PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

We use PagerDuty for alerting and escalations. We have it integrated with our monitoring tools.

PagerDuty integrates well with many other monitoring applications, it provides us with a centralized view of what can be configured in terms of escalations, and who's on call. 

We can control who is going to be notified through PagerDuty. If one team needs to contact another team, we can contact them through PagerDuty to get other teams involved in different incidents.

The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO,  the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting.

PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform.

I have been using PagerDuty for approximately two years.

The stability of PagerDuty is good.

PagerDuty is scalable. They have APIs that are compatible with Amazon web services. You could send alerts directly to PagerDuty from different platforms.

There are a lot of different teams using this solution in my company, such as engineering teams and IT. We have approximately 200 people in the company but not everyone needs to use the solution.

As the company grows we will increase usage.

I have not had the need to contact the vendors.

The solution does not require a lot of maintenance. We integrate PagerDuty with Okta for single sign-ons. If we need to add new users, the associate director and one other person have administrator permission in PagerDuty to add new users. We can integrate those users with Okta, which allows them to log in through Okta.

I recommend PagerDuty to others, it's a good solution, and it works well.

I rate PagerDuty a ten out of ten.

The most common use case is the result of alerts coming from a monitoring system, like New Relic or Nagios, alerts that we define as critical. They are alerts where we need someone to get on a bridge or to start working on them during the night. Once such an alert is firing, it fires a PagerDuty alert and it triggers the current on-call who is scheduled in PagerDuty's schedule.

The on-call person acknowledges the alert and looks into it to understand what is going on and to update, via PagerDuty, what the status is. The update will be sent to all the groups that are part of the PagerDuty schedule until the issue is resolved.

We mostly integrate it with other monitoring tools like New Relic or Nagios, or we are using their email integration for on-call processes to page people in groups. We also use it for Sev 1 issues that are coming from alerts from New Relic or from Nagios or other monitoring systems.

When my team is needed immediately, instead of people trying to catch someone on the phone or by email during off-hours, it's easier to use this kind of service. People can just fire an email to an on-call email address and it will catch the current on-call who knows he has to be available at that time.

Also, because we are not a large group and we do not have our eyes on glass 24/7, we need to have one on-call available for several projects. The current on-call may not always understand why a project is firing an alert, but he will know how to easily reach the person who is the focal point for the project in question.

Also, most of the time, the teams that want to engage my team are not so fluent in English and it's easier to understand someone via email. But my team is not always in front of their emails. PagerDuty is doing the bridging between the email being sent that asks for help and those who can provide the help. PagerDuty calls our on-call and he answers the phone and understands that there is a real issue. After that, he reads the email or looks in the body of the pager message and gets an understanding of what the issue is, and engages the focal point.

It's a tool for incident management, to help us understand what happened during an alert. A cool feature is that it helps us to understand the flow of the alert. If the alert was coming to the current on-call and he didn't catch the call or didn't notice it for any reason, it starts being escalated automatically, according to the escalation schedule, or to other teammates. You can see the flow very easily on your phone or via the website, if you want to do a post-mortem.

The solution’s alerting functionality is very good. It does the job. It's not that it only works sometimes. It works every time it needs to. It also knows how to close alerts that are closed from the monitoring system and you can easily close and acknowledge alerts via your phone even if you don't have the mobile app. You can do it with an SMS. So at 2:00 a.m., it's very easy to navigate an incident.

The email-for-alerting integration is also valuable. If there is a team that needs my team, they can easily send an email with the subject and why they want us to be on board and that we should start investigating an issue. Instead of how it worked in the past, when they would call the on-call number and start talking and try to explain what is going on, they just send an email and it pages the current on-call who is scheduled. It's very nice and easy.

While using PagerDuty hasn't resulted in a decrease in issues, it has allowed us, in combination with the monitoring systems, to know about issues before customers are alerting us. If a monitoring system was only sending emails, those emails could be missed among thousands of emails. But if we create alerts in New Relic, which integrates with PagerDuty, and we get a call from PagerDuty, it's much better. By not missing an email, it allows us, during working hours, to engage with other teams or to resolve the issue without causing problems to our customers. Issues can be resolved before someone notices.

It is more the monitoring systems that can point out problems to be addressed before they become worse, but those systems are not really able to do more than send us an email. Without the integration to PagerDuty, issues that are defined as critical could be missed.

There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule. Due to that, I need to do extra work to adjust it, due to specific team needs or how I'm staffing my team. It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process. I find myself redoing the schedule often. Every month I need to make another schedule. It's not so bad but it could be improved.

I've been using PagerDuty for more than three years.

