PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

We email in, and Pager Duty finds the person on-call, alerts and escalates.

Faster reaction times to respond to a set alert that we have designed to be classed as a Wake Up call.

They need to sort out the date / time function when the time zones switch over from Normal to Daylight savings, and vise versa.

NOT all countries swap at the same time, thus everything is off by 1 hour until everyone is back in the correct zone.

I did make them aware of this, but they simply did not understand, and after a week everything auto corrected when everyone was back in the correct zone.

5 years.

We very rarely encounter issues where an SMS is about to be received before the application push notification (connection to the internet did not fail on devices.)

Not currently.

8/10

Back in the day, it was very simple. Other added in functions started to make it odd, but overall for what we use it for is it still straightforward.

I set it up and the systems simply emails the alert in, and it does its magic as per the rota.

I suspect it has paid for itself.

Keep it simple. For the pooled users and what is allowed, we have yet to go over the allocated pool for the month.

For a corporate tool – it acts as a 3rd party for a simple wake up tool. Absolutely recommend it. Escalation policies can be set up so that the alert should get someone’s attention, and all from a simple email being sent out. I like it.

• Automated scheduling
• Escalation
• Text to voice

It has increased the availability of networks to users and therefore decreased operational costs.

It always needs more integrated applications, especially if you are not a software developer. It's mostly geared towards application providers.

I've used it for four years.

There were no technical issues. It just integrates and works.

Up-time is pretty good. They send out an email if there was an outage and don't try to hide it. There was a hacking incident as well last year, but they handled it.

If implemented correctly there won't be any issues. Our set-up mimics the departments of the company and therefore grows with it.

It's pretty good. Never had an issue with response times.

I've never required any, it just works.

We previously just used emails and text messages. We required voice-based phone calls and scheduling for alarming of outages.

It was straightforward. In basic terms, if you send PagerDuty an email, it will call you and read it to you. And if you use PagerDuty, so will your toaster.

It was done in-house. It was easily adopted by internal processes.

Having an automated system to get the right person out of bed when required is priceless. The first time you know about an issue before your customer does it paid for itself.

It's per user per month. Just sign up people that are required and not every manager just because. It can get expensive.

Other text to voice products were evaluated but the combination of features is what stands out.

Give it a try. It's simple and easy. Use the apps, they are great and fun.

I would say the notifications, and the information that comes along with them.

We're able to respond to problems within the environment a lot quicker, because we get the notifications regularly, or when there is an issue, we're able to respond and get it resolved quickly.

I'm not really sure. The one that was big on our list was the ability to tune the alerts, but they've done that now with the non-critical. At this time, everything is pretty good with how we're using it, and what they provide.

2 years.

It seems to be very stable. I don't know whether there's been an issue on the PagerDuty side or on the devices that we use, but we have seen some inconsistencies with receiving alerts on an iPhone versus an Android device from time to time. I don't if that's a PagerDuty issue or not.

For our needs, it's definitely scalable. It's more than adequate. Just the ability for us to add users, and that's really all that we need, users and policies that we want to tie into our infrastructure. It's been good, so far.

I don't think we've actually had to submit any tickets. It's a pretty easy solution to work with, and haven't had any issues with it.

Everything about it is very straightforward, and easy to get rolling with.

I definitely think we have made an ROI. Just the ability to be able to respond quicker to the issues that are coming up gives the company a better mean times resolution resolution, which is going to improve upon the return on investment for what we spend on PagerDuty.

It's very easy and straightforward to get implemented, and hit the ground running. As far as advice, I would ensure that you should create your services and policies to what you need, so you're not getting false alerts on issues that really aren't worth investigating. You definitely don't want to be running down false positives, and so, making sure that you are truly monitoring and being alerted on things that are important to company. Something to ensure is set up properly.

Its alerting capabilities, simple user interface, stability and functionality is exactly what we need. I would also highlight a fact, they have very responsive support, and API developers support. We mainly use it at GoodData for:

A) Alert/event routing from our product/monitoring system to the responsible DevOPS engineer who is on duty to fix/workaround issues reported. We mostly escalate to mobile/cell phones.

B) We use it for on call schedule resource planning as we have around 100 people using PagerDuty (mainly from engineering, support, services). Using their system, you basically know at any time who is working, when and which service he owns/is responsible for.

C) Billing/accounting. Using their APIs we are able to easily financially compensate those 100 people for their on-call duties. This might be country/geolocation specific.

We significantly reduce our first response and platform issue resolution times thanks to full 24x7 resource coverage for the whole gooddata.com product (not just operations support functions but also security, services and other areas).

We're fully satisfied with the type of service they offer. I think it might be cheaper for enterprise organizations.

5 years.

Not at all, it is cloud based software, they are responsible for a whole software stack. We just use the client/web based interface and mobile app (Android, iOS) and we didn't have any issues as far as I know.

None.

None.

Excellent and responsive.

Very good.

No we didn't, but we evaluated a few alternatives before we started to use it - they were the winners at the time.

Easy to setup and follow.

We are fully self-service, we didn't use their services team for implementation/first setup.

As we scaled we changed our pricing a few times based on the number of users subscribed to our service. Right now, with about 90 users we pay monthly around $1,200. You pay as you grow - from the basic model to the enterprise model which includes analytics.

