PagerDuty Inc. today unveiled new automation features for its incident response platform that can learn from the administrators who use them.

The platform, which has been adopted by Google Inc., Comcast Corp. and other large companies, is designed to help customers better deal with urgent incidents such as a data center outage. Organizations can configure PagerDuty to alert the appropriate personnel automatically  about issues and give them the context they need to fix them.

The new automation features aims to streamline incident response further. Dubbed Event Intelligence, the bundle analyzes incoming logs from the systems PagerDuty monitors and takes into account how administrators typically go about handling incidents. It then helps configure the platform’s alerting mechanism based on these patterns to filter out unnecessary alerts.

According to PagerDuty, Event Intelligence reduces such system “noise” by as much as 98 percent. This can theoretically save quite a bit of time given the massive amounts of operational data generated by a typical enterprise’s infrastructure. Plus, the fact that the process of removing redundant alerts is automated reduces the amount of time that administrators must sink into setting up filtering rules.

PagerDuty has paired the noise reduction capability with several other complementary features. Event Intelligence automatically groups related issues in a single report, which centralizes the troubleshooting process, and displays any similar incidents that may have occurred in the past.

The latter feature aims to help users spot long-term problem patterns. Something like, say, a temporary latency spike can be a sign of a deeper problem if the phenomenon repeats itself multiple times a week. PagerDuty visualizes all similar incidents in a color-coded graph that summarizes what happened and on which day.

The startup claims that its platform can stream operations across many parts of a company. Infrastructure teams can use PagerDuty to notify the administrator on call when a server goes offline, while application and cybersecurity teams may set up alerts for their own systems. PagerDuty also targets areas such marketing where users are less tech-savvy, but still require the ability to respond to important developments quickly.

Image: PagerDuty