Occasional operational snags are bound to crop up in every organization. PagerDuty Inc., an incident response provider backed by $83 million in funding, is turning to artificial intelligence to help companies deal with issues more efficiently.

PagerDuty on Thursday released a new version of its namesake platform that incorporates machine learning to ease troubleshooting. The company made the announcement at its second annual customer summit, which was covered by SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE mobile studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Tejada said the update builds upon the incident information that the company has gathered over time from its customer base, which presently stands at about 10,000 companies. “Over the last eight years, we’ve been collecting a tremendous amount of data,” she told Frick. “We have the events that come from all the machine instrumentation, we have information around the workflow …. and then what’s going on with the people, who are the people who have the most useful subject matter expertise.”

PagerDuty has applied that data in two main ways. First, the company’s platform now evaluates operational issues and groups them according to relevance before notifying the relevant personnel.

This mechanism can help prevent administrators from getting overwhelmed with alerts when a problem requires attention. More importantly, bringing all the data about an incident together makes it possible to gain a better view of the issue. This feature could be particularly useful when it comes to troubleshooting outages at the infrastructure level, where a malfunctioning system can often disrupt multiple business processes.

In the same spirit, PagerDuty has added a new tab that shows if the problem that a company is trying to overcome had occurred once before. The platform shows what steps were taken it to solve it and various contextual details that may come handy for administrators.

The Similar Incidents tab is rolling out alongside a redesign to the part of the interface that tracks ongoing problems. According to PagerDuty, the console packs improved navigation controls and a new section that shows real-time operational updates.

Rounding out the release are new features for automating the task of spreading the word about a problem within a company. The main highlight is a capability called Response Plays, which makes it possible to create pre-prepared workflows for contacting specific staffers. It enables users to quickly fire off multiple notifications when the need arises to avoid wasting precious minutes manually alerting colleagues.

TheCUBE host Jeff Frick interviewed PagerDuty Tejada about the new features. (* Disclosure: PagerDuty sponsored TheCUBE’s coverage of the summit. The company has no editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: PagerDuty