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
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
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
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
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
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
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Jimmy Flores
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