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.
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Overall experience has been very seamless. Very easy to setup and use. But a little on the expensive side.
Pros
- Easy Integrations
- Simple User Interface, very easy to navigate
- Lots of features and functionalities
- Very easy to setup
- Schedule creation and setting up rotation
Cons
Pagerduty is definitely the leader in this space, but it is fairly expensive and hence we have started looking at other options.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 8/10
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 7/10
PagerDuty has continually helped us in identifying the unusual issues and edge cases, now our product is stable, and we ensure high availability of our services , it has been a great experience with it
Pros
You can use pager duty for different purpose to get alerted and track the alert till the alert was addressed,
we use it for the alert on service down and failures, so that the product issue can be addressed and fixed at the earliest,
Pagerduty serves this purpose good, it alerts in different mediums and at different levels, and there is a rotation policy, if a level 1 user dose not addresses then it alerts the level 2 user and this rotation gos on till the issue is properly addressed, and there are good features like time tracking, historic analysis , team groping, different alert policies, scheduling the users to be on call, snoozing the alert, escalating to other user, etc
Cons
some times the web UI becomes slow, the app version dose not have all the features that the web version has
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Starter: $10/month billed monthly or $10/month billed annually for up to 6 users
Platform: $35 per user/month billed monthly or $29 per user/month billed annually
Platform business: $47 per user/month billed monthly or $39 per user/month billed annually
Enterprise: $119 per user/month billed monthly or $99 per user/month billed annually
Hosted by
Jimmy Flores