Platform Release Notes (2020)

December 2020

Visibility Console 2.0 Updates

  • On-Call Responders Module (beta) [Digital Ops]: Filter for escalation policies and find responders, along with their most relevant contact information, in the new On-Call Responders Module.
  • Service Activity Module [Business, Digital Ops]: Expand your view within the Service Activity Module to see 7 days of incident activity across your digital operations. Investigate specific incidents with a detailed tooltip that shows total incidents for that block of time with links, titles, and urgencies. View more by clicking through to the specific incidents on that service.
  • Incidents and Changes Timeline (beta) [Digital Ops]: Discover potential contributing factors to incidents by investigating changes like deploys, code changes, or automation runs. Investigate how these changes affect incidents across services over time with the new Incidents and Changes Timeline Module.
  • Incident Urgency Toggle and Bulk Actions [Business, Digital Ops]: Toggle between high urgency, low urgency, and all incidents in the Incidents Module. Acknowledge, resolve, or set priority on incidents from the Incidents Module to accelerate your incident management process from a centralized view.

November 2020

Zendesk v3 Integration [Professional+]

The latest version of PagerDuty’s Zendesk integration is now available in the Zendesk Marketplace. It provides a bi-directional integration that enhances communication between engineering and support teams by giving visibility to high-impact incidents. Drive automated workflows in PagerDuty that can be run by support agents, and provide the right level of information back to customer service teams, so they can interact knowledgeably with customers. This integration is a key part of our PagerDuty for Customer Service solution.

Dynamic Field Enrichment and Extraction [All plans]

Arming responders with the right context will accelerate incident triage and prevent wasted time during an outage. That’s why we now allow you to add important context to your incident summary using alert content, so responders can act quickly. In addition to accelerating incident triage, manipulating alert format allows you to be more prescriptive when you group alerts based on alert content.

Extended Acknowledgements Reduce Escalations [All plans]

We’ve made it easier to ensure that responder requests get accepted and don’t escalate. Acknowledging an incident where you have a pending responder request will now also accept the responder request. One click, two actions! Extended Acknowledgements are now generally available.

Change Events [All plans]

Send change events from a variety of systems to PagerDuty, so that responders and service owners can discover contributing factors that may have caused incidents and get to resolution faster. This includes code changes via a continuous software delivery process, like GitHub or GitLab, and infrastructure change orchestration systems like BuildKite or Relay by Puppet.

On-Call Readiness Reports [All plans]

Help properly set up teams so they can successfully deliver on their on-call responsibilities. Leverage these reports to improve your on-call posture and track your progress toward organizational readiness. Proper team assembly can reduce resolution times and improve your organization’s ability to respond to incidents.

Add on-demand Microsoft Teams meeting to incidents [All plans]
From within Microsoft Teams, you can now quickly add an on-demand/dynamic Teams meeting to a PagerDuty incident.

Audit Trail API [Business+]
Get operational visibility and compliance to aid in understanding what changes were made that led to a missed incident. Previously, to investigate configuration problems, you needed to contact your PagerDuty account team or Customer Support. Now self-service PagerDuty audit functionality empowers you to examine service history and understand what’s going on at a larger scale. Administrators can access audit records for the previous year, on-demand and at any frequency, to comply with organization policy.

Suggested Service Dependencies [All plans]
We now use machine learning to suggest dependencies between services to help you keep these relationships up-to-date as your infrastructure grows. This feature is available on the Impact tab of the service profile.

Content Based Alert Grouping [Digital Ops+, EI add-on]

Building on the launch of Content Based Alert Grouping, we’ve improved ease of use by showing the most recent alerts and allowing you to directly select configured fields.

Preview Intelligent Alert Grouping [All plans]

All accounts (including those without Event Intelligence, Enterprise for Incident Management or Digital Operations (Legacy) plans) can now preview how Intelligent Alert Grouping would have performed for a specific service over the previous 45 days. Preview Intelligent Alert Grouping can be found in the Alert Grouping section on a service's Response tab.

October 2020

Service Level Event Rules API [All plans]

You can now perform CRUD actions on your service rules via API. Note that APIs have already been available for Global rules.

Multiple Overrides [All plans]

Now you can select a range of dates for which you're on-call and easily create overrides for all of them with one action.

Content-based Alert Grouping (v1) [Digital Ops +, add-ons]

If you work with predictable, homogenous alert data, you can now customize how alerts are grouped without having to train the algorithm on your specific data. This allows you to configure grouping based on your preferred, user-defined fields (multi-select). Alerts that share an exact match on the selected field will be grouped together into the most recent open incident.

Visibility Console [Business+]

If you’re on the Business Plan, you now have access to a version of the Visibility Console that allows for a single dashboard. The Visibility Console provides an interactive view of your digital operations to provide everyone on your team with information about your systems and their health at any time. For example, your teams can use the dashboard to prepare for an upcoming on-call shift, coordinate a number of ongoing incidents, and mitigate risks before a time-sensitive, critical business event.