It's always up. We haven't faced any issues with the PagerDuty platform. In that sense, it hasn't affected our operations at all. But if there were an issue with PagerDuty, I can see how it might be like Murphy's Law and that the issue would happen at a time when we needed PagerDuty to be working. That would not be good for a group like ours that operates several main projects, projects which impact a lot of customers all over the world. So the availability is very important for us.

We haven't had any issues with scaling up.

Currently we don't have plans to expand our usage, we are good with what we have. But we are using it very often, with like the alerts, mostly on the weekend. And when there are crises we get alerts that come through PagerDuty.

I myself have not had to work with support very much, but I understand from my team that they are good and have solutions. Someone in particular from my team had to work with their technical team and they helped him a lot. If we find issues or we have suggestions for improving the solution, they're very responsive.

I wasn't involved when they implemented PagerDuty, but I don't think the company had to implement anything here. It's a SaaS service and the integrations are through integration keys, and that is something I do for each project. It's simply that you have service, you can log in, and do what you want to do.

They just gave us the license key, we got access, and we brought our team into PagerDuty by sending them each an email to log in.

The integrations with our monitoring tools took five minutes. It's very easy. And they have a lot of integrations. If you have a specific tool that you need to integrate with, you can always use their email integration, where your tool will send an email to a specific address and PagerDuty will fire the alarm.

And we don't need to maintain PagerDuty. It's a SaaS service so the only thing we need to do is create a schedule and, if there is a new integration, to set up the integration. It's not something that you need to be doing every day.

I think we have had a return on our investment but I can't give you actual numbers. It has prevented a lot of potential crises for our customers. We catch things before anyone else knows about them. We are based in Israel while 90 percent of our customers are in the U.S. So we know about customer-facing issues, local time, before they are felt in the U.S. The main functionality is that it calls us for critical issues and outages. It's very helpful and has reduced customer complaints and issues that could cause us to struggle.

I don't use the solution's analytics very much. I only use it at the end of the year if management wants to see its usage and the capacity of my team.

We have about 60 to 80 users of the solution. Most of them are support engineers, developers, and some managers.

We mostly use it for our on-call engineers, for schedules, alerting, and critical alerts. And, of course, we use it for the management of an issue, so that people acknowledge the alerts, reassign them, etc.

PagerDuty enables us to implement well-known techniques for on-call. It helps with managing schedules, being able to escalate issues, and being able to add people to an instance. It enables us to have multiple levels of people on-call, in a simple way. Otherwise, managing those schedules, offline, would be quite hard. Having a tool like PagerDuty to support us from that standpoint is really key, so that we can perform well when we have issues.

The fact that it doesn't have maintenance windows is definitely something that is really key. It was a key element in our choice. Having maintenance windows for a monitoring system is just not acceptable. The impact is that we really trust PagerDuty. There were situations where a specific alert didn't reach PagerDuty. We looked into finding the reason elsewhere, and not in PagerDuty, because we really trust that PagerDuty, when it catches an alert, will actually deliver it.

The most valuable feature is definitely the flexibility of the schedule. 

The mobile app is quite also good for what we do: for receiving alerts, acknowledging, assigning, adding new responders. It has rich features for our needs.

The alerting functionality is quite good. It is one of the key parts of our on-call process, so that people can react when things are not working as expected. We trust it a lot. It definitely works well. We have never missed alerts or had situations in which we felt that we could not trust the alerting functionality of PagerDuty. Alerts in our environment could be caused by a specific part of the platform not running right. If a database goes down, for example, we will get an alert. There could also be errors in an application or a particular zone of infrastructure is down, or if service-level objectives are being affected for some reason. In all these cases, we will get alerts.

The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this. The solution has not enabled us to go beyond responding to incidents and to start predicting or preventing them.

It would help if they simplified the way you try to get insights or information about instances and to improve your situation regarding the groupings of alerts. 

Even if there are a lot of different functionalities, a lot of prediction abilities in place, it's not really clear what the best practices are for using PagerDuty to get the best out of the platform. The concepts are quite complex, at times, for people to understand. They need a more straightforward way to use the product and get the best out of it. With all the concepts of escalation, services, and the schedule, it gets confusing.

I've been using PagerDuty for one year. I joined this company a year ago and it was already using it.

The stability is very good. If I remember correctly, we have only had one incident with PagerDuty over the whole period that I have been using it. I also used PagerDuty at my previous company. My experience is that it is a very stable platform. 

There are also no bugs in the apps, in my experience. It is a very high-quality product.

It's a SaaS. 

But in my previous company and also here, I see the cost of the platform as an impediment to scaling this from a small team to the whole company. But for the platform itself, we don't have to manage anything in terms of scaling.

We have about 100 people working with PagerDuty — mostly engineers. It is used across all the different engineering teams. The adoption rate is 100 percent.

We have used their technical support once. It was okay. I don't think we managed to get to the bottom of the issue we were having, but it ended up that it was not that critical at that point, so we just let it go.

In my previous company we used a home-grown system before PagerDuty.

I was involved in the initial setup of PagerDuty in my previous company. Depending on how big your deployment — how many services you want, how many teams — it can get complex. But in general, it's simple. 

What is complex is to go from using PagerDuty as an instance manager and as a pager, to getting to the next level and the advantages that PagerDuty sells a lot: intelligence, analytics; the extra functionality that they add. That functionality comes with a high price. For me, that is the complex part. It's not the start, rather the hard part is to really get the most out of what PagerDuty offers.

The return of investment is from how quickly we engage our teams, meaning that we don't waste time and money. It has returned the price that we pay, but the price is high.

A con, a failure, is the cost which is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team...

Some important features are closed to a group because of the licensing. For example, one of the features that I always wanted to use but never managed to is the postmortem part of PagerDuty. To me, it is important that everyone in the organization be able to read any postmortem that is produced. PagerDuty only allows you to share it with people who have accounts. It doesn't have different levels of accounts. There is only a complete account and you have to pay for it.

You really need to understand what feature functionality you want from the solution and then see what the cost-benefit is for what you want to achieve. We tried the stakeholder licenses, but we ended up never using them. They don't have a lot of flexibility on that. It's almost like one type of licensing or nothing.

We have done some investigation internally, but nothing really serious. We looked at Opsgenie and VictorOps. We didn't see a reason to change. We trust PagerDuty.

The main pro, of course, of PagerDuty is that it is a full-featured application, with high trust. Many companies use it, big companies that trust it. This is definitely a big plus.

One of the reasons we stayed with PagerDuty was, of course, trust, but we also see the value of the added functionality that PagerDuty gives us. But if you don't get to use those — the things that are the differentiator for PagerDuty — then the cost starts to be quite high. You need to be completely in to be able to get the full advantage of PagerDuty. Competitors will give you a little bit less functionality, fewer luxury functions, but the cost is more accessible for the feature set that you really use.

From the get-go, approach it in a way where you can get the most out of it. Really engage with PagerDuty from the beginning to support you on that journey. Otherwise, you will only be able to use the core functionalities that you can also get from the competition. Focus on the full platform and make the decisions that will simplify that. Don't do quick wins at the beginning that will not help you to take full advantage of the platform.

PagerDuty worked with us to find the right solution that fit our needs and budget, but they didn't do so as much as I would expect or as much as I would have liked. At some point we asked, "How can you help? How can we get the most out of PagerDuty?" We had some ideas and we engaged with their Professional Services, but the cost of that was quite high. It ended up that we never did what we wanted to do with PagerDuty. It got stuck at some point. They did help but we would need to pay even more to get the help that we need.

It's really key to manage your operations life cycle. You cannot go without having something in place. And it's important to have something that will support you. Whether it's PagerDuty or something else, that is really key.

If I don't look at the cost of it, I would rate PagerDuty between eight and nine out of 10. If I include the cost, it would be a seven.

The primary use case of the solution is to alert the on-call person when there are any critical errors or when the servers are down. It is also used for the on-call scheduling of personnel.

The most valuable feature is the phone app that allows us to send notifications without additional fees when sending by SMS or phone calls. There is also an escalation metric that allows any alert that goes unanswered to automatically move on to the next person on the list.

The product can be improved by including out-of-the-box integration with other standard tools used in our fields such as Confluence and Jira.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable and we haven't had any missed alerts in the five years of use.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The cost is based on the package you select.

I rate this solution seven out of ten.

I recommend anyone looking for an alert solution to try out other similar products such as Opsgenie. Opsgenie is more user-friendly out of the box and is available at a lower cost.

I use the solution as for log aggregation, scheduling, and filtering out false positives. 

The solution's most valuable features are that it adds each alert as a service, has good scheduling capabilities, and includes the ability to write logic based on texts. 

The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue. 

More adaptive machine-learning logic would help to correlate incidents. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable with no issues. 

The solution is scalable. 

We currently have 300 users in our company and plan to increase usage. 

Technical support has been good.

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I previously used OpStream without the tariffs. 

The setup is straightforward and there is no real deployment because the solution is ready to operate immediately. 

We only need to manage integration to the solution. 

I implemented the solution in-house. 

Our company has already achieved ROI because different tools can alert to a single system and that is very efficient. 

The solution removes the need for multiple systems and handling alerts at each phase. 

The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget. 

If you are considering the solution, it is important to have a clear idea of the services you want it to report, a defined service schedule with registration policies, and a filtering plan in place to decrease false positives. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use PagerDuty for incident managment. We're looking at integrating PagerDuty with Rundeck in the future.

PagerDuty has allowed us to identify issues and incidents within the infrastructure that we wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

PagerDuty's notification process is the most valuable feature.

