Incident Management & Operations Performance Software
4.5/5 (48 reviews)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.
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.
Overall, Pagerduty was a great way for us to get started creating an alert system because it's easy of use and integrates. It works well and has little to no downtime and provides a ton of features and is really reliable. However, the UI is not intuitive and pretty and the alert system is robotic making it not "fun" to use. It is pricey overall if you don't intend to use all of its features.
Pros
The thing I like most about Pagerduty is how easy it is to set-up, get working, and consistently be reliable to send alerts at proper times. These things made it easy for us to integrate into our software using their API.
Cons
It is a bit pricey, especially if you don't plan on using all of the functionality and features that PagerDuty. For us, PagerDuty was overkill for the kind of alert/messaging system we were looking for so we were paying extra for these features we weren't using. Secondly, the alert/messaging system feels pretty robotic and is not very customizable. It feels like Pagerduty was built for engineers thought it could be used in other sectors.
Our experience has been good, but it all depends on your implementation. If you don't plan your implementation and set your rules properly, you're going to have a bad time. Read through the implementation guides and best practices before you pull the trigger on making this product live.
Pros
PagerDuty makes it so easy to set up your paging rules and schedules as well as integrate it with your monitoring solution. We use it with What's Up Gold and it does a wonderful job of making sure that the right people are informed of an outage.
Cons
Sometimes if there are multiple alerts in a short amount of time, you can get overwhelmed with notifications and phone calls. I've been in the situation before where when being paged multiple times at once, I couldn't actually acknowledge the pages because my phone kept getting called over and over again for different alerts.
Pros
Pager Duty overall is a great solution for handling on call escalations for server and environment issues. It makes it easy to integrate with third part solutions to generate actionable alerts for on call engineers. If you are using a product that doesn't natively integrate with Pager Duty (which is rare), you can use their email integration to submit issues that way.
Cons
The interface for adjusting the on call schedule could be improved - when updating a schedule to cover an engineer while they are on vacation, it can be really confusing to setup.
We have been able to roll out this tool to our team as well as others that we work along side. It has made it much easier to communicate alerts that are received. It has also significantly lowered the amount of noisy alerts that we receive as well as assist us in not missing alerts when we are not at our desks. A very convenient tool to have.
Pros
This tool makes monitoring so much easier by bringing everything into one place.
Easy to use, easy to set up, and already integrated into a lot of existing tools.
Notification preferences, and schedules, and escalation policies make life SO much better!
Cons
The terminology is a little hard to wrap your head around.
Has elements that are dependent on others and makes it hard to clean up after you have already set it up.
Need a pay rise? Get PagerDuty! OK, subscribing to PagerDuty does not guarantee you a pay rise, but it will definitely lessen the number of complaints from your bosses in regards to the response time to server downtime. However, this may lead to a neat pay rise when your bosses realized that you are getting more efficient in resolving the downtime.
Not only will PagerDuty alert you of server downtime, but it will literally alert you of any incidents that you may or have encountered (e.g email from clients, email from data centers, servers reaching a certain threshold, etc).
Another feature that it has is that it can integrate with most of the tech sites out there (AWS, HipChat, Pingdom, etc). For Pingdom, instead of having Pingdom alerting us for every downtime, we just integrate it with PagerDuty. PagerDuty IS our focal point of alert for all our monitoring systems.
With the scheduling feature, your team will be able to monitor the servers' health 365/24/7.
With PagerDuty, our response time had improved tremendously and this leads to a decrease in potential revenue loss. We had tried its competitors out there (shan't name them), but nothing come close to PagerDuty.
The only drawback is its pricing. However, the quality and service (and don't forget the potential thousands that it can save you) provided by PagerDuty is second to none.
Highly recommended for businesses that depends on 24/7 servers uptime and definitely for business that provides 24/7 support.
Pros
1) Alerts for all kinds of incidents
2) Integration with most of the common and popular monitoring and tech sites
3) Easy-to-use scheduler
Cons
Pricing (its value over cost depends on the potential revenue loss for your business)
Pros
While not super easy to setup, it's generally a one time things. Once you've configured PagerDuty you're free to explore all the integrations available. We use it connected to our AWS monitoring, DataDog, Rollbar and bunch of custom integrations.
PagerDuty also helped us reduce to amount of alerts - it's easy to go to far, and being woken up in the middle of the night for something completely irrelevant helps you make better decisions about platform monitoring.
Cons
Not all the escalation rules are clear. Editing schedules could be easier - if you do that on a one-off basis it's usually by trial and error.
If you don't have a 24-hour support center/team, this is a great tool to manage your queue in after hours scenarios.
Pros
Very simple to manage and make adjustments to the operational flow for our team. The app is straightforward and works well. Text message and phone call features also are very hepful.
Cons
The setup wasn't the easiest. Integrating our support took a little time to ensure that it was functioning correctly.
Knowing that you will get notified if a High priority ticket gets in the queue (without having to pick at your phone every time you get a work email like it used to be before PagerDuty).
Pros
You can login and see the schedule for all the teams involved in the on call process. It is nice to be able to find out not only about the current week, but the future on call times as well.
Cons
The reminders when your on call turn ends. I see the need for the reminder when starts, but I don't really see the point of the reminder when it ends.
Pros
Pager Duty consists of quite simple set up. It provides quick alerts for all sorts of incidents. It is integrated with the most common and famous monitoring and technology sites which is considered to be the most interesting feature. This is the straight forward app that works very well. It's feature of text messaging and phone call are equally helpful. Simply by login on call process, one can easily see schedule for all the team workers involved.
Cons
There are not any downsides of this software. One of the issue is setting up escalation levels in the beginning seems to be difficult. While integrating our support, it takes quite long time to make sure whether it is working correctly.
Pros
Trustworthy notifications with user configurable channels. I like alerts by text and app, with a phone call backup. I don't know what the other guys on my team have set up.
It has a mobile app You can set it override system volume so you can still hear your alerts even if you forgot to turn the volume up on your device Ability to set how many and how often you are alerted before it ends up escalating to the next person.
Cons
There is some rigidity to the scheduling which has some obvious workarounds that work for us.
Does currently not integrate with Logicmonitor via the API. - Nobody likes getting up at 2 AM.
Pros
Timely alerting and love the pagerduty smartphone app user friendliness.the best part of this app is integration with almost anything. Good work on that.
Cons
Only grieveance I have is they have lot of improvements scope in their support team. I have had a not the best experience whenever I needed technical support.
I'm not really sure how I lived without PagerDuty. Once I started using it, I can't imagine not using it. Our ops group was/is small, and we needed eyes on at all hours, with a failsafe way to make sure someone got woken up. PagerDuty has been dutifully letting us know things are broken for 3 years, for a fraction of the cost of a manned "NOC".
Pros
First and foremost, that it works as advertised. The core product has done what its supposed to do without fail for us. Additionally, the ability to effortlessly set overrides to schedules is something I've found very helpful.
But perhaps more than anything, honestly, are the people. Everyone I've interacted with, be it emails with support, or discussions with our rep on the phone has been fantastic. They're enthusiastic, know the product, and eminently helpful.
Cons
I can only think of one minor thing: the phone number that alerts come from has a tendency to change. In some senses though, this is a bit of a "pro". From discussion with support, this changes because of the redundant outbound calling facilities used. So I'm happy to trade the minor inconvenience of occasionally not recognizing a number as being PagerDuty in return for knowing that my alerts will go out.
Pros
Easy to use oncall management system. Pagerduty has integrations with major monitoring SAAS and open source tools. Pagerduty product features are easy to understand and less learning curve. You can get your own domain name first half if you are a big enterprise customer.
Cons
Their certain features have limitations such as their Live Call routing only allows single digit dial. They can expand that. Also, their API have some limitations and sometimes to get an object you might have to make 2-3 calls depending on what you want to retrieve through API.
I'm glad my workplace has PagerDuty to ensure our notifications get routed and escalated correctly. We dabbled with alot of other methods and products to do what PagerDuty does and it gets the job done.
Pros
Its straightforward, yet flexible, mostly easy to connect with your monitoring service and get using right away. The schedules are not the most flexible, but that probably just creates more consistency. The notification options ensure that your engineers/techs wont miss their notification.
Cons
A little costly for small shops for a service that many other services or home-build products can do, but it does it well.
Help us to respond on time customer incidents. With multiple level responding configuration, we can believe we don't miss any urgent incidents.
Pros
A powerful alerting mechanism helps quickly connect security incidents and outages to right people.
I love the way it is designed to escalate incidents to people at many levels. It guarantees that an incident must be notified to at least a right person.
Cons
In the case where a person answers "Acknowledged", I would like it to have an easier way to temporarily turn off repeated alerts.
Pros
It has been able to do everything I have wanted. API integration to email integration, it has worked great.
Cons
Not much negative to say, it's a straight forward and easy to use software.
PagerDuty has been one of the most useful services we've purchased as a consulting firm. Our company does 24/7 monitoring of customer systems, and the ability to have an automated system contact us whenever there is an urgent issue has really helped push our service to the next level. The application is very easy to work with, changes take minimal time to implement, and if you have any questions, the product team is always incredibly helpful.
Pros
- Let's you set up on call rotations with multiple users.
- The product can be set up to contact you in various ways sequentially (eg email first, then text, then call).
- Lots of useful integration with other apps, and a developer API.
- Incredibly cost effective for how important the service is.
- Reliable! In three years I've never once ran into an issue where the system failed to contact a person, or where the application configuration was unavailable (that was unplanned).
Cons
- The only con i can think of is that setting up escalation levels is a little confusing at first. After working with it for about half hour it makes sense and you'll be setting up on call schedules quickly and easily.
Overall, we're very pleased with PagerDuty and it is an essential system within our organization!
Pros
We loved how PagerDuty allowed us to improve our customer service with quick and frequent reminders, easy access to messages in our system, and easy transfers/follow up functions!
Cons
PagerDuty was not a particularly elegant-looking application. It's presentation and user interface, particularly on the mobile app, has some opportunity to make it more immediately accessible to new team members.
PagerDuty is used throughout our Technology department mainly for Production Support.
Pros
PagerDuty allows for robust customization for escalation policies and time between escalation.
It has a nice way to schedule primary and secondary on call support and notifies the person when they're on call or off call.
Cons
There should be an ability to snooze bulk of incident at the same time, currently we would have to do it incident by incident.
Pros
Pagerduty has great scheduling features and excellent options for customizing your notifications. You can use this service for *all kinds* of notification needs, hardware, software, hook it up to API's and the sky's the limit.
Cons
Pagerduty has one type of pricing structure, they don't match the use of the software, so one account could have 1 user and 60,000 alerts/year and it will cost a tenth the price of an account with 10 users that gets 1 alert/year.
Pros
I like that it's simple to use and does it's main job well. I get alerted properly and it's easy to acknowledge incidents.
Cons
I believe the functionality could be a little cleaner and more enhanced. I'd like to see it integrate with our ticketing system better.
Pros
PagerDuty has a nice way to schedule primary and secondary on call support and notifies the person when they're on call or off call. Also, Slack integration!!!
Cons
I would like to see PagerDuty mobile app allow users to add and customize alerts with email, text or phone calls.
Pros
Great and simple api. PagerDuty will fit easily with pretty much any software.
Great feature for people on duty to select the proper way to reach them. SMS, email, phone call ....
Cons
Escalation rules are sometimes really hard to properly configure.
Is it difficult to see in what order people will be called
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.