Operations and analytics platform PagerDuty Inc. today announced the expansion of its generative artificial intelligence capabilities with a new tool designed to put automation and insights in the hands of first-responder teams to help them react to incidents and outages faster.

The new solution, PagerDuty Advance, is designed to assist the first response to outages and incidents by surfacing relevant context and automating the incident lifecycle by reducing the tedious work of reading through reports. That means information technology specialists and experts can spend more time working on root causes and getting systems back online rather than digging through logs.

Advance is built into PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which combines incident management, AIOps, automation and customer service operations. The company says the platform is an easy-to-use system for addressing mission-critical, time-sensitive work by IT, DevOps and security enterprise teams.

“Global IT disruption and outages are becoming the new normal due to organization’s technical debt and a rush to harness the power of generative AI,” said Jeffrey Hausman, chief product development officer at PagerDuty. “These are contributing factors to a greater number of outages which last longer and are more costly. Building upon our genAI offerings, PagerDuty Advance provides customers with generative AI solutions that help them scale teams by surfacing contextual insights and automating time-consuming tasks at every step of the incident lifecycle.”

The recent global outage caused by an update to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.’s software knocked out more than 8.5 million Windows OS-based computers globally, Microsoft Corp. estimated. Most outages and incidents that affect enterprise business don’t have the scale of the CrowdStrike event. However, outages can still cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year for mere hours offline, so the sooner they are discovered and fixed the better.

PagerDuty said that with Advance, organizations can quickly automate manual work within the incident lifecycle where and when first responders get their information, giving them an edge.

Advance can work directly within Slack, a common communication tool for first responders to collaborate as they try to get incidents resolved. Using simple prompts, responders can quickly get summaries of key information about incidents and the chatbot can also anticipate common diagnostic questions to suggest troubleshooting steps to accelerate resolution.

The AI will also auto-generate status update drafts on progress and current challenges to help streamline the tedium of reporting and paperwork during the process. The same works for postmortems once the incident is resolved, a user can elect to generate a review by collecting all the data generated that includes a highlight of the key findings and recommended next steps to prevent the issue from happening again.

On the automation side, when jobs are run, they produce reports — long-winded logs that are tedious and difficult to read. Advance can take reports from Actions Log, automated processes that execute events based on triggers to assist with diagnostics and summarize the most important results. That way, first responders can make informed decisions from those results or load key values from reports into orchestration for further automation.

“Organizations can take the next step in unlocking the full potential of AI and automation across the digital enterprise with the help of PagerDuty,” said Hausman.

The company said that early-access customers using Advance to summarize status updates have saved up to 15 minutes per responder per incident. PagerDuty estimates this could save the average company at least 75 hours or more than nine business days each month alone.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer