I recently had a conversation with a company called PagerDuty after they told me about their latest integration work with Zenoss, a company that provides IT management for virtualization and cloud environments. Zenoss offers an extensible management product by providing third-parties with its plug-in architecture, which PagerDuty is taking advantage of to provide some really interesting additions such as on-call scheduling, alerts and incident tracking. To get a better understanding, I spoke with Alex Solomon, co-founder and CEO of PagerDuty.
VMblog: PagerDuty recently announced its integration
with Zenoss 4. First, can you tell readers a little about PagerDuty and Zenoss?
Alex Solomon: PagerDuty is the 9-1-1 dispatch
for IT. As the leading centralized dispatch center for IT monitoring tools, we
provide on-call scheduling, reliable alerting and incident management for
critical IT issues. Zenoss is a leading commercial and open-source IT
monitoring solution used by enterprise IT management for legacy, virtual and
cloud monitoring. PagerDuty extends Zenoss' service by letting users customize
how they want to be notified of Zenoss events. With the integration, users can
control how and when each team member is alerted, so teams can be sure the
right person can take action immediately.
VMblog: And what new features and capabilities will the
integration provide to customers?
Solomon: This integration enables users
to take immediate action from alerts and so they can solve IT incidents
quicker. For example, when an event is triggered within Zenoss, the incident
will instantly notify PagerDuty, which will then alert the designated user
about the incident. With alerts available to Zenoss users via email, phone, SMS
and mobile push, users will reliably receive every alert wherever they are so
immediate action can be taken. This all results in our customers being able to
successfully resolve IT issues as quickly as possible to maintain ongoing
operations, resource management and application hosting.
VMblog: Why did you choose to integrate
specifically with Zenoss?
Solomon: Hundreds of our customers use Zenoss - it is
a popular open source network, server and application monitoring system that
helps with the challenges of complex IT services. Zenoss provides one of the
best event management systems available in any open source monitoring system,
so we realize the importance of continuing to integrate with it. One example of
a customer that values the integration is Cascadeo Corporation, a provider of
network and system engineering and IT services. The company uses PagerDuty and
Zenoss to keep their network operations center (NOC) running efficiently.
VMblog: Explain if you would, what is the value of integrating with third-party tools like Zenoss?
Solomon: PagerDuty's integration with third party
tools greatly simplifies alerting and escalating events. With our reliable
alerting, flexible on-call team scheduling and incident tracking across
multiple communication channels (email, phone, SMS and push notification), customers
are able to take immediate action and solve incidents quickly, wherever they
are. In addition to Zenoss, we integrate with IT monitoring tools including Splunk, New Relic, Pingdom, Nagios and more. We centralize
the alerts from these monitoring tools so sysadmins and devops teams get faster
and reliable alerts.
VMblog: Tell us about the things you have seen in the IT monitoring and
alerting market, and talk about the industry trends you see emerging.
Solomon: Aside from IT departments wanting fast,
reliable and accurate alerts, the ability to customize those alerts and
designate more ownership for each incident is of upmost importance in the
industry today. Additionally, mobility is an important trend that allows people
to now get alerted easier in a variety of channels, wherever they are. We at
PagerDuty take these trends seriously and are delivering functionality based on
these trends to our customers, which is why we are the leading IT incident
tracking and on-call management system.
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Thank you to Alex Solomon, co-founder and CEO of PagerDuty, for speaking with VMblog.com.