Peter Goodman (petegoo) is a Vice President of Engineering with 22 years under his belt, 10 of which were dedicated to incident management.

Originally from Ireland and now living in New Zealand with his family, Peter has worked as a software engineer, site reliability engineer and engineering leader. After a decade of experience using PagerDuty, he shares his experience managing on-call rotation remote teams around the world.

Feel free to share more about your background (professional/personal), where you are originally from or based in, a memorable moment in your career/life, or any "one thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile" type of story.:
I'm originally from a town called Derry in Ireland but find myself now on the other side of the planet in New Zealand where I have worked as a software engineer, Site Reliability Engineer and Engineering Leader, raising my family and enjoying this beautiful country. I spent a lot of years in on-call rotations and learned some of the best lessons from responding to incidents. It gave me a deep appreciation for the runtime characteristics of code and the systems that we build. When our code is running for a customer it is doing the job we designed it for and so being present and observing how it does that is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

During the first months of COVID and lockdown I was working on a product that went through massive growth. Watching it fail repeatedly and solving the emerging difficult problems of rapid unforeseen scale was incredibly challenging yet amongst the most rewarding periods of my career.

How many years of working with PagerDuty products (please mention which ones) do you have?:
Over 10 years with Incident Management

Tell us about your experience using a PagerDuty product, native integrations, custom APIs, extensions or add-ons to services/systems challenges you were trying to fix/solve/improve and what you achieved after the implementation (feel free to include performance metrics, if available or any fun/odd/remarkable stories).:
The first, most important, job that PagerDuty solved for us was getting the attention of the right person when we needed them. This might seem easy but once you consider that those people could be anywhere in the world, working in rotation, using different channels of contact, it starts to become a problem that is not easily solved alone.

We used native integrations with email, push notifications, SMS, phone calls as well as tooling like APMs, Observability tools, Slack, and others.

We observed reliable acknowledgement times of under 1 minute. This meant that the right people were looking at the problem as soon as humanly possible resulting in average MTTR times of under 1 hour.

What type of resources you like/use the most when in need of support? Knowledge Base, Ops Guides, LinkedIn/Twitch streams, 1o1 with Devops Advocate/Account Manager/Solutions Consultant, Community Forums, PagerDuty University training/certifications or other. Tell us why!:

Knowledge Base. Ops Guides.

The Ops Guides on Incident Response best practices are a great resource for those starting out or seeking to improve their overall posture.

Do you have a favorite PagerDuty product and/or API, integration? Tell us why!:
This will sound weird but email to alert. When everything else is down, the internet is on fire and our front line staff or partners need to get someone's attention - email is the most reliable way to get in contact, page the right people and kick off the conversation.

What feature you like to see implemented in our Operations Cloud ecosystem in the future?:
Not sure if this already exists but trend analysis on postmortem documents by analysing the content using AI to surface developing risks.