trying to buy online it's working, it's there. We're going to be able to transact it in the time usually at real time that we want. Talk to me about with rising customer expectations with the emergence of automation, machine learning AI goals are definitely evolving within businesses. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the market or hearing from the customers? Yeah, lots of folks are still trying to do more work with the staff that they have with the resources they have available. They're trying to make the best of the new platforms that are available and be flexible and reactive to the market pressures that they're seeing. So working with focusing on innovation versus the sort of reliability or technical debt work that they still have to do and sort of balancing those things out. So we see folks moving towards more and more automation driven solutions so that they can focus more on that innovation, those new features, those things that are going to delight their users more so than the sort of hygiene that still has to get done but isn't the stuff that's going to make people excited about their offering. So looking at more sophisticated automation solutions relying more on automated production there as well as artificial intelligence or machine learning driven solutions that are going to learn off of your ecosystem and make better decisions for you so that your human employees are doing all that really great forward looking innovative work. When you're talking with folks about this what do you just still down as, hey guys, this is the biggest benefit of digital operations maturity. Obviously organizations are going to perform better but what do you think is that single biggest key driver benefit from digital operations maturity? Yeah, we see so many folks that are hesitant to get started or they're not sure where to begin and how to approach it like that. The whole journey starts with a step like any other journey but can feel so overwhelming to a lot of organizations. So we're helping them just find those projects that they can get started on and build that sort of internal momentum. So many things technologically driven internal to large organizations start with a large project, it has a success and then everybody wants to do it. It's very much a sort of internal world of mouth and it snowballs into these amazing programs that then spread out that success across the organization. So we're really in there helping all of these folks like just get started and find those first successes so that they can build off of those and build like that organizational enthusiasm as well as the internal practices, the technological practices that they're going to need to improve things across the entire organization. So really just getting folks going is the biggest place we can help drive folks forward there. Starting to kind of create that flywheel then kind of self-generates that momentum. So then in your expertise and experience where are most organizations in terms of their digital maturity? If we look at it as a spectrum where are most of the organizations these days? A lot of folks finally are sort of above average we'd say are above sort of the median where they are looking at, we see about a third of organizations are in a mature proactive mode. They're surfacing issues and problems before customers notice that you want to be in there before someone's complaining on Twitter that there's something wrong with your product. So they are maturing their monitoring practice. They're maturing their response practice. They're maturing their ability to remediate issues so that customers never see those problems even if they're surfacing. Like we know that when we put software into production things are going to happen, right? Things go wrong occasionally but we want to get ahead of those things before our customers notice. No one wants to be the front page in the New York Times or having an outage or any of those kinds of issues. So we want to get in front of all those kinds of things. We see another sort of fraction of organizations that are even beyond that they're getting to a preventative level of maturity where they're kind of continuously learning and getting ahead of anticipated problems and working on bringing all of that sort of operational reliability into their entire software development practice so that when a new idea is being thought about in engineering, they're like, okay when we get this into production here's what it really needs to be so that we don't have some of the issues that we've seen in the past. And lots of organizations are moving towards that sort of continuous learning sort of a trend that we've seen over the last five or six years for just constantly getting feedback out of their production systems. Susan, about a third of organizations are in the most mature proactive mode. Others are in that top tier preventative group. There's still room there to grow but what are some of the things that are new in digital operations? I understand PagerDuty has a new model. Yeah, we're looking for those folks that are really just getting started. Like there's plenty of organizations that haven't started leveraging automation. There's plenty of opportunities out there for them to be looking at smoothing out their processes whether it's deployments or working with their software when it gets into production, working with lots of the new tooling and taking advantage of all the other innovative platforms that are available, plugging all of that stuff back into their PagerDuty platform so that they're getting all of this really great data and telemetry out of their systems that can help them then raise the bar across their reliability and their performance and their customer delight so that they have all these measurable pieces. These organizations are ready to start using more say machine learning or other automation to help them identify their issues and respond to other things before they become really deep problems so that they're getting more out of the platforms that they're already using. Are you seeing those organizations that are maybe leading edge there proactive? Are they on the maturity curve of advancing machine learning into AI ops? Is that what some of the things are that you're seeing? Yeah, the folks that have sort of been at this the longest have the biggest set of learning materials, right? So your machine learning needs a place to like build its rules. So the folks who have the sort of headstart on all of that stuff have our best positions to be able to take advantage of those components because they have the largest training data really, right? But as more folks have more data coming in and more things that they've plugged in then the machine learning capabilities become more available to other organizations as well. So we definitely see the folks that were in the forefront and really using that telemetry in really powerful ways are getting the most rewards out of what's available now for machine learning and AI ops and