PagerDuty Process Automation – Jonathan Rende, PagerDuty

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to techstrug TV.

I've got it. Well, if you've watched text Strunk TV over the months and years you've probably or you may have seen this man before he's my friend Jonathan Randy. Jonathan is the SVP of products a pager Duty and we're happy to have them.

Hey Jonathan, how are you? Very good. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure. It's great to see you again. I hope all is well.

You know what Jonathan died everyone watches every interview on Tech strung TV as much as it hurts my heart. So for those maybe who are familiar with you. Why don't you give a little of the Jonathan Randy story and we'll transition that into the Patriot Judy story.

Yeah happy to Alan. So I've been at pager Duty for coming up on six years now veteran of the industry and a number of companies over the last couple of decades and we're I I'm the SVP of products as you mentioned. So I've had the opportunity to work across Whole portfolio and in the last couple of years have been focused on our new and emerging products and am you know, one of the individuals responsible for when rundeck came in and became a part of pager Duty and we fully integrated that now so really excited to share a couple of the Next Generation steps that we're we're releasing now.

Absolutely and John I I think most of our audiences is familiar with pager duty, but there might be some folks out here who aren't so beyond the runda Run book and run that stuff, you know, but bigger picture, can you how would you describe page your duty to them? Yeah, well paid your duties been around for over a decade now and been really essential infrastructure an essential solution that devops teams and it Ops teams use to to deal with real-time interruptions and real-time work and and getting engaged in the right way so that the fewest number of people are at the at the issue working in a war room to help fix those disruptions those that interrupted work as quickly as they can in the most effective efficient way and so, you know, that's kind of at the core of incident response is where we've can't come from but now we're really excited. We've with the inclusion of our process automation formerly run deck and lots of other pieces.

We've added a lot of compliments in the AAA Ops area in the process automation area, even in customer service operations connecting the front office to the back office when there are use and so we call all of this and is the operations Cloud. So a lot of people know us for incident response, but we've greatly expanded what we've done into these adjacent areas with a lot of synergy and complementary capabilities. I love it.

com for people want to get more information. Right. Okay.

So Jonathan you let's talk about it new and now announcement new new. functionality feature sets coming out clue us in Yes, I was one of the pillars of the operations Cloud process automation formerly known as rundeck to many folks out. There was you know started as a open source project is still an open source project and that Community we're working closely with but the whole idea of rundeck was to create a plane of automation for all your operational needs in an organization to sit on top and and really expand the use of automation for it Ops teams for devops teams in a variety of different uses and one of the areas we've been really focused on over the last two years as rundeck has become and as we refer to process automation has become a part of pager duty is creating a SAS version of the on-premise commercial product and integrating that tightly into the existing pager Duty platform the operations cloud.

So today what we're here to talk about and really excited and what it's doing more importantly for our customers and adding value is is that new release the latest release which is really a re-architecture a new architecture. It's a big step forward in the world of automation when you think of the coming together of Cloud SAS worlds and on-prem worlds this hybrid nature and the complexity of running Automation and all the different zones and networks and doing that centrally for a team so that they can scale and get a lot more efficiency out of their Automation and ultimately take out a lot of toil and a lot of cost in doing so so really excited about our process automation release now. Excellent.

Excellent You know. Just to it was a it was about almost two years ago the rundeck acquisition wasn't it? Yeah, a little over two years ago was November two years ago.

Yeah, and so the integration here, as you know, it's been done sort of organically. It's not been rushed. I mean immediately.

There was some Affinities that you know that played well to each other but this to me sounds like it. It's now finally truly truly. You know holistically part of the pager Duty.

Tool set. Yeah part of the operations Cloud. That's right.

That's exactly that's what you guys do there. So You know mind John or Johnathan. Let's let's for our audience out here.

You know, he they're in SRE. They're an IT Ops guy. What is this really mean?

Like what? How is your day to day how they're using it? What are they doing?

Now really really important point to hit sometimes we get lost in in some of the big announcements here and yeah make it real practical. So what we've done is again, we've created a pure SAS version of this and whether it's SAS around premise, we're still supporting both. That's not the big issue or the Big Challenge here because there's always going to be a need for multiple models of use but what we've done in this new architecture and the new release of the product is is a couple of things.

