The global pandemic has moved entire industries online, along with many consumers. Will it remain this way forever?

That was one of the questions that PagerDuty Inc. sought to clarify when it commissioned a global study earlier this year. Results from the survey are in, and they indicate that at least 40% of respondents believe demand for digital services will only continue to increase and 79% of DevOps and IT practitioners believe digital acceleration has to be their company’s number one priority in 2021.

“It’s not going to decrease,” said Rachel Obstler (pictured), vice president of product at PagerDuty. “People have shifted how they’re operating to being online. Now they are used to it, and this is probably not going to change in the foreseeable future. So you have to find a way to manage it if you want to keep innovating.”

Obstler spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the PagerDuty Summit 2020. They discussed PagerDuty’s use of automation to manage IT issues and the future role of AIOps in resolving system incidents. (* Disclosure below.)

Identifying critical issues

Over the course of its 11-year history, PagerDuty has placed a great deal of emphasis on the use of intelligence and automation to manage IT incidents. By coding and automating incident resolution, the company can provide customers with an ability to differentiate between the trivial and the terrifying.

“If you have a lot of issues that are coming at you, you may not know which ones are important,” Obstler said. “We have a lot of capabilities in the system that group things together, help you understand which ones are critical and which ones are not, get them to the right person, and also provide important context for fixing them. It’s intelligence when someone is interrupted and has to immediately figure out what to do with an issue.”

PagerDuty has also refined the use of AIOps, a broad category that employs big data and machine learning to generate insights that can accelerate, identify and resolve IT issues. Next-generation AIOps uses data already in the systems of PagerDuty customers to make suggestions for incident resolution.

“We have all of this information about what happened in the past,” Obstler explained. “We can leverage a lot of that data to help automatically reduce noise and point out the things that are important. You turn it on, it works, and it continues to learn and get better.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PagerDuty Summit 2020. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE