‘This is a massive change’: PagerDuty wants to supercharge incident response with a new SRE agent and command center

PagerDuty is going through a “massive change” with a product overhaul, according to the company’s EMEA VP Arnaud Lagarde.

The company recently unveiled Paige, a new Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) agent designed to help automate incident response capabilities for customer teams.

Running parallel to the agent roll-out, a rebrand of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud looks to create a “single source of truth” for customers on their agentic AI journeys, Lagarde told ITPro.

“This is a massive change in terms of the impact our customers are going to experience,” he said, noting that Paige comes in direct response to the changing face of development and IT operations.

Workers across operations, engineering, and DevOps teams are now scrambling to tackle bugs and various issues across IT estates, and it’s causing significant strain from an incident response perspective.

“When we talk to our customers, there are more and more events that happen in their systems. We see it in our platform, there's a big increase of events that we manage,” he told ITPro.

“There are more security breaches,” Lagarde added. “There’s also the fact that there’s more and more code that is being produced, and we see that code is developed more and more with agents.”

“It also leads to code that is a bit more brittle and also more fragility in the code.”

With an increasing frequency of incidents, research from PagerDuty shows that enterprises are focusing heavily on incident response and cyber resilience capabilities.

95% of executives told PagerDuty that the ability to reduce incidents is now a “competitive advantage”, while 77% intend to increase resilience investment over the next 12 months.

PagerDuty eyes agentic incident response

With Paige, Lagarde said PagerDuty has an opportunity to help supercharge teams on this front. Many teams are still “very reactive” when it comes to incident response, he told ITPro.

Acting as a “digital assistant" for teams, Paige will enable them to automate remediation processes and reduce manual toil.

“With Paige, we’re going to that new generation of how we deal with incidents with agentic AI at the forefront,” he said. “We now expect incidents to be managed by a collaboration between agents and humans.”

“It’s more modern, it's more proactive, and the benefits of having Paige at the forefront of your response also means that it helps you accelerate response.”

Paige is just one of a series of agents PagerDuty offers aimed at helping customers develop end-to-end incident response capabilities.

One specialized agent, known as Scribes, works in tandem with Paige and “reports everything, documents everything,” he explained. There’s also an Insight Agent that provides teams with details on previous incidents, enabling customers to refine best practices and build a more efficient SRE process.

While all eyes are on Paige right now, Lagarde noted that Scribes is arguably the most critical component within the company’s burgeoning toolkit. This helps develop the fundamental knowledge base that other agents draw from.

“What I say to all my customers is that the first thing you need to implement is Scribe, because when I look at systems, there’s very little knowledge that is captured by the human when they have to do it manually.”

“Therefore you don't create that knowledge base that is very important for you to be able to auto remediate. So by first building that sort of pool of knowledge using agents, that means that you don't create any additional effort on the team.”

PagerDuty eyes ecosystem gains

The new Paige agent runs on top of the company’s PD Reliability Platform, formerly known as the PagerDuty Operations Cloud.

It’s here that Lagarde said the biggest changes for the company are unfolding. The rebrand and overhaul essentially aims to create a more “cohesive experience” by consolidating disparate tools and features.

“Over the years, we’ve really looked at that incident management journey and we had different components,” Lagarde explained. “Now you have a seamless customer journey across all the different stages of incident management.”

A key aspect of this push lies in the PD Reliability Platform Console. This acts as a “command center” for incident response team leaders that consolidates telemetry, workflows, and scripts within a central repository.

From an efficiency perspective, Lagarde said this offers teams significant improvements in terms of synergy and alignment.

“All these activities are now fed back into our repository, which therefore fuels productivity and continuous improvement in terms of the way that people operate and respond,” he told ITPro.

“They don't have to switch UI. They don't have to go, ‘okay I've got a tool that does this. I've got another tool that does that’ from different vendors,” Lagarde added.

“[It’s a] seamless experience. There is no handshake that needs to happen. One single repository, one single system of action.”

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