PagerDuty Inc. today introduced a set of artificial intelligence features that will help companies more quickly respond to server outages and other technical issues.

NYSE-listed PagerDuty provides a popular incident response platform of the same name. The software can detect when something breaks in a company’s information technology environment, collect data about the incident and notify administrators.It also performs related tasks such as filtering false positives.

“Most organizations are not fully prepared to tackle major unplanned outages,” said Jeffrey Hausman, PagerDuty’s chief product development officer. “The PagerDuty Operations Cloud integrates AI and automation to streamline the entire incident management lifecycle.”

The first new feature that the company debuted today is an AI assistant for Microsoft Teams. When PagerDuty detects an IT malfunction, administrators can use the chatbot to access information about the incident without leaving the Teams interface.

Application outages are often the result of erroneous configuration changes. According to PagerDuty, its chatbot points out any modifications that may have been made to a workload in the hours that led up to a malfunction. Administrators can also ask the AI to activate remediation workflows that perform troubleshooting tasks without manual input.

The chatbot is based on a set of AI features called PagerDuty Advance that debuted in July. The feature suite also powers a Slack chatbot, as well as tools that automate tasks such as creating incident summaries. 

PagerDuty is rolling the new AI assistant for Teams alongside enhancements to its platform’s alert management features. Those features help filter erroneous or redundant error notifications. They also perform a number of other tasks, such as grouping together alerts that describe the same incident to ease analysis.

Until now, PagerDuty grouped notifications based on textual similarly. Today’s update introduces machine learning models that use “enhanced pattern recognition” to more effectively process alerts and filter unnecessary data. The company says that the enhancement will help speed up troubleshooting times for customers.

While at it, PagerDuty is also upgrading the alert processing features of its Event Orchestration tool. This is a component of the company’s platform that routes technical data about outages to external applications such as cybersecurity services. Event Orchestration can now more extensively automate the manual work involved in determining the urgency of an alert and preparing it for analysis.

Rounding out today’s update is a new benchmarking tool. According to PagerDuty, companies can use it to evaluate how well they manage incident response tasks compared with industry peers. The tool also points out specific areas for improvement. 

Image: PagerDuty