I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions.

We have been using PagerDuty for about five years.

I rate PagerDuty support 10 out of 10. 

PagerDuty was deployed before I joined the company. Finding the information about what I wanted to do was complex, but it was straightforward once I found what I needed. Overall, it has been a fairly easy solution to use and maintain. 

We have seen a return.

I think the license costs around $30 per person.

I rate PagerDuty nine out of 10. 

I've found the the versatility of notifications to be the most valuable feature. With the multiple methods of notification and the escalation policies, we can always be certain that someone will get the message.

We are a transportation company and run 24/7. Communication with our drivers is of the upmost importance. All of our tractors are equipped with on-board computers that drivers use to send and receive messages along with reporting of information at pick up and delivery locations. Receiving this information as close to real-time as we can get is vital. We have developed processes that receive this information and update back office systems. We have also created procedures that monitor when new information is added. If a predefined time elapses with no updates, then it is safe to make the assumption that there may be an issue stopping the process. When this occurs, an event is triggered in PagerDuty and notices are sent out. If there is no response to the triggered event in PagerDuty within a certain time frame, the notification is escalated to the next person.

Drivers also use the on board computers to report certain events, such as an accident. When these types of messages are received, PagerDuty is used to immediately send notifications to our safety department. This allows us to react faster and get safety personnel out to the location if needed.

PagerDuty currently has an app that can be used on a smart phone or tablet that allows you to respond and view stats of the incidents. It would be nice if the app could somehow receive the notification of an incident and allow you to customize the warning method on the device end. Currently, the user can be alerted of an incident through email, text message, and phone call. It would be handy to have the capability to configure the app such that if an incident happens between the hours of 10 PM and 5 AM, it uses a much louder, alarm-sounding noise rather than just a text message and phone call noises.

I have been very satisfied with all functions of the product that I have used. However, I have not used all the functions so there may be some other short comings that I am not aware of.

I had no issues during the deployment.

I had no issues with the stability.

I have had no issuesd with the scalability.

Customer service is very good.

Technical service is very good.

I did not use a previous solution.

Once I got a good understanding of how the system works and what needed to be configured, it was very straightforward. Adding new services and users, as well as implementing into our current systems, was very easy.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

I cannot really put a dollar amount on the ROI, but I can say that we are definitely getting an ROI in our in-house support. Our IT department uses a rotating 24/7 on-call schedule for emergencies. When we are not getting the information from our drivers, it is considered an emergency and will initiate a call to the on-call person. By having PagerDuty send notifications dependent on the actual issue, we can be certain that the correct person will be alerted. In the vast majority of the incidents, the issue is resolved before it is ever noticed by operations.

Do the research before picking a pricing plan. PagerDuty offers a few plans that allow you to only pay for what you need. Know your requirements.

I interact with customers and then see the use cases and how they would use the PagerDuty tool and the integrations that come with it. I basically see how the customers will use the product. I then have conversations with the higher members or the stakeholders in the company on what ROIs they would get from this tool and the measurements of metrics, etc.

The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable. 

It's an incident management tool. So, its main functionality is to integrate with monitoring tools. There is a flexible and easy way of integrating with monitoring tools. That's what I have observed in most of the scenarios. It allows us to configure the integration with APIs and plugins as well.

The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident.

PagerDuty can introduce machine-learning concepts for detecting incidents earlier. They haven't implemented that, but that might be on the roadmap.

It has been one year.

It is stable. It is rapidly growing, and all the features are being built in a stable way for the users to work with. I don't see any difficulties in handling any of the functionalities in PagerDuty.

It is scalable. It is used by enterprise customers. Only good planning is required in the initial stages for us to implement it fully.

So far, we have not reached out to their support team. We were able to support the customers with the solution that they needed when they reached out to us.

Most companies these days are partner-led companies. The first hand that goes into support is from a partner. Partners like us support the customers in any P3 or P4 issues. We also help with the P1 issues if they're finding it difficult to manage the application, and in turn, if the partners need support from the PagerDuty support team itself, they get support within one or two hours. So, it is easier for customers to go through a partner.

It depends on the complexity of the environment a customer has. If a customer only wants to track one application, then it's just a straightforward integration. If a customer wants to set up the tool at an enterprise level, there should be a real plan that requires having discussions with all the teams. We need to build a plan and then methodically integrate all the tools one by one. It's not always complex, but better planning helps in configuring these tools properly. In most of the scenarios, it provides us the integrations that are readily built, and we have successfully configured it in most of the customer environments. Overall, I would rate its setup a 4 out of 5.

It's not only the budget that goes into the product. We see all the other factors as well, such as the services that they buy and investments they make in the resources for configuring, working, training, etc. It could help an organization not only financially but also performance-wise in the long term.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.