We did, but I was not part of the team who did the evaluation. I do not have this information available.

SMS + phone call alerts, multiple escalation lists, personalized notification rules, centralized administrator interface, automatic incident creation. The customization options available in PagerDuty make conformity to our needs possible.

It governs our "on call" system, picking up custom-made emails from our alert system and forwarding the alert to the relevant on-call technician using his custom set notification rules. As a System Administrator, PagerDuty reliably notifies me via email, SMS, and phone call at the creation of an incident with custom-set rules controlling who is responsible per issue and at what time those responsibilities kick in. PagerDuty is of central importance to the continued smooth function of my company and it's IT-related infrastructure and applications.

Open alerts should properly respond to SMS resolution beyond the initial alert. To explain, when an alert first comes through SMS, it'll prompt for a response: 4 to acknowledge, 6 to resolve, 8 to escalate. If a ticket is acknowledged with a 4, and then the matter is dealt with, responding again to the SMS with a 6 then will not resolve the ticket. It's a minor issue, and one largely mitigated by the mobile app.

5 years.

None, and this is really key. The stability of an alert system makes it reliable, and an alert system must be reliable as a baseline.

None, though there are just two administrators of the system and no more than ten users at any time. That said, as our projects have become more complex over time, we've had zero issues tying them into PagerDuty when necessary.

Home-grown incident management system. It was poorly written and unreliable.

A previous Sys Admin configured the system. By his account, it required no special knowledge to implement.

In-house.

This would be difficult to measure. Without PagerDuty, an element going into error might go unnoticed, or the timeframe of an issue may be unclear - a situation that might cost our company valuable clients. The notification features of PagerDuty and the logged history are incredibly important for identifying problems when they occur and responding to them promptly, as well as ensuring that someone is indeed responding to them at all. Accountability matters. PagerDuty has saved us from creating, through ignorance and inaction, many tense situations with multiple clients. The reliability that PagerDuty provides (as a service) and enforces (as a practice of the service) creates real value in the immeasurable "quality of life" for both our administrators and our clients.

PagerDuty licensing is straightforward.

VictorOps - a somewhat immature product at the time. Had most of the "big" features at a glance, but missed most of the details in actual use. Total lack of an API (at the time of our test, not sure if this is accurate to current) pushed us to PagerDuty.

No specific advice. The community has a lot of solid ideas for using the product during initial setup.

When I first started at this company, we set up our AD for free on Mail Server, but it paged everyone who was on-call. Moreover, we couldn't make adjustments, such as adding and removing people. The result was that if you didn't respond to a page, the task wouldn't get done.

With PagerDuty, if you don't respond to a page, the next on-call person would get the page. We don't have to think about who is on-call because the process is automatic.

The critical tickets and the critical outages get handled faster, even though there's less people who get paged.

Previously, everyone would get the page with the thinking that tasks will get done faster. But in reality, the process was inefficient because there was indecision and and constant emails determining who was going to take the page. But with PagerDuty, everyone knows what tasks they've been paged specifically for.

I can only suggest cosmetic improvements to the recorded voice when responding to a page. It should be less angry.

We've used it for three years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We're able to easily added or remove someone from the page list for instances of, for example, temporary maintenance.

The initial setup was pretty simple and we did it within a matter of minutes.

It's very affordable and well worth the price.

We had a 30- or 60-day free trial during which we set it up and used it. Afterwards, we didn't want to get rid of it.

• Easy to ACK
• Easy to read UI
• Custom notification
• Easy to override schedules for on-call swaps
• Easy integration with Nagios

It's improved our organization by making the on-call lifestyle less stressful. It also improved the response time.

Smartphone App can be flaky sometimes. Feature request: it would be nice to see an alert history by clicking on a host or some means to make it very easy to view alert history.

We've used it for approximately two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

It's very good.

It's very good.

I wasn't involved in the set-up.

It's my free time on-call off-hours, as I'm not spending as much time figuring out if an alert is real or not.

Go for it. Worth it.

Obviously, scheduling the calls is a valuable feature. We have a feature where there were three calls: primary one, primary two and primary three. If this guy doesn't pick up, it will respond a certain way; that's the most valuable feature. We use it on the weekends. If some customer escalates, I'll get a page, if my manager doesn't pick up. That's one of the great features; I love it.

I would like to see them increase the content base and add integrations with different systems, for example, with ZenDesk or Slack; if it could integrate more with those types of systems. We use ZenDesk; I’d like to link this to ZenDesk. I’d like more integration points.

There has been some downtime, but it did not impact the business. It's pretty stable. It's reliable.

It's scalable. They have a very flexible billing system. There is a minimum of 15 or 20 numbers or users. If you add more money, you can add more users. It's pretty scalable. We haven’t experienced any scalability issues up until this point.

Their technical support has excellent notes. When you get notified, you can instantly see all of the details, organized on a timeline. That is very good technical support.

When I joined the company, it was already there; they were already using it.

Upgrades are straightforward; there are no major hassles.

Evaluate your requirements first. Determine the number of users. What is your user base? Are you going to grow more? That's what I would decide.

When I select working with vendors, I look for a more reliable solution. I want something that meets my requirements. I don't worry about the UI and stuff like that, as long as it's reliable; as long as it meets the SLAs.