As is often the case in the technology world, the catalyst for forming PagerDuty Inc. originated from the experience of one engineer working many years ago at a wholly different company. In this case, that company was Amazon.com.

Alex Solomon (pictured) started his career as a software engineer for Amazon in 2006. At the time, Amazon was transitioning from a monolithic code base to a microservices architecture that also necessitated a major shift in how the company approached engineering support.

Large information technology departments working on software and services were out; smaller teams were in. That meant that Amazon software engineers like Solomon were now empowered to write, test and deploy their code. It also meant they were responsible if their code blew up, so they carried pagers for such emergencies, a part of the Amazon culture that became known as having “pager duty.”

The system worked well for Amazon, but what about other companies that were increasingly confronted with a shifting landscape toward DevOps and the need for small, agile teams of engineers to make information technology work? That was the inspiration for Solomon and his two co-founders to launch PagerDuty in 2009, part of what proved to be a successful quest to reshape incident response for the IT world.

“The old way of sending the alert to everyone and having 100 people on a call bridge, that just doesn’t work anymore,” said Solomon, PagerDuty’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “There’s the issue of not having the right ownership. We have to be a lot more targeted to understand who owned what and which systems were being impacted.”

Solomon spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco. They discussed the company’s recent release of new products and services, the important role of integration in PagerDuty’s business strategy, stress created by unplanned work in an IT environment and the journey that led to Solomon’s firm becoming publicly held (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Alex Solomon as its Guest of the Week.

Intelligent tools analyze impact

To help its clients gain a more complete picture of system problems, PagerDuty has turned to machine learning. In September, the company announced a new service for its Event Intelligence product called Intelligent Triage. The new enhancement uses historical data matched against a current issue to smartly analyze what’s happening and which company teams or networks could be affected.

“If you’re debugging a problem and you have an incident that you’re looking at, the question you’re going to ask is: ‘Is it just my service, or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time?’” Solomon said. “We’ll show you that very quickly. We’ll show you if there are other teams impacted by the same issue, and we leverage machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents.”

The company also rolled out a new solution to empower customer service agents in faster issue resolution and ways for teams to proactively share information. PagerDuty for Customer Service is driven by new partnerships with Zendesk Inc. and Salesforce Service Cloud.

Value of integration

The new customer service product highlights a key hallmark of PagerDuty’s core business strategy: The company simply wants to work with everyone.

“From the early days, we called PagerDuty the ‘Switzerland’ of monitoring, because we’re friends of everyone, we’re partners of everyone, and we sit on top,” Solomon said. “We’re really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools.”

In addition to recent partnerships with Salesforce and Zendesk, PagerDuty has built a suite of integrations around ticketing systems, such as ServiceNow, Jira and BMC Remedy, according to Solomon. The company’s integrations page lists over 300 partners, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp. and VMware Inc.

In Solomon’s view of the competitive tech world, various companies offer specific strengths that can benefit IT customers, including those who use PagerDuty, so it’s better to have them inside the fold than out.

“Some are still the strongest in one area, like Splunk for logs, New Relic and AppDynamics for application performance monitoring, and Datadog for metrics,” Solomon explained. “My best guess is we’re still going to live in a world where you’re going to use multiple tools and they’re each going to do something really well. But it’s about the integrations; it’s about bringing all of that data together.”

Avoiding IT burnout

PagerDuty has become increasingly focused on the volume of unplanned work affecting DevOps teams. At the PagerDuty Summit last week, the company released the results of a study that showed 70% or more of tech staff surveyed were negatively affected by unplanned work, adding greater stress and anxiety, in addition to fostering a poorer work-life balance.

Improved alerting and incident response, along with on-call automation, are designed to mitigate burnout caused by unplanned work.

“It’s very related to that journey of going from being reactive, just reacting to these situations, to becoming proactive and being able to react and address things before they impact the customer,” Solomon stated. “The repetitive things are easy to automate, and the system can just do it for you so you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires.”

Leadership and perseverance

From being on-call at Amazon more than a decade ago to co-founding a business that has transformed the incident response space, Solomon’s journey has been one of hard work and resilience despite initial skepticism in funding circles about PagerDuty’s long-term future.

The fledgling company was rejected for Y Combinator investment multiple times before finally being admitted to its startup class in 2010. What ultimately made a difference for investors was that PagerDuty had one thing that many startups did not: customers.

Solomon also performed a rare feat not traditionally seen in the business world: He replaced himself. The PagerDuty co-founder stepped down as chief executive officer and hired Jennifer Tejada in 2016 to lead the growing company. In April of this year, Solomon stood at the rostrum of the New York Stock Exchange and watched as PagerDuty went public.

“It was incredible; the word I like to use is surreal,” Solomon recalled. “I know it is just a moment in time, and it’s not the end of the journey, but it is an important milestone for us.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the PagerDuty Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE