How PagerDuty deploys safely with Datadog

Mia Henderson, site reliability engineer at PagerDuty, discussed how her team integrated automated metric checks into their deployment process during Datadog Summit San Francisco in 2017. The team initially incorporated a canary phase into their build pipeline to limit the risk of introducing bugs and performance issues into production. However, they later adopted continuous deployment, automating the process of deploying and monitoring the canary code. A pivotal incident led them to automate the process of evaluating their canary releases by creating scripts to check key metrics using Datadog's Ruby client library. PagerDuty now integrates automated canary checks into their build and deploy pipeline, checking metrics after five minutes of a canary release. Mia encourages others to adopt this discipline and integrate metric checks into continuous deployment processes.