PagerDuty
Incident Management & Operations Performance Software
4,6 /5 (176 reviews) Write a Review!
Bye Bye to old school on-call practices
Pros
PagerDuty is incredibly easy to setup and use. Creating new teams, on-call schedules, and escalation policies can be done in a matter of minutes. You can go from manually looking up people via a google calendar or an excel sheet, to engaging an on-call resource in 2 minutes or less from the great app while you are on the beach.
The integration with Slack is great, no other way to say it. Very useful for incident notifications for those teams that rely heavily on Slack.
Cons
The reporting functionality of PagerDuty needs some further enhancements. Obtaining certain data such as "what users are using which contact methods" for example still needs to be provided by contacting their Support team. The filtering of the Visibility console needs work and is currently limited to "All Teams" or a single team.
PagerDuty : A solution to almost every problem you didn't know you had yet
The software just works. We have had almost thirty thousand alerts flow through PagerDuty since we first started using it. The software completely replaced a rather broken SMS / Email alert chain overnight and has been by far the most valuable product we have purchased for keeping our system uptime levels where they need to be.
Lastly a personal experience which I will always cherish. It's a snowy winter day and you're on call, but you needed paperless, and cat food, and pedlyte and diapers and other bits, so you took your 2 year old to a big box store. You're all the way at the back of the store and your phone goes off with "Something's broken... Something's Broken... It's your Fault! ... It's your Fault!..." In the box store, with a full cart and a toddler.
Next thing you know... you're flying through the box store to the front, diapers falling out of the cart, sippy cup lost, toys missing, and toddler singing along with your phone since he now knows the words quite well. Get to the front, abandon the cart, the two children's voices still going full tilt, and get out to the parking lot just in the nick of time to production by ninja resizing a set of boxes as they are almost to the point of falling all over themselves.
No one noticed. Thanks to PagerDuty.
And now I'm *still* known as "The Something's Broken" dude by the managers of that store. They sing it to me every time I'm there 2 years later.
Pros
Integration with CloudWatch, webhooks, Jira is outstanding, functional, and reliable. The application has gotten better over the years I have used it.
Handles real issues in real time with everything you need
Allows on-call individuals to customize their notification scheme to fit their life. Having full control over when, where and how you are "dinged" is just awesome.
Cons
It's a little expensive per user if you need simple API things. The rule set for routing isn't as good as VictorOps for the same price point.
PagerDuty is missing a "default route" option like VictorOps has. This is minor, because it's rather trivial to setup an extra account and use that "extra dummy account" as the "Default". I'm counting this as a "con" since we have had to do this for every single deployment of PagerDuty I've worked on where we wish to have alerts go to a team, but not actually notify anyone.
Lastly, business-hours-only alerting is a little weak. (Maybe it has gotten better.) Every implementation I've found, we need to have some sort of queued' alerts which we don't want to wake us up in the middle of the night but we want to or need to know about next business day situation we have had to work hard to implement in PagerDuty.
On-call software with rich features
I have been using PagerDuty for 1 year now, and I'm with the product so far. The only negative thing about the PagerDuty is the big latency during the incidents.
Pros
PagerDuty does the job. It's gonna wake you up in the middle of the night, no matter what. The number of ways they are providing for acknowledging an incident is great. You can get a call, an SMS message, a push notification on the browser, or a mobile notification for an incident.
Cons
PagerDuty has some latency when it comes to acknowledging incidents. After acknowledging an incident by using the mobile app, getting an additional phone call about the incident is a little bit annoying.
Great solution for on-call and incident management for any organisation!
We have implemented PagerDuty across our SRE and Support organizations and are beginning to roll it out to our engineering teams. This is providing us rapid Incident response and rapid engagement of teams to assist during incidents, no matter what time of day it is or where the teams are geographically located.
Pros
PagerDuty very easy to configure and use, I've given access to team leads with no instructions and they've been up and running that day.
Cons
It'd be great if PagerDuty could integrate with all versions of Jira natively without a 3rd party plugin.
Great product, helps us a lot
As much as i hate to see a call from pagerduty, i know its doing its job. Its served the purpose well, its rare that we have to login and change settings since you can ack and resolve from phone, or slack.
You could add snooze option to the slackbot, that would be awesome!
Pros
- The flow of events, mainly. How it goes from Triggered, to ACK, to resolved with snooze options, it feels natural.
- Notification flow: How I can set up to notify my phone, wait two minutes before texting me, and wait five minutes before calling me.