We realize that there you know for every SRE out there for every it Ops person who's building run books who's building jobs that they need to run that they're increasingly having to run those more more and more complex jobs across more complex environments and networks. So they may have to build a script or a job that has to run across multiple zones or multiple networks that are secure and they need to be able to do that without compromising or creating any risk in how These jobs are running whether it's you know, increasing compute capacity on a machine taking down a service bringing it back up, you know a typical activity that might happen during during a major incident that's happening. And so the running of these steps in this complex environment, we've just hugely simplified it and so what do I mean by that?

Well, it used to be in the before if you wanted to work across multiple secure environments people had to poke a hole in a firewall or they had to secure shell SSH into an area and then have the script run there and sometimes they would share the credentials of that script that needed to operate in that secure environment. So they might ultimately need to deploy a few versions of rundeck in these different areas to run. Well now we've made it hugely efficient that from a central either on Or SAS capability to be able to build all of your automation jobs that will run and you know drive all of the things you want to do on these elements of your infrastructure across all those different environments in you know, what we call a zero trust world where you can trust that we're just HTP httpsing into those.

It's completely secure communication Central Administration and creation of the jobs. But, you know a knowledge and intelligence that's going into all of the runners as we call them that run all the scripts and all these areas. It's really groundbreaking it's gonna make life so much easier for all the sres and how they create and how they then run and expose all of these automation jobs for for the individuals across the organization.

So huge huge Time Savings. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely it's Jonathan forgive me this this announcement the releases available now it's going to be available.

What's the story? It is it is available. We have as I said a few flavors of our process automation product as a part of the operations Cloud, we have the open source.

So a part of this goes into open source, and then we have the commercial on-prem version and then we have the SAS version as well as an option that we're really excited about getting customers going on and those are available now. Yeah, great. com Jonathan what else is happening?

We haven't had John unfortunately in a while and you know, what else new with Patriot Duty. Can you share? Yeah, so as I I mentioned, you know the operations Cloud it's really the the parts the some of the parts are greater than the individual pieces and I talked about our core incident response.

And our what we call our AI Ops solution. And obviously this is the next generation of process Automation and a customer service operations solution all of them work together. Well, you know your question about like what's new we're all so getting ready to make a set of announcements around our AI Ops product, which is another form of automation out there.

It's you know paid your duty a lot of people think about it as a huge pipeline that takes in information and Telemetry from all kinds of monitoring products and ticketing products and we make sense of that so that those teams when they come together in a, you know, unplanned outage or a war room activity. They come together. They have all the information they need and they can resolve it.

Well, the what we were just talking about process automation. The former rundeck product is really about the resolving of that in addition to other use cases, but it's about the resolving of those issues the actual taking action, but The Upfront piece the automating of that. You know all those events flowing in our AI Ops solution making sense of all the noise getting to the what we like to say improving the signal to noise ratio for SRE teams and for it operations and for developers.

We have a big new release that's coming out there that we're really excited about that. We're we're starting to share with with the Press right now. So that's going to be another big area.

You can't walk more than five feet without running into some side kind of AI Jonathan. Yeah, we continue to really push the envelope on machine learning and Ai and I think you know, there's so much fear out there Alan with like what is this gonna do is it gonna eliminate jobs our whole approach over the years has been this can be a huge assist. You know, if you think of this as like the Marvel character Iron Man, you know, it gives an individual but capability to do more to make better decisions with suggestions and we've tried to leverage that and that's our approach for our AI Ops products and the rest of the operations Cloud as well.

You know Jonathan of any technology a long time every Technology Innovation, you always hear, you know, the sky is falling folks who says oh my god there I'm gonna be obsolete at 29 and it's it's never the case. Right? It's usually these kinds of Innovations for new jobs for more jobs and spur more interesting jobs because these kinds of Innovations generally.

or to make the mundane right and and allow allow workers to focus on. More interesting varied kind of or complex problems. I couldn't agree more I couldn't agree more.

It's a I think these types of Innovations these steps forward create more opportunities for individuals, you know for all those continual Learners out there. It just creates more opportunities. I always joke with with my kids.

I'm like, you know the job that you're gonna wind up in it probably didn't exists doesn't exist today. My job didn't exist when I was in school. So it's not easy how that works.

I I just had so my my boys ones in law school one's a junior and you know undergrad and I've told them look guys you got to think about what is AI gonna mean in terms of your career at this point because I I think one by one it is gonna disrupt so many different markets. Not that it's gonna make people obsolete but people are gonna you need to think about how do I Leverage that to be a better whatever I'm going to be right and and I think that is the key. Anyway, Jonathan.

We're out of time man. com check out all the new flavors and ways. You can utilize page.

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Thank you Alan.