 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020 brought to you by PagerDuty. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 20. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome back one of the PagerDuty alumni of theCUBE, Rachel Obster, the VP of product for PagerDuty. Rachel, it's great to talk to you today. Oh, it's great to talk to you too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. So one benefit of this massive pivot in the last six months is companies like PagerDuty get to reach even more folks than would come in person. So I know the summit is expecting a lot more people to attend because there's no travel limits. But since this massive pivot happened in the last few months, I wanted to understand what some of the things are that you've observed as the VP of product. What have you seen that really is revolutionary? You know, one thing that we saw, and this is back a couple months when COVID first happened, we thought, you know, it seems like there's an unprecedented shift to people using online services. And so we wanted to check and see if that load was represented in our platform. And of course, you know, we help companies manage digital operations, respond to incidents. And so we actually looked at the incident load and we saw that some industries or some verticals had seen an unprecedented growth in incidents. So this load was really impacting their platforms. And in some cases, like with online learning or e-learning, we saw they had over 10 times the number of incidents in the period immediately following the start of the pandemic and everyone shifting to work from home from what they had seen just before it. So was this some of the things that you looked at at your platform and then was that what prompted the survey that you guys just released last week? Yeah, that's exactly right. So we saw that in our platform. We've also seen since then it is calm down a bit. So if we look at the six months after the pandemic really started and everyone moved to work from home versus the six months before, we saw about a 38% increase. So it's still an increase even now. And so then this did prompt us to do a survey because we wanted to see not just what was reflected in our platform, but we wanted to talk to maybe companies that may not be PagerDuty customers as well as customers and also understand how their attitudes were changing and what they were seeing. So it's not just about the data, but it's also about the beliefs and what sort of stress people are feeling. And that stress is so real and it's something that if it's not addressed, we're talking about customer support folks who are on the digital front lines and can affect a customer churning, for example, the brand reputation is on the line. So what are some of the interesting things that you found talking to these IT practitioners, these DevOps folks about what they've experienced in terms of incidents and their time at the last six months? Yeah, that is a great question. So I'll share some of the data that we found. I mean, one is that responders said that pressure on their digital services has increased about 80%. So that's a pretty significant number. 62% of IT and DevOps practitioners are working and spending an additional 10 hours per week on responding to incidents. And so if you think about the average work week, maybe it's 40 hours. I know most of us don't actually work 40 hours. Maybe they're working 50 hours. Even in that case, that's a fifth of their time. So this is pretty significant amount of their time that they're spending on responding to issues as opposed to innovating, which is really what they want to be doing is building new goods and services and capabilities for their customers. So spending 10 hours extra a week reacting. And I imagine that a good amount of those 10 hours are in the middle of the night or kind of random hours before the volume they didn't see. So what are some of the things that cater duty is can do to help with that? Like what are some of the things that these practitioners talk to you guys about? This will help us tremendously because we know that this crazy time it's going to be TBD for a little while longer. Yeah, that's a really good question. And just some stats on that because we also have stats on that from the survey. We saw that more than half of the respondents of the survey are being asked to respond to incidents five plus times, more than five times on personal time during the week. And so that could be, it doesn't have to be in the middle of the night. It could be in the middle of the night. It could be after hours, dinner time, breakfast time. But that's still a lot of interruptions for your life. And so there are a number of things that PagerDuty can do. One of a couple of the things that we really focus on are around intelligence and automation. And so examples of intelligence are if you have a lot of issues that are coming at you, you may not know which ones are important, which ones you should work on, which ones you can ignore, which ones are part of a larger problem. And so we have a lot of capabilities in the system that group things together, help you understand which ones are critical, which ones are not critical, get them to the right person and also provide important context for fixing them. So you may want to know things like, this is impacting my service right now, or other services impacted, which teams are working on that? Who should I collaborate with? Or you may want to know, hey, I've never seen this before myself. Has it ever happened before? I'd like to see past incidents that are similar. So those are just some examples of the things that we can provide. It's intelligence when someone is interrupted and has to immediately figure out, what do I do with this issue? When it comes to automation, we can help customers in a number of different ways. One is we can automate menial tasks. Like let's imagine that you find out there's an issue, you think this is a very serious issue, you need to pull in more people, while pulling them into a bridge, a chat channel, making sure they have the right information. We make it super easy for customers to do things like that. But we also make it easy for them to automate, maybe diagnostics, like maybe they want to call out to a system and pull in more information. Maybe they want to actually restart a server. So there's all sorts of ways that you can automate. We also help you automate communication to the broader environment, or the broader set of people. So you mentioned earlier customer service teams. Well, if you're a development team and you know there's an issue, and you know that customer service teams are soon going to be getting a whole bunch of tickets, they need to know what's going on so they can answer those tickets and maybe get ahead of them. Maybe even post something on a status page, telling customers, yes, we know we have an issue, so they know it's being worked on and they know that it's being taken care of. You know, one of the things I didn't think about when in the beginning of this pandemic, because there was such chaos, there still is chaos, is the demand for digital services dramatically increased. And it wasn't just ordering groceries online or, okay, I can't go to a store, so I'm going to depend even more on Amazon than I have before. And we have this culture where we expect we can get anything we want in some cities overnight or rather in a couple of hours. The demand is there, the customer expectation is there, and the patience is dwindling. Think of like a Netflix, which is a customer of Patreon duties and all of the competing streaming services. If