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ITOps and DevOps Spending 10 Extra Hours Per Week Resolving Incidents During Pandemic

More than 80% of organizations have experienced a significant increase in pressure on digital services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey by PagerDuty.

These same companies cited a 47% increase in the number of daily incidents, resulting in 62% of IT and DevOps practitioners spending more than 10 extra hours per week resolving incidents, compared to six months ago.

The global survey, which involved more than 700 DevOps and IT practitioners across North America, EMEA and APJ, also shows that 40% of organizations expect this digital pressure to get worse in the next six to 12 months.

"The pandemic has irreversibly changed the way we live, work, communicate, learn and shop. We now exist in a digital default world and the stakes are high. Downtime can mean millions in lost revenue and keeping digital services running perfectly is a complex job," said Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at PagerDuty. "This research underscores the fact that every company is facing the challenge of accelerating their digital transformation to keep pace with customer expectations and needs, while grappling with increased digital complexity and strain. It also candidly points to the human cost of this dramatic change — an immense strain on the practitioners charged with keeping digital services running which can lead to massive burnout."

Since the pandemic began, 55% of respondents divulged that they are asked to resolve incidents during their personal time five or more times a week, and 39% say they are firefighting or focused on unplanned work 100% of the time, which leaves no room for proactive, innovative work.

As a result, organizations have had to cancel or delay an average of 7.6 projects in the last three to six months.

Other survey highlights include:

■ The top reason respondents stay at their jobs is because of the teams and the camaraderie in DevOps/IT (71%).

■ 58% said they are grateful for the opportunity to play an integral role in the digital economy.

■ 53% said the pressure to keep digital services running perfectly has reached unprecedented levels in the last 3-6 months.

■ 46% feel overwhelmed when thinking about the next 12 months and feel the volume of work in the future will be significant.

■ 79% believe digital acceleration has to be their company's number one priority in 2021.

■ 51% cite intelligent data and insights that help prioritize where to spend time are critical.

■ 64% believe automation that removes manual processes will be critical to do more with less and meet increased demand on digital services.

■ 69% believe smart integrations are critical to doing their job better.

"As organizations strive to capitalize on the new norm of digital first, they must modernize and automate how they manage their digital operations, because the old approach doesn't work anymore. You need AI and machine learning, and automation, in order to remove complexity and be proactive and predictive," Obstler continued. "Any company that fails to mature their approach, compromises customer experience, employee health, critical projects and risks significantly impacting cost structure."

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ITOps and DevOps Spending 10 Extra Hours Per Week Resolving Incidents During Pandemic

More than 80% of organizations have experienced a significant increase in pressure on digital services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey by PagerDuty.

These same companies cited a 47% increase in the number of daily incidents, resulting in 62% of IT and DevOps practitioners spending more than 10 extra hours per week resolving incidents, compared to six months ago.

The global survey, which involved more than 700 DevOps and IT practitioners across North America, EMEA and APJ, also shows that 40% of organizations expect this digital pressure to get worse in the next six to 12 months.

"The pandemic has irreversibly changed the way we live, work, communicate, learn and shop. We now exist in a digital default world and the stakes are high. Downtime can mean millions in lost revenue and keeping digital services running perfectly is a complex job," said Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at PagerDuty. "This research underscores the fact that every company is facing the challenge of accelerating their digital transformation to keep pace with customer expectations and needs, while grappling with increased digital complexity and strain. It also candidly points to the human cost of this dramatic change — an immense strain on the practitioners charged with keeping digital services running which can lead to massive burnout."

Since the pandemic began, 55% of respondents divulged that they are asked to resolve incidents during their personal time five or more times a week, and 39% say they are firefighting or focused on unplanned work 100% of the time, which leaves no room for proactive, innovative work.

As a result, organizations have had to cancel or delay an average of 7.6 projects in the last three to six months.

Other survey highlights include:

■ The top reason respondents stay at their jobs is because of the teams and the camaraderie in DevOps/IT (71%).

■ 58% said they are grateful for the opportunity to play an integral role in the digital economy.

■ 53% said the pressure to keep digital services running perfectly has reached unprecedented levels in the last 3-6 months.

■ 46% feel overwhelmed when thinking about the next 12 months and feel the volume of work in the future will be significant.

■ 79% believe digital acceleration has to be their company's number one priority in 2021.

■ 51% cite intelligent data and insights that help prioritize where to spend time are critical.

■ 64% believe automation that removes manual processes will be critical to do more with less and meet increased demand on digital services.

■ 69% believe smart integrations are critical to doing their job better.

"As organizations strive to capitalize on the new norm of digital first, they must modernize and automate how they manage their digital operations, because the old approach doesn't work anymore. You need AI and machine learning, and automation, in order to remove complexity and be proactive and predictive," Obstler continued. "Any company that fails to mature their approach, compromises customer experience, employee health, critical projects and risks significantly impacting cost structure."

Hot Topics

The Latest

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 14, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud network observability...