- Slack integration
Cons
- Configuration can use some redesign. Its hard to find some settings sometimes. I told a coworker about updating notifications, and it took them a while to figure out where they can do that.
- Some important features are hidden behind a higher tier plan, eg: analytics.
The best option if you need to be alerted for when things go down
We were tired of paging everyone all the time on things going down or coming back up. Now it pages one person during business hours only. Also if the server comes back up it'll close the ticket for us and resolve the call. Our admins can now sleep at nights and not have to respond to every page with people trying to figure out who is handling the situation.
Pros
Most? There are so many features with pagerduty. I like it only alerts one person on call instead of the old way we use to page people. We use to page everyone on everything. Now it's just the person on call and he doesn't respond it goes to the next person. Very nice setup.
Cons
Scheduling times is a bit difficult for me to grasp, but once you figure it out you only have to set it up once.
Helps me sleep at night
PagerDuty keeps my entire team in the loop when something goes wrong with our app. We couldn't deliver the level of service that we do without PagerDuty
Pros
I love that Pagerduty has integrations with all of the application monitoring tools that we use. If anything starts to act up, Pagerduty makes sure we are aware of it.
Cons
Nothing really. The pricing is fair, the reliability is flawless.
Pager Duty
Helps monitor critical systems and alerting
Pros
The alerting, even when you turn the volume down on your phone if an alerts triggers the volume will get turned back up for that alarm
Cons
After a few years the price started to increase.
PagerDuty make it feel more like a pleasure than a Duty
Surprisingly easy to setup rotating schedules, schedule maintenance window exceptions, and have alerts triggered from many sources including email.
No one on call can say they didn't hear their phone anymore.. you will be phones, emailed and SMS messaged.. and it will loop until you (or someone else on rotation) knowledges the issue.
Pros
Easy to setup.
Trigger alerts via emails.
Good interface.
Integrates easily with MS Teams.
Rotating schedules for multiple team members.
Easy to make schedule exceptions.
Easy to acknowledge alerts via email, phone, app or SMS.
Cons
I can't really think of any Cons.
I really enjoyed getting this setup and benefiting from the easy alerts.
Pager Duty - Proof you get what you pay for
We immediately handled the overflow of noise from Nagios, AppDynamics, Dotcom-Monitor, SCOM(from our dc provider) and were able to drop a cellular device using the centralized phone contact with Pager-Duty. We also were able to put our on-call schedule into PagerDuty to realize immediately who was on-call for what product, in what region. There was a very immediate value add realized from even just trialing PagerDuty.
Pros
I tried a competitor's product which was a free notification manager up to 11 people. It took me 3 days to get anywhere with a basic task of integrating 3 of our noisiest alerts. Then I tried the PagerDuty trial and got 2 of our noisiest alerts built out in 1 day. I added 3 more over the next 2 days to go well over the targeted mark. Coworkers were excited to help put time and effort into the system as opposed to the free tool which I couldn't seem to get any traction with. The alerts were immediately available, they were easy to get posting to my cell phone, and adding additional users was a cinch. The tool unfolds and becomes more useful the more time you put into it where some tools you struggle to get right and then you're afraid to make changes.
Cons
The UI is a bit quirky in the scheduler which is a pretty important view if you have a rotating on-call shift you're trying to tie down. There was a lot of "can't delete before you delete elsewhere" scenarios where there could have been a "will also delete these elsewhere, are you sure?" scenarios. What you gain in ease of use and stability in the mobile platform you lose in overall functionality, it is simple almost to a fault and while it seems silly there's no skinning of the mobile app to better suit your personality in a hyper-customized world. I'll know shortly if they're willing to go longer but they seem to be sticklers for the exact trial length + only a little. Corporations interested in putting in a full month long or longer trial that may need that amount of time to show value, create a SOW, and have a PO issued may be stuck in limbo for a few weeks.
Ensure High availability of your product to the end user by integrating it with PagerDuty
PagerDuty helped our product to become highly stable and it ensured high availability to the end user, overall had a great experience with it.
Pros
PagerDuty is used to send alert notifications to developer,
We can use it in a way that when ever failure occurs notify the developer who is scheduled to be on-call,
Even a customer escalation to a email can trigger a pagerDuty notification alert, when the receiver email ID is subscribed with PagerDuty,
PagerDuty has escalation policies , in which multiple users can be in different level, if level 1 failed to resolve the issue, the level 2 dev gets a alert etc ..
and the dev's can be scheduled to rotate there levels in fixed time intervals, like weekly bases,
It Dose a good job of maintaining the issue states & the alerted issue has different lifecycle such as triggered, acknowledged , resolved, snoozed,
It maintains analytical dashboards on dev's which shows the responsiveness of the developer , like how many issues they have resolved and what is the average resolution time or have they escalated it etc ..
it maintains history of alerts, it has good customer support,
the resolution note's can also be added against the alert,
We can configure the alerts as Low and High Urgency , based on which we can have different type of notifications,
types of notifications are phone call, message, email, push notification in pd app etc ...
pagerDuty deduplicates the alerts with same message, if a incident is in open state and if same incident occurs again and again , it will not be raised.
Cons
Sometimes when i resolve the alert on web, i still get a call on phone,
If the incident was resigned by the developer to a other user who is not in the escalation policy and if he did not answer the alert the escalation chain stops, instead it should be thrown back to older escalation policy from ware it begun
PagerDuty is the perfect solution for managing our production support team
PagerDuty gives us peace of mind. With PagerDuty it's great to know that the right person will be contacted as soon as a production incident is logged. Keeping track of who is on support is no longer a hassle. I can't imagine us managing production support without it, especially considering the fact that the team is spread across multiple continents. I can't recommend it enough!
Pros
- Great integration support
- Mobile app works great and continues to get frequent updates
- Flexible configuration options without being overly complicated
- Allows us to easily manage our after-hours roster and schedules
- Ability to create incident reports is a great time saver
Cons
- Pricing is a bit more than some competitors
An Excellent Service for Orgs with complex alerting needs
PagerDuty has met all of our needs to-date. We reassess vendors regularly, and have yet to try someone else.
Pros
PagerDuty has an incredible featureset that spans just about every "on call" use case you could dream up. They highlight new use cases regularly in blog posts and Account Management is pretty solid.
Cons
Pricing is far higher than competitors which makes it a tough pill to swallow with annual billing. There's not much focus on controlling costs and very little leniency on things like prorating user seats if we have a new hire (it appears to be billed as a full month). With the highest price point in the industry, Account Managers usually have leniency to retain customers by avoiding these nickel-and-dime approaches to billing.
Did everything we needed it to
Kept our team groups and rotations organized and informed of production impacting problems. Easy to use so was there to help us solve our problems, not to be yet another configuration challenge to overcome.
Pros
Simple to use intuitive interface via web and smartphone app, third party integrations with Nagios, Slack, and Atlassian products (Jira), as well as custom webhooks for use with monitoring tools (grafana). Overrides available for scheduled rotations. Custom alert sounds was a nice touch.
Cons
Attention from customer support requires being a larger customer paying a significant amount of money. Which we were when I used and configured this, and it worked well for us.
The standard in on-call notification
I have used pagerduty for years, and I have to say I use it as the gold standard for other notification services. So far, competitors either don't have nearly the same level of features, or cost a fortune.
Pros
Easy to set up. Inexpensive. Reliable. It has a number of integration options for various monitoring systems, and they are always adding more. They also have generic versioned APIs for any custom software you might bring to the table.
Cons
The Mobile app sometimes has issues refreshing when there is a lot of activity.
Does way more than what is on the box if people knows to use it.
Overall its been amazing and always a friend of operations team now spreading to development teams.
Pros
- Setting up override is 30 seconds task.
- Reminder of when Im going on-call and my own notification settings is a life saviour.
- Slack integration
- Api integration
- Postmortems made easier.
- ITIL followed in the core in an automated fashion making incident management a cake walk.
Cons
- No way to export the schedule to excel. Only option is to do a calendar export. Which is not what a team lead or manager will want to do payroll.
- Would be nicer to have billing based on number of schedules/services rather than number of users as we are in a devops world where all need to be able to login/resolve alerts. This forces teams to limit access taking them away from being "devops".
- I am not a big fan of the schedule UI. It will be nicer to have days separated with lines on the rota.
- In general the amount of invested on this tool is very minimal by a user, so it is worth simplifying schedules and services for people to understand it easier. The word service itself is misleading for the users.
Great for On-call
Great!
Pros
I like that we can easily resolve through the app.
Cons
I don't like that we can only have 3 users.
PagerDuty review
Pros
Good customer support, documentation and API
Cons
Lack of filtering/search options. Not possible to search for specific alerts without the use of the API. It's a pain.
No audit logs to see who made changes and what the changes are. Lack of features in the PagerDuty slack plug-in as compared to other alternatives such as OpsGenie
Value for money
Web application is seamless and we had to contact support for any kind of question.
Pros
Seamless workflow management, once the workflow is setup everything works just as expected. PagerDuty has many integrations which allows us to setup alerts just by choosing the application, which is a great thing for small teams where development costs are very high.
Cons
Cannot think of anything from my standpoint, we are a small team and PagerDuty has everything we need and it works as expected every single time.
PagerDuty is the defacto incident management software
Pros
PagerDuty takes the complication out of scheduling and lets us focus on keeping our services up and healthy. We set the schedule and forget about it.
Cons
The Terraform provider is very buggy. We often find we have to go through multiple rounds of guess and check to get Terraform config to match up with how we want it to end up in PagerDuty. I understand that Terraform is not the primary UX you are focused on but for Terraform power users managing many teams and services it is indispensable.
Excellent Product
Having PagerDuty set up to trigger alarms to will notify my team is truly priceless. Whether we are on duty, or in an On-Call scenario, PagerDuty is always around to let us know when things go wrong.
Pros
I love how reliable PagerDuty is. My company has PagerDuty implemented for not only our On-Call regiment, but also with alerting. Since we've been using PagerDuty, we've ALWAYS been notified of issues that we've created alerts for. Sure, it's not always fun to receive a call when On-Call, but we can always rely on PagerDuty to be functioning correctly to ensure we are informed in the most critical of moments. Keep up the good work!
Cons
No cons to report, honestly. Other than having a critical moment where PagerDuty is having to be utilized. However that is no fault of the PD Team!
From 10,000 emails to one actionable alert: PagerDuty
I started trialling PagerDuty and other alert aggregation services after accidentally sending myself 10,000 emails. One thing PagerDuty does and does well, is cut through the noise, and helps you focus on the actionable issues. With integration with almost every alerting tool out there, including basic email - integrating a PagerDuty alert into your application or service is far too easy. The pricing is reasonable, and the phone and SMS alerting options work well, even in New Zealand. The PagerDuty app itself makes being on call so much easier, with simple acknowledgement and resolution actions, next to escalation and incident collaboration features. Having user controlled customisation, you can setup the alerting to suit your connectivity and support your sleep. After 6 years on call for a critical NZ wide system, I can say PagerDuty is refreshing change to the game. Don't hate the pager...
Pros
Simple setup and easy first alert.
Comprehensive incident management, reporting and analytics to focus on what matters.
Highly configurable alerting that is controllable by the recipient themselves.
Easy escalation, resolution and communication features in mobile application and via the web.
Well supported SMS and Phone alerting and incident management - Internationally
Quick and easy support for the product - from a great PagerDuty team.
Less noise, more actionable alerts with comprehensive de-duplication and alert filtering options.
Cons
PagerDuty is unforgiving of poorly written interfaces generating errors and despite ignoring ones' phone while in meetings, the alert will get to you, no matter what you are doing!
While I love the 'PagerDuty' alerting and am amused by the 'Engineer Laughing' alert sound - having more options for custom, per incident, alert notification sounds in the Mobile app would be great.
Powers our on-call engineers
Without PagerDuty we could not run our on-call rotation. The learning curve is pretty steep, but once you have things configured correctly its a fantastic tool
Pros
- Love the on-call rota, the ability to schedule overrides and multiple call out hierarchies
- The wide range of alerts and abilities to interact with the product via multiple channels
- Integrates with most tools natively, and there is always email alerts to fall back on
- Ability to customize alerts based on email content
Cons
- The learning curve is pretty steep
- Suffer from alert overload and the AI features are extra
Operations Platform which works
Pros
-multiple integrations with many tools.
-easy to set up and use
-mobile App
-stable
Cons
Some of the integrations, at least at the moment, are not ways. Such as Zendesk and PagerDuty where you can only create incidents when a Zendesk case is created but not the other way around.
The mobile App does not have all the features as the web platform.
Functional, and reliable
Fairly good, minus top drawbacks. Mostly gets out of my way.
Pros
Extremely reliable, gets out of your way, lots of integrations
Cons
Confusing why there are schedules, teams, rotations etc. too much burden and it’s not simplistic to setup for first time use. Setting overrides and viewing on call schedule should be at the forefront. Should have out of office integration
Issues that use to "fall through the cracks" or receive no attention/acknowledgement at all have been almost eliminated totally. The time for a technical resource to be alerted to an incident and acknowledge it has gone from 15-25-35-45mins to 5 minutes or less. Teams are now proactively alerted to issues that may turn into something big before the customer notices any impact.