Trustpilot Gives PagerDuty a Rave Review

Trustpilot is a leading independent review platform – free and open to all. With more than 45 million reviews of over 230,000 companies, Trustpilot gives people a place to share and discover reviews of businesses, and gives every company the tools to turn consumer feedback into business results. Our mission is to bring people and businesses closer together to create ever-improving experiences for everyone. Trustpilot reviews are seen more than 3 billion times each month by consumers worldwide.

While consumers read and submit reviews at no cost, Trustpilot offers multi-tiered, subscription-based pricing for businesses to leverage additional services, like promoting their Trustpilot score in a “TrustBox” on their respective websites. Businesses leverage the TrustBox to promote their quality of products or services to customers and prospects. With this kind of scale, it is essential that the Trustpilot platform never lags or falters so they can continue to deliver real-time information to both customers and businesses.

Empowering Teams to Respond Faster

Morten Reinholdt Boelskifte, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager at Trustpilot, leads a team of SREs focused on website availability, online performance, incident response, and infrastructure. Any  platform downtime translates into lost customer traffic and loss of revenue. As a result, Boelskifte’s team must take action immediately when critical issues arise and address them with urgency. “3 billion reviews seen a month increases traffic on our infrastructure, and so it’s even more important for us to stay on top of everything,” said Boelskifte. “Ultimately, we ensure customer happiness.”

The PagerDuty platform, with its on call management, scheduling and automatic notification capabilities, make it easy for Trustpilot to engage the right people at the right time when business impacting issues arise. “On-call rotations are very easy to set up and maintain, even down to the minute. We can even create multiple scheduling layers to help balance the workload for our on-call resources,” said Boelskifte.

In addition to Boelskifte’s team, all engineering teams at Trustpilot have adopted PagerDuty. The flexibility to personalize individual notifications empowers team members to maximize their own efficiency. “Having teams be able to actually customize on an individual basis is quite powerful,” shared Boelskifte.

Driving Continuous Improvement

Trustpilot is a firm believer in continuous improvement, and tracks every incident and alert to identify ways for teams to become even more efficient and responsive when future issues arise. Trustpilot also tracks the number of alerts that teams receive, in an effort to combat alert fatigue.

“PagerDuty streamlines everything, addressing not just a specific alert, but the grouping of alerts. This enables us to see where we need to make changes,” said Boelskifte. By using PagerDuty Event Intelligence capabilities, Trustpilot can determine if alerts are properly categorized and acted upon. “We ask ourselves if it’s actually a critical alert (P1) or a lower priority P2 / P3 that can be addressed and resolved later, during the teams normal working hours. We want to figure out how we can prevent this in the future to reduce the risk of burnout for teams,” he added.  Ultimately, all of this helps effectively balance team workload and improve team health.

Boelskifte’s team also leverages blameless postmortems, which are part of PagerDuty Modern Incident Response. Events that occur during incidents are automatically documented so that best practices and key learnings can be incorporated into their incident response workflow. “The postmortem process is already set up in PagerDuty, and it’s more than self-explanatory on how to use it. It’s a pretty great feature,” Boelskifte said.

“PagerDuty will fit your business as it is right now, but it will also grow alongside you. Every time we produce something new, we automatically include PagerDuty in it.”

Morten Reinholdt Boelskifte, SRE Manager, Trustpilot

Smarter Development, Faster Innovation

At Trustpilot, all Engineering teams have full stack ownership, responsible for their applications and how services are set up and monitored. PagerDuty plays a key role in keeping the development engine running — all alerts are funneled into PagerDuty, thanks to the 300+ integrations that make it simple for Trustpilot to set up monitoring.

“The PagerDuty API really helps us. It’s well-documented, easy to use, but more than that, it’s so fast and easy to incorporate it into our entire pipeline. Every time we have a new service that we want to set up, we can incorporate PagerDuty into that,” said Boelskifte.

As Trustpilot continues to grow and evolve, Boelskifte anticipates that PagerDuty will be there every step of the way. With PagerDuty, Trustpilot can scale and deliver a faultless digital experience for their customers around the globe. PagerDuty empowers software engineers at Trustpilot to focus on innovation.  According to Boelskifte, “We are evolving all the time. We see a lot of adoption of PagerDuty at Trustpilot, and it’s clear that PagerDuty can grow with us.”

To learn more about what PagerDuty can do for your organization and sign up for a free trial, visit www.pagerduty.com.