PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

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.

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. 

The two major use cases were alerts for events and scheduling of engineers to get pages based on incidents.

Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful.

It is a very non-customizable product, so you cannot add things like root cause analysis or the classification of incidents based on the area where you are getting more incidents. For example, if you're getting a lot of database issues, that may be an are you want to probe.

There aren't any capabilities to integrate with any problem management issues, like repetitive or high impact issues to deep dive and track them in the PagerDuty system. That is, I would like to see integration of problem management with incident management. That would be one nice feature to have.

It is a stable product.

It's scalable. We had 120 users.

We used Evanios and switched to PagerDuty because deduplication of the alerts was not occurring in Evanios.

The initial setup was not very difficult. It took us about four months to set it up because we were trying to make PagerDuty fit to the best possible use cases that we had. We also had quite a number of alerts to move.

I'd rate the initial setup process at three out of five.

Set your objectives and have a plan regarding your goals, timelines, and what you want to achieve. Figure these out in terms of the implementation of the tool and whether your objectives will be met by the tool.

Overall, I give PagerDuty a rating of eight on a scale from one to ten. 

I use PagerDuty for incidents, event orchestration, alerts, and creating services.

The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances.

PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration.

I have been using PagerDuty for approximately six months.

PagerDuty is stable.

We have 20 people that are using PagerDuty.

I have contacted the support from PagerDuty and they were very good.

I rate the support of PagerDuty a five out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of PagerDuty is easy. It only takes one day to set up.

There is a license needed to use PagerDuty.

My advice to others is for them to use API reserves and API rest to test the payloads before putting them in production. To understand better the PagerDuty communication. For example, they can use Postman to create APIs and then create a payload. It's a useful tool to test with PagerDuty.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate PagerDuty a nine 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. 

The solution is used to alert the on-call users if we have priority-one or business-critical issues.

The product easily integrates with other solutions. We can do automation. The product is used for alerting.

It’s quite hard to reach the support team.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

I haven’t faced any problems with the tool’s stability. I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

Around 20 people, including users and stakeholders, use the product in our organization. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The scalability is good.

I have used AlertFind and Opsgenie. It is easy to integrate PagerDuty with other applications like Jira, AWS, and Microsoft Teams.

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. The product is deployed on the cloud. It took us a few hours to deploy the tool.

The tool saves at least 20% of our time.

The price is very high. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. The license for stakeholders is very limited.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

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.