Nine uses PagerDuty software to help find the best person inside to fix a problem that may arise with one of its media products.
Nine’s director of product engineering technology Andre Lachmann said at PagerDuty Summit 2022 that “with such diversity in the value of services, products and systems, knowing what’s going on in the environment and integration this is what we expect from PagerDuty ”.
He said identifying a problem in the first place, but then who is the right person to deal with it, is a challenge, especially in an organization with a size of Nine.
“It’s not always obvious who should respond correctly,” Lachmann said.
“It’s not always the case that the first person who gets the alert can fix the problem, and in a relatively large organization, and especially in a joint company and there are people coming together from different backgrounds or different other parts of the business, they don’t always know each other like smaller organizations might. “
The tool also helped 250 product engineering staff find the owner of the dependency used by their own product or system.
While the product engineering teams are responsible for both developing and operating the products – that is, not only for creating the software and deploying it, but also “making sure your services are online and available .. .the challenge there is that those teams are only responsible for their part of the universe. ”
“If and when they rely on other parts of the organization or other services, and there are other dependencies that they have to rely on, we have to combine that in some way. We look to PagerDuty to help us do that, ”Lachmann said.
“When we receive an alert, it usually comes to one of the product engineering teams. They’ll look into the issue, and try and resolve it if they can, but in the case where they have a dependency that they can’t manage their themselves, they will need to interact with the rest of the business.
“This is a big company. In software engineering alone in our group, there are about 250 people. In the broader technology group it’s 400-plus, and then there’s a bigger business out there that produces content and is involved in the business itself.
“So when it comes to reaching and connecting with the right people at the right time, we need a system to do that, and that system is PagerDuty.”
Lachmann said the need for efficient incident response systems has been highlighted by changing customer expectations in the media, particularly video-on-demand where high-level viewers are demanding of reliability and performance.
“The size of our responsibility and the extent of what we need to address, if and when there are issues, is higher, and you also bring together different vendors and services and applications, which increases complexity, ”he said.
Lachmann added that Nine is in the process of re -integrating PagerDuty with ServiceNow – the ticketing solution used by Group IT at Nine.
While the two systems are already connected, the integration is custom, and this will now be done again using the official integration between the two platforms.