Page it to the Limit

You've probably heard of MTTR. That alone is a big reason why it comes up in discussions about improving incident response. But is MTTR the correct metric? Is it enough? There's plenty to debate about MTTR. Rich joins Mandi to talk through some of what PagerDuty engineers are thinking about MTTR.

The transition from traditional monitoring technologies to modern observability tools can leave teams confused. Satbir Singh joins us to talk about the new goals of observability tooling and how it will help teams conquer challenges in complex systems.

Today’s episode is about technical debt, not as a cautionary tale, but as a lens. We take a closer look at where debt comes from, how it quietly rewires teams, and why paying it off is rarely just a matter of “cleaning up code.” Along the way, we’ll examine two real-world stories: one where unaddressed debt led to a $440 million disaster, and another where a company used an infrastructure overhaul to rebuild architectural trust. This is about more than code. It’s about momentum, memory, and the systems we inherit.

Alert fatigue can happen to anyone working in environments with a lot of signals from different sources. In security, teams are dealing with potential threats reported by tools running across the organization. Dealing with all the alerts, whether they are positive, negative, false positives, false negatives, is a lot of mental stress and requires cognitive capacity that can be depleated. In this episode, we speak with Boaz Barzel, Field CTO at OX Security, about his research on the subject.

AI used to wait for instructions. Now, it doesn’t always ask. In this opening episode, we explore the rise of agentic AI systems that don’t just respond to input, but take initiative, set goals, and act on their own. We break down what agentic really means, why it’s different from traditional automation, and what kinds of design and trust challenges this shift introduces. Along the way, we look at how this plays out in tools that summarize, schedule, and trigger real-world workflows — and why autonomy sounds good in theory but gets messy fast. Whether you're building LLM-powered copilots, evaluating autonomous workflows, or just trying to keep your incident response human-aware, this is the groundwork you’ll need for what’s coming next.