PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

Initially, I started using it for managing on-call schedules. As the tech stack developed, we began using it for service alerts and event routing, and then transitioned to operational views and dashboarding. It eventually became central to our alerting systems, where all monitoring tools would send information to PagerDuty, enabling event management and routing to whoever was on call.

The product used to be unique in getting the message to the right person to fix the job. It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person. A significant advantage is that it includes a metrics overlay, which provides an overview of what is happening in the environment, and its scheduling capabilities are superior to other operations.

We are a 24-hour online business. We use it for scheduling our on-call engineers and making sure that there is follow-the-sun or round-the-clock coverage for alerting and network operations.

It ingests all our alert paths, i.e., anything that generates an alert of any description, such as, Splunk, AWS, and internal applications. We feed all our events into it, then it generates alerts which need a response from an engineer with a description. Another thing is it is built-in scheduling is pretty much hands-off for our on-call engineers unless somebody goes on holidays. That is the only time that we have to jump in there and make any changes.

One of the things with our incident flow is that it generates Jira tickets for us. So, its JIRA integration is a critical thing because we need to have that logged for compliance in a separate ticketing system. Having it go into Jira is great, where we can generate hard copies of the alerts and all the events around it. Also, it has the visibility to be able to update one particular location, so you can update Jira and that information goes across to PagerDuty, or you can update PagerDuty and it goes back to Jira. The integration that they have now is great. For example, if you are in the middle of a major event, where you have multiple incidents coming at you, the way it correlates events into a single incident is great.

It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise.

It has been fantastic. I've used PagerDuty across multiple companies throughout my career. I brought it with me through several companies. It is one of the most affordable solutions. It is highly API driven.

Over time, they went from just being a really simple solution for sending you a text or an email to being something that can send you alerts, push notifications, and all types of things that guarantee that the people you're trying to reach can be reached. The multi-way messaging, as well as everything else, has really helped make it reliable and consistent. That's something that we necessarily need for on-call operations and those types of activities.

The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features.

It's mainly for IT call scheduling, emergency contacts, events, and those kinds of things. It's integrated with AWS, MS Teams, Remedy, and other solutions.

Previously, people used to use pagers. Nowadays, nobody wants to carry another device. PagerDuty has replaced that ability to contact somebody in case of emergency without fail. That's how I would characterize it in improving our organization. 

We use the solution for incident management.

PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams. It has good user management and is easy to plug in. It has good APIs to integrate with our apps and send alerts, making it compatible with most applications. It becomes a powerful infrastructure when handling priority applications, so we use it during the critical phase of our engineering development.

We have a support team consisting of roughly 20 support agents, and we used PagerDuty to raise alerts to people on the roster. It was integrated with our help desk ticketing system and AppDynamics, which we use for application monitoring. 

There were rules in place for when AppDynamics generated an alert. For example, if a transaction is slow or something is about to go down, PagerDuty would notify the IT team members to look at the issue. 

PagerDuty let us set up rosters based on our shifts. We could assign a hierarchy for how the calls should be escalated and the number of times the call will be transferred between people before it is answered. It makes it easy to access an agent via mobile phone.

We primarily use this solution to track alerts from our cloud environment and monitor and respond to alerts on our cloud platform.

The ease of having it on a mobile phone is valuable. We can always track incidents wherever we are, even away from our computers. Additionally, the escalation feature for incidents to senior engineers or other people is very useful.

Our use cases include generating alerts from our site 24/7. We are managing the cloud infrastructure there.  

We found that the interface of PagerDuty is more friendly. It was easy to use and easy to set up. It integrated easily with our critical server and our Jira project console. It also had better features than Opsgenie. We were impressed with PagerDuty, so we decided to give it a try.