PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Notification is the most valuable feature.

It allows us to provide better customer support.

I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end.

We have never had any stability issues.

It has scaled well for our needs.

I've opened one support ticket. They were very responsive; answered within a few hours.

I can't help with this. I wasn't involved in the selection.

I would say look at PagerDuty. Look around, because I didn't. But it is definitely a good option.

We didn't really do any training and it was pretty well accepted. I regret not doing training. They had a booth at a recent conference. I walked up to them to specifically find out a few things and I did find out a few things that I know our team hadn’t been aware of. Do a bit of training.

It has a very limited scope, but it's very good at what it does.

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.