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.

Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.

The solution has been 100% stable with no issues due to PagerDuty.

The product was highly scalable, with no limits on the number of applications or event routing rules. However, managing a large number of these became cumbersome, suggesting a need for a way to define everything in code.

The customer service was amazingly good. They helped us build our event routing.

Positive

The setup is very straightforward, allowing users to be up and running within minutes. Usually, one knowledgeable person is enough to manage it.

The solution was expensive, but if all its features were utilized, it was considered worth the cost. The tier-based pricing model was cumbersome, and there was a desire for a service-based catalog to better customize purchases.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

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.

It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty. You can set up email alerts, but you cannot build any triggers using those email alerts. There are limitations; you cannot extend it to send alerts to other teams. You can escalate it within the team but not redirect the alert to different teams.

It has a good API for integrating with apps and good documentation. We seldom ask the support team for help. The app can call the on-call person even when the system is offline. It helps you handle alerts quickly, ensuring a fast turnover.

It's straightforward to set up for an organization. It is easy to integrate with our apps.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We were exploring ManageEngine ServiceDesk. So, we need a feature where we can, like, when an alert triggers, we should alert the recipient by on-call. So, when an alert is detected, a ticket is generated in the management team, and we want to notify them on-call. Like, this ticket has been generated and stuff. So, I would like to see a similar feature in this solution.

This is why we want an alternative to PagerDuty. We want an alternative to PagerDuty. So we are getting on-call notifications using PagerDuty, but now we want to replace PagerDuty with ManageEngine ServiceDesk.  

So whenever some incident happens in the cloud infrastructure, we get data alerts from cloud security. We want to integrate a service that will provide us with notifications on-call. That this server is down, or this website is down, or this thing is going wrong.

Another area of improvement is integration. It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system. That's why we are dropping PagerDuty. We won't continue using it due to integration issues.

I have been using this solution for a few months. We are in the testing and evaluation phase, so we are comparing some tools online. So, we have purchased the paid version of PagerDuty, but now we want to explore some other products.

It's stable. We haven't encountered any issues with PagerDuty.

It's a scalable solution. It worked well for us. We have around ten people using PagerDuty because we have a team of ten, split into two teams.

The initial setup is a simple process. We just want to integrate our ticketing tool with the alerting tool, like PagerDuty, as an alerting tool. From PagerDuty, we would like to generate alerts in some ticketing tools, like Jira or ServiceNow. So we were looking for that solution, so we opted for PagerDuty.

We operate our services 24/7, generating alerts as we monitor our infrastructure around the clock. There are three products involved in this process. The first one is Site Twenty-One, responsible for monitoring our cloud infrastructure. If anything goes wrong in the cloud or on our infrastructure, Site Twenty-Four by Seven generates an alert. This alert is then sent to PagerDuty, which processes the alert and notifies someone from our IT team, cloud team, or application support team.

Simultaneously, it creates a ticket in a ticketing tool like Freshdesk, Jira, or ServiceNow. However, we are migrating from Jira to Freshdesk, and PagerDuty cannot integrate with Freshdesk. So, we want to replace PagerDuty with an alternative.

We have two technical staff and two administrators for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We paid for the license. It was a little bit expensive, but it was worth it. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I would definitely recommend using this solution. It is a user-friendly solution. It has a good interface. 

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.

PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually. 

Every month, someone needs to create those rosters and publish them. It would be great if PagerDuty could pull the rosters from Excel or another tool. We had to maintain rosters at multiple places, which was a duplication of effort. The point of PagerDuty is to automate our systems so that the calls are not missed and all, so it isn't ideal to manually intervene in one aspect each month.

We have used PagerDuty for two-and-a-half years.

I think PagerDuty is more suitable for large enterprises because smaller companies have financial constraints.  Atlassian might be more appropriate for their needs.

I rate PagerDuty support 10 out of 10. The support is knowledgeable and responsive. They set up video calls to walk us through our problems.

Positive

I rate PagerDuty eight out of 10 for ease of setup. It's straightforward. I could easily train a member of my team to handle the administration. It is efficient and easy to use. 

I rate PagerDuty eight out of 10 for affordability. It's on the higher side, but there are alternatives on the market.