September 2020

Technical Service Dependencies for Triage [All plans]

A streamlined interface for rapid definition and mapping of upstream/downstream technical and business service dependencies and relations between them, with low-effort maintenance. Technical service dependencies are highlighted directly on the Incident Details page during triage to provide situational context, help teams collaborate quickly, and take the right actions to resolve issues.

Dependency-Aware Related Incidents [All plans]

Technical service dependencies are suggested via machine learning, and like user-defined dependencies, are highlighted directly within the Incident Details page during triage to help teams avoid blind spots, and expedite incident resolution.

ServiceNow Integration v7 [Business, Digital Ops]

The updated ServiceNow integration helps customers get more value from their investments in ServiceNow and PagerDuty by leveraging new, bi-directional functionality like running a PagerDuty response play in ServiceNow, or posting a Call to Action from ServiceNow to the PagerDuty Incident details page, providing users with live status updates. Additionally, both business and technical service dependencies from ServiceNow's CMDB can be shared with PagerDuty's service directory, allowing teams to more clearly understand the impact of incidents and identify critical services.

Paused Incident Notifications [Enterprise for Incident Management, Digital Operations (Legacy), Event Intelligence add-on]

Reduce operational noise by delaying triggers, giving machines a chance to auto-remediate before notifying responders. Customers can keep an audit trail of triggers and actions, regardless of whether a responder was notified.

Zoom Conference Integration

Make collaboration in a distributed environment fast and easy by giving response teams the ability to quickly add on-demand, dynamic video conference bridges to their PagerDuty incidents.

Status Update Notification Preferences [Business, Digital Ops]

Increase stakeholder engagement and business service subscriptions by giving business users complete control over the notifications they want to receive for critical updates. Now users can determine the number of times they are notified and the channels by which they occur.

Visibility Console Service Activity Module [Digital Ops]

Help NOC teams increase operational visibility by surfacing patterns in service activity —and their scale— across the entire digital operations portfolio.

August 2020

Improvements

Aug. 14 — Paused Incident Notifications

As a new Rulesets feature, paused incident notifications allows rules to be set to create alerts, but pause incident creation and notifications for a predefined amount of time. During the pause period, new alerts will be viewable in the Alerts table with a Suspended status. These suspended alerts have new actions, allowing users to Trigger an incident from the alert during the pause period, or Resolve the alert, preventing the incident and its notifications from being created altogether.

Aug. 4 — Visibility Console: Service Activity Module

The Service Activity module allows users to see incident activity across a multitude of their services at once, so that they can quickly understand their digital operations health, and identify if there’s a widespread major incident. It is ordered by most recently impacted service and will reorder itself when new incidents are triggered. It has different time windows so eyes on glass teams can monitor their digital operations in real-time, but can also see service activity in the last 24 hours. This module can be filtered to any set of teams and services.

Aug. 21 — Status Update Notification Preferences

Configure notification preferences for status updates when subscribed to an incident.

Integrations

Aug. 21 – ServiceNow Integration Update

The updated ServiceNow Integration allows users to run Response Plays, post status updates and set the impacted Business Service on a PagerDuty incident all from the ServiceNow interface. Administrators can perform Assignment Group and priority mapping to PagerDuty escalation policies and provision Business and technical services along with their dependency relationships. Additionally, this version allows users to author custom code for outbound REST API calls and it comes with MID server support.

July 2020

New Features

Jul. 23 — My On Call Shifts

My On-Call Shifts allows users to view their shifts across all escalation policies and schedules in a single, easy-to-use view. This feature displays if a user is on call now, a list of their associated shifts and what their schedule is for the upcoming weeks and months. Users can now easily create override shifts across multiple schedules because all of the shifts are accessible in one place. My On-Call Shifts is also available as a widget on the right side of the Incidents page, displaying their current shift, and when they are on call next.

Improvements

Jul. 31 — New Visibility Console

The newly redesigned Visibility Console provides users with the single pane-of-glass experience to effectively monitor their digital operations in real time. This feature provides Central Ops / NOC teams and technical stakeholders with context on their technical environment at a glance, allowing them to quickly understand the health of their digital operations.

Jul. 15 — Dependency-Aware Related Incidents

To help responders gain better understanding of the breadth and scope of incident impact, we’ve enhanced PagerDuty’s Related Incidents capability set with Dependency-Aware Related Incidents to provide real-time, contextual insights across multiple services and teams. When two incidents are triggered within five minutes of each other and one service is directly dependent on the other, these incidents will be marked as related. Similarly, if incidents occur within this time frame and share a parent Business Service, they will also be marked as related. These service relationships will be identified in the Dependency pane on individual Related Incident cards.

Jul. 10 — Analytics API

With our new Analytics API, users can get incident data aggregated from all incidents, or from services and Teams. Additionally, users can get raw data on multiple and single incidents.