taking advantage of seeing the signal come in and like human beings don't have to be involved. We can just pass that over to the automation because we've seen that thing before and know what it looks like and how to fix it without involving human responders. When you're in customer conversations what are some of the reasons that you give them or talk to them about why automation is so important when it comes to digital operations? Yeah, there's a lot of time that can be freed up from these, in the SRE model is kind of referred to as toil. I kind of think of it as hygiene, right? Of the things that you need to do but aren't super exciting. Like you need to brush your teeth, right? And there's a lot of technical work that's kind of like brushing teeth where you have to do it on a regular basis to keep things clean and to keep things safe. Whether it's security updates or making sure that you're on the most recent versions of other software or other things that are going to keep you up to date. They're not interesting really for a lot of folks. Like it's just work that has to get done. You need to do them on a regular basis so that you're not accidentally exposing yourself to a security risk or to a compliance problem or whatever the other cases might be. But you don't necessarily have to have a human being doing them all the time, right? They are things that you can automate. You put some scripts together. You employ some other tools that help you deploy updates and push them through your software processes so they get tested appropriately. So those things can be done on a regular basis and your human beings don't have to be involved unless a problem is surfaced through that process. So you're keeping yourself clean. You've got your hygiene going. You're keeping all that toil at sort of a low place on the amount of work that your humans need to do. Got it. Speaking of humans, let's talk about employee efficiency. One of the things that employees are dealing with, we're all dealing with this, application ecosystems are getting more and more complex. There's more tools. There's more platforms. For organizations that are facing that complexity, how is pay-to-duty helping them keep their employees efficient? Yeah, we have some internal processes that we've been working on and we've been trying to share out where our SREs are setting what they call the golden path. They are paving the road for our internal engineers and then we're using that as a place to sort of evangelize outward to other organizations where we can say, here's how you make things easier for your application engineers by utilizing these sort of automation practices, SRE practices, other types of work that make everyone else more efficient. There's a lot of choice. There's a lot of places for individualization or customization across all the tools that we use, but a lot of that stuff creates unnecessary complexity. It means that team A and team B might be using the same tool in completely different ways and it's very hard to share knowledge and to share best practices across your organization when that happens. So what we're seeing and what we're helping SRE teams with is sort of creating these baselines for operational teams and for application teams to say, here's your best practice. Here's your paved road for getting your innovative ideas and your innovative applications into production. You don't need to customize or worry about any of the other crazy things that are here. There's lots of options, but we've picked this middle road for you. And if you take this, this is the fastest way for you to get into production. So that when application engineers are working on their great ideas and they're like, you can't wait to get this in front of customers, that road is as smooth as possible. And we take as much of the complexity out of it as we possibly can. So that all that work gets straight into production in front of customers without being sidetracked by should we change the settings on this one particular application or not. Reducing that complexity is critical, especially these days as we are in still an interesting time in our global society where the great resignation is still happening. What are some of the things that you're seeing organizations do to manage burnout and to manage the fatigue that the on-call duties teams are spacing? Yeah, we hear this a lot from folks, especially since that's sort of our road in. A lot of times to discussions with organizations is what they do for learning, what they do for on-call management. And there's still a lot of fear around being on-call. I am a former systems administrator that was always kind of part of the job, but a lot of other folks who are coming in from application engineering maybe haven't been on-call before. So we do talk to a lot of organizations with, here's a plan, how to set a plan to make the whole experience less harrowing for people, but understanding that if it's a new requirement for application teams to be on-call, you wanna manage how those out of the hours interruptions are gonna be impacting your team health. Folks that weren't necessarily expecting to be on-call out of hours, you're disrupting maybe their family time and their sleep most definitely in those cases. And being flexible around the expectations and the plans that you put together for these teams is super important. Like a platform like PagerDuty gives you a lot of flexibility for changing the way your team handles on-call. Maybe you want to employ more of a follow the sun. You have folks in the West Coast in the US and you have folks in Europe and you can like set up different hours so that folks aren't interrupted in the middle of the night as often as they might otherwise be, or you have certain services that you can deprioritize to say, well, you know what? We don't really need these pages to come in all the time. And we can fix this in the morning when folks are back at their desks or more ready to work and being very cognizant of how that impacts folks engagement with their work and the fatigue that can set in. We do see the flexibility to have not necessarily a full week of on-call, right? That's sort of the traditional schedule is a week of on-call, but you don't necessarily have to be on-call for a week. You can be on-call for 48 hours or 36 hours and then switch it off. So having that kind of granularity and that kind of flexibility is really going to help teams when so much other stress is in folks lives right now. Absolutely, and that is so critical for employee experience, for customer experience, for revenue, for brand reputation. It's all really been strictly linked. Manny, thank you so much for joining me today talking about digital operations, automation and what PagerDuty is doing to help organizations really revolutionize their businesses. We appreciate your insights. Thank you so much. For Mandy Walls, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE on the ground at PagerDuty Summit 22. Stick around, we got more great content coming up next.