PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

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.

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 tie alerts from our GCP tenants to PagerDuty.

PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back.

PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement. In the next release, PagerDuty should include the ability to get raw data about usage and put it on a dashboard.

I've been using PagerDuty for five or six years.

PagerDuty is stable for the most part.

The initial setup can be difficult for those without experience in onboarding.

PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users. There is also a free version available for a limited number of users.

I would advise trialing the free version before committing to paying for a license. I'd rate PagerDuty seven out of ten.

Whenever we have a server that goes down, we get notified immediately which helps out our clients and all the developers, so we know when we have to log on to bring it back up.

We never found out about the problems with the server unless we had the developers that would call us up saying, "Server's down. Bring it back up." Now we get the phone calls. If we don't answer a text message or an email right away, they'll even call our house phone, the computer will, and tell us the server is down and what server it is. It's helped out a great deal because then we can bring it up right away and then figure out what the problem is after we bring it up.

It handles everything that we do now so if I can avoid the 2 AM phone calls that would be perfect but I know that's not possible. Other than that, nothing else.

It's very stable. We don't have any issues with it.

It is meeting our needs because we have followed between 1,500 - 2,000 servers, so it does meet our needs that we can actually maintain them and make sure everything is up and running.

We've never had a problem with the technical support. We have one person in our office who mainly does a lot of the setting up of it and anytime she has a problem, she can call them and they handle the problem.

We were mainly relying on the clients and stuff telling us when something went down or if we happened to catch it. There really wasn't a solid tool that we were using before.

It wasn't that difficult to set everything up. It's pretty straightforward. You put in the servers, the names, who are the people we're contacting.

We have to look at other vendors. Yes, we did look at other vendors. I don't know which ones they were but they did stay with PagerDuty.

I'd probably give it a 9/10. You just have to be prepared for the early morning calls, but it does give you three ways to be notified. You don't have to worry about being missed. It will take one and go to the next and go to the next and the last one, of course, is it will call up not only your cell phone but your home phone. Good and bad but it does handle what you need it to do.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: does it handle all the needs? If it handles everything that we need it, the price is something but it's more that it actually does the job that we need it to do.

We use this solution to alert us to system errors.

The immediacy of the alerts allows us to provide a good user experience to our customers.

 The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly.

We are also able to set the escalations level in this solution, which is useful.

This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations.

We have been using this solution for almost three years.

We have found this solution to be very stable.

This is a very scalable solution in our experience.

The initial set up of this solution is very straightforward. The product operates from a list of provided emails that are then included in error alerts. 

All of the configuration, including setting the level of escalations is done from the UI, and deployment only takes 10 to 15 minutes.

We would recommend that any organization looking to use this solution ensures that they have a good logging system in place. This will allow alerts to be set up and trigger properly.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product for intrusion management.

The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features.

They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product. It would be efficient for businesses or professional clients to manage multiple incidents instead of notifying all the users.

We have been using PagerDuty Operations Cloud for a month.

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is easy.

We evaluated a few products earlier. We switched to PagerDuty Operations Cloud for ease of use and services.

I rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud an eight out of ten. It requires a technical knowledge to understand the features.

Our primary use case of this solution is for alarming and to mitigate threats in our organization.

The feature I like the most is the alarming.

Something that needs to be improved is adding multilingual support.

PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable.

As far as we've used it with clients, it has been very scalable and we don't have time limits yet. We currently have 20 users, who are IT technicians, operators, and managers. We do have plans to increase our usage in the future, but right now we're mainly using the alarming functionality of the solution.

We haven't used the technical support yet.

The initial setup was straightforward and it took us a few months for deployment. We did everything ourselves and now we have one person responsible for deployment and maintenance. 

Licensing costs are around $700 a month and the only additional costs are phone costs in some instances.

We looked at some other options, including on-site servers, but decided to go with PagerDuty.

I would advise others to make sure it's a good fit for their organization and that you have your internal organization sketched out before you install the product. I rate this a solid nine out of ten.

In the next version I would like to see multilingual support.

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.