I'm not going to get what I want within a second, I'm going to go find somebody else who's going to be able to deliver the service that I'm expecting. So the demand on the digital services is greater and greater. And one of the things I saw in that survey that you guys just published is that 40% of the respondents think it's actually going to get worse from here. So they've got to be able to implement AI ops tools and automation now if the volume isn't going to decrease, right? Yeah, you've really nailed it, Lisa. That's exactly what's happening out there. And I think it's not going to decrease. We've basically not just had a blip in time. People have shifted how they're operating to being online and now they're used to it. And this is probably not going to change in the foreseeable future. And so absolutely, when you're seeing these types of increases in demand for your services, which leads to more incidents, it leads to more noise, it leads to a lot more operational work, basically you have to find a way to manage it if you want to keep innovating. And to your point, customers or end users expect more innovation, right? They're not going to expect that a company is going to stop innovating just because they have a lot of more users now. So absolutely, the main way one of the big ways that customers really need to address this is to be able to work smarter. And tools that help you automate things and help you gather data faster and provide intelligence to things and help you find the signal from the noise like the AGDD are really important to serving that bigger need that is not going away, as you said. Yeah, that's the cubes tagline extracting signal from the noise. And the thing that's important about that is right now as you talked about, there's blurred lines, right? We either work from home or we live at work. And I think every day it can change. And that's challenging. Not only is there no commute, so you can work more. The expectation is you're going to be online, you're going to be accessible. But also one of the very real challenges that we're all experiencing no matter what industry you work in is burnout Israel. It's been real for a long time, but right now it's critical for organizations to address it and help reduce it. What are some of the things that you're hearing when you're talking to customers about, hey guys, Pedro duty, how can you help my practitioners, my DevOps folks become less reactive? How can you help us manage these incidents so that they can go back to innovating which is what they like to do because we want to be able to have productive, happy employees. Yeah, that's a great question. So some of the things that we can do is help you look across all your incidents and understand where you're getting repeat incidents. We can also help you look at things that are showing up as incidents that are notifying people but aren't real incidents. So for instance, we've looked at our system and we've seen that a decent percentage of incidents ought to resolve within two minutes or three minutes. And so those are incidents that are still notifying someone, but then maybe there's auto resolution capabilities in the platform, maybe it was just a very delicate monitor that was finding something wasn't really there. But in any case, this is disturbing someone and maybe waking them up for no reason. And so there are tools that we can provide that allow you to set rules around things like this. Like don't tell me about this unless it's still going for three minutes. Don't tell me unless it happens three times in a row. Like there's really easy ways to cut down on a lot of noise that distracts people, that interrupts them, that maybe bothers them off hours, which you really want to avoid. And then beyond that, there's also things that you can do in our system and in general that help you just understand when someone had a bad on call. So knowing when there's certain people that are getting woken up a lot or responding off hours or spending a lot of time responding to issues or responding to just a lot of issues in general, that's something that we can provide so that any manager could look across their team and just see which people really need a little bit of relief. And I'm sure that would be welcomed by everybody in every industry. We talk about customer experience all the time, pandemic or no pandemic, but really ultimately something that I've always believed and seen it is that if the employee experience isn't really good, then that is directly able to negatively impact the customer experience. But one of the things I was looking at too, like with respect to like first gen AI ops tools with respect to ROI companies think, I'm not really getting that yet. So give me an insight into how paid for duty thinks that second gen AI ops tools are going to help dial up that ROI for companies to really invest in this so that they are the winners of tomorrow. That's a really good question. So a lot of the earlier AI ops tools require a lot of training. So people to spend time telling the system this should be grouped or that should be grouped and also requires not just that upfront training for them to work, but also ongoing training. So continually training the system. And so second gen AI really uses the data in the system to automatically make suggestions about things. And that's very straightforward with a tool like PagerDuty because we have all this information about what happened in the past, what happened when you were responding to incidents, who responded to them, how long they took, how bad they were. And so we can really leverage a lot of that data to help automatically reduce noise and point out the things that are important without having people needing to spend a lot of time with the system upfront before anything actually works. And so in fact, like we can just have you turn it on, it works and it continues to learn and get better. That's critical because in this digital default, as I know you got PagerDuty is talking about, I spoke with Jennifer Tehada about that. There is no more luxury of time about a company determining, well, how should we go on our digital transformation? That time luxury is gone. Last question, Rachel, for you, fifth PD summit, first virtual, but the opportunity to engage and interact with a lot more customers since there are no travel limits. I'm just curious, some of the things that are, that you're excited about at this year's event. You know, one of the things I'm excited about is I think we're able to give our attendees a lot more choice of what do they attend because it's virtual, so you don't have to have a room, you know, where you can have a certain number of, you know, sessions and only one session at a time. So I think there's gonna be more choice for our customers. We're also gonna have a great lineup of speakers. So I think this also means that not only can we have more attendees show up because it's more convenient, but we can have more really great speakers and industry luminaries because they don't have to also travel to the site, but they can do things from where they are. So I think those are two of the really great things about, you know, the remote world that we live in. I of course am disappointed that I'm not gonna be able to see more customers face to face or at least in the same room and have that interaction, but we'll still have plenty of meetings even though we'll be doing it online. Silver linings. Well, Rachel, it's been great having you on the program. I can't wait to hear about all the great things that come from the summit 20. Appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this CUBE conversation.