I was having a very interesting conversation with someone in our Marketing Department about the cadence of marketing and the over-abundance of technical content that exists today.  This got me thinking that I need to take a closer look at how the consumers of the content I am tasked with creating find said content.  There’s the way I might go about in my search, but perhaps people in different roles go abut it in a different way.  I’d like to share the path I’d take, discuss a few others and get your help.

For those of you that don’t know, a lot of my energy is around PagerDuty and the relationships we have with various partners.  For example, I try to put myself in the shoes of someone that might need to find out details on an integration.  Just as Sales has different phases, the first two of the five apply here – Awareness and Consideration.  I want to address the second phase first since to me I think it applies to a larger percentage of the possible audience out there.  (If you disagree, let me know!)

So on the “Consideration” phase, let’s say you already use either PagerDuty or AppDynamics and you are thinking of implementing the other solution but want to know how well they integrate, or work, together.  Here’s where I’d love to know your methodology.  For me – I’d go to Google and search for either “pagerduty appdynamics” or perhaps “pagerduty appdynamics integration”  – but that is only because “integrations” is a lot of what I am involved with.  And there are the perils that Google will autosuggest something like “pagerduty vs appdynamics” – but both are very different solutions with very different business value.  (Personally I can’t fathom not running both a system for instant notification like PagerDuty along with a true APM solution if I’ve got more than a simple application delivery chain to keep running optimally.  But that is content for another post some day.)

Or do you start with the site of one solution and search for the other?  Scroll through the 52 results on the AppDynamics search results?  PagerDuty’s search is AJAX and unfortunately I can’t share the link here, but below is a modified screenshot to give you a feel – you could bounce around the knowledge base, community or go to the integration page.  Please don’t take this as a judgement of either site –  I am only following the path of my initial example.  The goal is just to discuss different options for how someone might search for the answers they need.  Hopefully you can share with me how you’d go about it if it is different than what I discuss here.

There are so many other ways.  Would you search on YouTube? Perhaps open a support ticket and ask?  This last one isn’t something I’d think to do, but based on my time monitoring ticket queues I could see some folks going that route.  On that tangent – the great firms see Support as a market growth tool, not a cost center.  If you are a PagerDuty or Fastly customer you know how different that experience is when you deal with a firm that doesn’t cut corners on support.  But is there a path that would be your first impulse that I am missing here?

I also mentioned the Awareness phase.  How do you start the search if you aren’t even aware that an integration is even possible?  This is another spot where my experiences have caused bias in my thoughts.  Having spent years in the APM space, as well as years using PagerDuty to me it seems obvious that you’d want to integrate both solutions for many reasons.

Primarily to get the actionable information to the person that can do something about it in real time.  And of course many APM systems can be quite noisy, so any reduction there is so critical.  (To be clear NOT at all a statement about AppD – purely about the APM space in general.  All of the top APM solutions can be configured to reduce noise.)  But again – to me I see the integration of applications the only way to scale, be more effective, cut costs and drive more revenue.

But if you aren’t aware that PagerDuty could integrate with one of your other solutions – or visa-versa, what sources might cause you to stumble upon it?  Are the articles on LinkedIn, Medium or some other platform how you discover ways to do things you had never considered?  Or do you have to depend on consultants, system integrators or sales engineers to point out the tricks and implementation schemes that are out there?

I know that my view point is heavily skewed by my past roles and I am really curious how people in other roles with other paths might find out about these sorts of things.  If I touched on how you’d do it, or perhaps totally missed what to you seems obvious, I’d love your help.  Please tell me – am I on the right track that Google is your first choice here, or have I missed some good avenues to get the information about integrations to the right people?