June 2020

Improvements

Jun. 23 — Extensions API: Re-enable Extensions

With our Extensions API, users can now re-enable extensions outside of the PagerDuty web app.

Jun. 1 — Response Plays API

With our API for Response Plays, users can create, read, update, and delete Response Plays without having to log into the PagerDuty web app. Fully interact with Response Plays from your preferred interface, whether it be an ITSM tool like ServiceNow or a custom interface.

Integrations

Jun. 3 — Splunk Integration Update

The updated Splunk integration allows users to customize data that is sent from Splunk to PagerDuty. The integration also includes upgrades to support new Splunk 8 requirements.

Jun. 2 — Microsoft Teams Integration Update

The updated Microsoft Teams integration allows responders to view critical incident details within Teams. They can also acknowledge, resolve, trigger and add notes to incidents, all from one interface.

Jun. 1 — Jira Server Integration Update

The updated Jira Server and Jira Data Center integration includes a suite of features that allows users to coordinate incident response right from Jira issues using the PagerDuty sidebar. Organizations can drive synchronization and collaboration between teams with complex workflows, and map users and accounts across PagerDuty, Jira Server and Data Center.

May 2020

Improvements

May 21 — Service Profile

The new Service Profile streamlines all service configurations onto an easy-to-edit page. Responders can clearly see maintenance windows, and filter them based on status. Users can add metadata like runbooks and a communication channels to a service. Having this for as a resource on a service eases the incident triage and response process while also encouraging users to reference Services as a source of truth for their business. The Service Profile includes new metadata for services: a documentation link (use this for a wiki link, an FAQ, or a runbook), a communication chat channel (not a notification path, but helpful for finding out where a team is discussing operations issues), and (drumroll please... ) the impact tab with service dependencies.

May 14 — Status Update Branding

Users who wish to change the logo that appears in status update emails may now upload a custom logo.

April 2020

New Features

Apr. 23 — Intelligent Dashboards: Service Health Dashboard

The Service Health dashboard allows for the discovery of services that drive incidents and cause increased team response effort. Detailed performance views for each service are provided to show impact of interruptions, how teams respond to incidents, and performance details by incidents and team metrics. This feature allows service owners to make key decisions on where to allocate resources, make investments and drive continual service health improvement.

Apr. 1 — Related Incidents

The Related Incidents feature provides incident responders with the suggested 20 most recent related incidents that are impacting other responders and PagerDuty services. This feature uses a completely online and real-time machine learning algorithm to provide these insights, giving responders an at-a-glance-view of the full breadth and scope of incident impact. Related Incidents extends our machine learning capabilities beyond noise reduction, enriching incidents with deep contextual insights to help responders coordinate an effective team response and mitigate business disruption.

Improvements

Apr. 15 — Business Services API

Admins and service owners can now use the Business Services API to automate how they define and update business services using scripts, Terraform, or other tools.

Apr. 15 — Business Services: Team Permissions

Business services can now be added to a specific team, allowing team managers to create, edit, and update business services. Existing business services that are not associated to a team are globally viewable and editable by Global Admins and Account Owners.

Apr. 6 — Rulesets API

Users now have full API access to global rulesets. New functionality includes partial updates and rule ordering.

Apr. 6 — Live Call Routing: Option to Resolve Incident When Responder Ends Call

Users now have the option to configure whether or not the corresponding PagerDuty incident is resolved after the responder ends the incoming call.

Apr. 1 — Past Incidents

Similar Incidents has been renamed as Past Incidents to differentiate it from the Related Incidents feature. More information on the difference between these features is available in this FAQ.

March 2020

Improvements

Mar. 30 — Live Call Routing: Upload Your Own Audio Message

Customers who prefer to record their own Live Call Routing greeting may now upload their own MP3 audio file instead of using an automated message.

February 2020

Integrations

Feb. 25 — Salesforce Cloud Integration: v2 Update

The new Salesforce Cloud integration allows users to integrate any standard Salesforce object with PagerDuty. Responders can now take advantage of expanded PagerDuty actions, such as setting urgency, adding responders, incident reassignment and running response plays by setting predefined rules and actions within the Salesforce interface. PagerDuty can also send information to Salesforce Cloud by defining evaluation criteria against the updates made in PagerDuty and designating actions to be performed in Salesforce Cloud.

January 2020

Improvements

Jan. 16 — Rulesets

The new Rulesets feature is an extension of our legacy Global Event Rules feature. With Rulesets, users can route events to an endpoint and create collections of event rules, which define sets of actions to take based on event content. Accounts with Free, Starter and Team plans will have access to a single global ruleset, while Business, Enterprise for Incident Management and Digital Operations (Legacy) plans will now have the ability to create multiple global rulesets. For these higher-tier plans, each ruleset will have an individual endpoint and they can be associated with specific Teams, giving Team Managers edit-access to their rules. On all plans, Rulesets also expands actions available for service event rules.