I was not involved in the selection process. I started working on PagerDuty when it was already finalized. Solutions in that space have similar features, but we get  Atlassian products from the marketplace, so they are more accessible. The only issue we had was that the terms and conditions were a bit stringent on the PagerDuty side for the licensed product.

One of the members from the procurement team was trying to extend some licenses or there was some pricing discussion that was happening that they didn't consider. They were ready to renew, but there was some scenario where then we got a bit angry that they were not listening to what we wanted. I don't remember the exact circumstances. 

I rate PagerDuty eight out of 10. I would recommend PagerDuty. It is a nice product, but it depends on your organization's use cases.

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. 

The most important feature that is used is call scheduling. We are also able actually to call IT folks in the case of an emergency.

I have not heard anything bad about its stability.

It has scaled well for us.

I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense.

The company has been using the solution for two or three years. 

I have not seen or heard anything bad about stability, so I would assume no news is good news. My understanding is it is stable. 

I would say it is a scalable solution. We initially started with a limited number of licenses and then expanded to much broader usage. We never had any issues scaling as needed. 

We have about 1,000 people using the solution right now, although it may have grown to include even more.

I have not seen any requests coming through directly to me regarding increasing the budget allocation for the solution for 2023. If at all, it comes through maybe a later part of 2023. I have not seen any request for an increased budget and therefore do not see us increasing usage in the next little while.

I've never dealt with technical support. I have no experience with them. 

We had multiple solutions before PagerDuty. There are still some in use in other parts of the company. For example, there is a tool called Arrcus that is used. We use it for our line technicians and others, however, no longer for IT support.

I did not get involved in the setup. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the process was. 

In terms of witnessing an ROI, no one has really done that level of due diligence. 

This is a SaaS solution. 

The pricing may be about $1,000 per user. 

We did a detailed coverage to choose the right solution for us. We tried Everbridge, for example. In the end, we decided to go with PagerDuty.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

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.

The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that. 

I have probably been using it since 2012. So, it has been a good 12 years at this point.

We're using the current web version and the mobile applications. It is on the cloud.

It is extremely stable. I've very rarely had issues with PagerDuty. Every once in a while, with some of the newer versions, there were a few issues. When they were putting a new feature out, such as some of the group configurations that they did four or five years ago, I remember a handful of pages that didn't work quite right in those areas, but for the most part, PagerDuty meets like four nines. So, there is consistent uptime.

It is very much scalable. I've seen it being used in organizations as small as 30 people. I've also worked in organizations with a hundred thousand people on PagerDuty. Currently, we have about 150 people. We absolutely have plans to increase its usage.

The product is so self-intuitive that you very rarely need to reach out to their technical support, but when you do, they're pretty quick to turn things around and resolve them for you. I would rate them a four out of five.

Positive

We've used all kinds of paging solutions where we've attempted and tried to do things, but there is just not a lot of great competition to PagerDuty. If you go outside of PagerDuty to other peers in that level of scale, they're either significantly more expensive, or you have to do a whole lot more homegrown stuff. For example, if you wanted to use Amazon SNS, SQS, or SES, you can build these types of solutions, but you end up having to put a lot of infrastructure, time, and engineering effort into them.

It has always been straightforward.

It is always implemented in-house. Its maintenance is effectively zero. Realistically, it is a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution thing, and then it becomes just a regular DevOps task that you tax to your DevOps or your CI/CD teams. For the most part, there are not a lot of changes that need to be done in there, but when a change is needed, it typically takes less than an hour to get that implemented and tested.

We have absolutely seen an ROI.

They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing.

It is one of the most critical things you can do in your infrastructure, and it is a no-brainer, just do it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It is literally peerless among its competition.

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.

The user interface could be more intuitive. Initially, when we started using it, we had issues viewing some options because we had information issues in my role as an observer, not the responder. Therefore, I couldn't view buttons like acknowledgements because they were not showing up.

We have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Our technical support is not directly from PagerDuty. Instead, it involves us rotating within the teams within the organization.

We previously used Dynamic which is similar to PagerDuty but with more Microsoft resources.

The initial setup is straightforward.

With the number of features we get, I believe it's a handy tool that is worth the money, so it's a great return on investment.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good, but the user interface could be improved. I advise new users to spend time reading documentation or about the type of features to understand how it works and how to set it up.

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.