The Unplanned Show

"It doesn't really matter to me how much resiliency you say you've built into your system, if you can't demonstrate the same rigor applied to how you think about humans and how they interact with the system." In this episode, Matt Stine, author of Migrating to Cloud-Native Architectures (O'Reilly) thinks about how resiliency for long-lived, critical systems spans domains,...

Did you know there's a PagerDuty plug-in for Backstage? Learn more about what Backstage is, the PagerDuty plug-in, and what's new from Head of Product for Backstage at Spotify, Meg Watson, and PagerDuty Developer Advocate, Tiago Barbosa. This interview was recorded just before BackstageCon and KubeCon in November 2023, but the next BackstageCon is coming up next month in Paris as a day zer...

"If you want to have a resilient system system in the broader sense of the people and the technology working together, you also have to create an environment in which you can be resilient." In this episode, Sam Newman touches on how psychological safety, planning versus practice, chaos engineering, and more all play into how organizations build resilience. Resources: Sam's website: h...

APIs are foundational to scaling operational efficiency. In this episode, you'll learn more from PagerDuty Product Manager, Nakul Bhagat, about the different types of APIs supported by PagerDuty, why they matter, and what's new! In the episode refer to a few things, so here are handy links: - Developer API documentation: https://developer.pagerduty.com/ - An earlier livestream on API scope...

What are the secrets to successfully adopting PagerDuty? Dormain sits down with Senior Manager of Customer Success Engineering, Matt Linebarger to get his list of things he wished every PagerDuty user knew. Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5BRQWsv2iU Find show notes: https://www.pagerduty.com/resources/podcast/

On the heels of the public beta opening for AI-generated runbooks in Runbook Automation, we asked Jake Cohen from product management about how this is different from generating code with something like chatGPT or various AI-powered code completion tools available. We get into prompt engineering, managing output quality, and privacy and security concerns. You can try out generating your first runbo...

In honor of National Preparedness Month, Dormain talks to Jason Flint, Senior Manager of Workspaces and Crisis Response, who recently authored a Crisis Response Management Operations Guide ( https://response.pagerduty.com/crisis/crisis_intro/ ). We discuss the going beyond “checkbox” firedrills, the value in cross-functional planning, and engaging workforces to improve preparedness  https://youtu....

In this episode, Donnie breaks down where ITIL came from and where it’s starting to go, and why that’s useful for teams that are trying to adopt DevOps practices in ITIL-oriented organizations. Donnie gives some great examples of building empathy and bringing the ITIL teams along for automating changes and decentralizing Sev 2 incident management. He also lays out his core philosophies on Platform...

In this episode, Mitra shares a bunch of valuable insights in how to successfully adopt generative AI, from selecting use cases that deliver value, having foundational data infrastructure in place, to having design and privacy guidelines. Grab a paper and pen and take some notes! Dormain included a bunch of them in this article on " 7 Habits of Successful Generative AI Adopters ." https:...

“All data is valuable when it’s generated, but the question is how fast does the value of the data decay?” In this episode, we hear from James Urquhart, author of "Flow Architectures" (O'Reilly), on how flow architectures follow patterns that move data through distributed systems from producers to consumers. By unblocking data from moving faster, organizations have the opportunity to...

In this episode, Martin Van Son provides a simplified definition of platforms in this context: a way for internal users to request anything from environments to deployments. The platform engineering comes in because someone needs to own stitching together and automating away all the complexity involved to complete that action. In the end, both the consumers and the creators save time. Furthermore,...

In this episode, Heather Hinton describes how security teams can evolve away from spending cycles on “silly little jobs” and scouring multiple sources to try to identify the kinds of unplanned interrupt work that needs to be dealth with urgently. Instead, they can complete projects faster and take on more because on-call rotations are spent getting work done (with the occasional interruption) inst...

“AIOps” is a term some love to hate, but what makes it useful? In this episode, Heath Newburn breaks down the three things to look for in an AIOps solution: reduce noise, create context, and reduce toil. He also explains the challenges with domain-specific approaches, versus domain-agnostic approaches to AIOps. But even within that approach, Heath warns of “gotchas” in rules “tech debt”, data form...

Long gone are the days when data is batch loaded into a data warehouse for business intelligence reports that are looked at periodically and if something is broken, a few internal people would have to wait. Today, data pipelines are “infinitely more complicated”, with more sources from cloud services to on premises systems, and supporting data applications that are critical parts of a business’ ec...

Generative AI is a rapidly-evolving ecosystem with a lot of attention. In this episode, Dormain Drewitz asks Sriram Subramanian about the main challenges to responsibly implement generative AI, including content that’s harmful, inaccurate or violates privacy or security standards. Sriram discusses Microsoft’s 6 tenets to responsible generative AI, as well as the notion of shared responsibility bet...

A software engineer, a data scientist, and a product manager walk into a generative AI project… Using technology that didn’t exist a year ago, they identify a customer pain point they might be able to solve, build on teammates’ experience with building AI features, and test how to feed inputs and constrain outputs into something useful. Hear the full conversation here. https://youtu.be/2mEVY6rmX3M...

In this episode, Hadijah Creary breaks down what Customer Service teams are versus Customer Success teams. What do they care about? How can they each get more proactive to improve the overall customer experience? And why is it PagerDuty Customer Service Operations and not Customer Success Operations? https://youtu.be/ve1RT4a_Udo

In this, the inaugural episode of “The Unplanned Show”, Dormain talks to Damon Edwards about the “capacity conundrum” where everyone is working so hard, but everything takes too long and costs too much. We talk about the “coordination overhead” costs of getting unplanned work done, how generative AI is both adding complexity and offers to accelerate automating as much as you can, and four steps to...