PagerDuty Reviews

We are a 24-hour online business. We use it for scheduling our on-call engineers and making sure that there is follow-the-sun or round-the-clock coverage for alerting and network operations.

It ingests all our alert paths, i.e., anything that generates an alert of any description, such as, Splunk, AWS, and internal applications. We feed all our events into it, then it generates alerts which need a response from an engineer with a description. Another thing is it is built-in scheduling is pretty much hands-off for our on-call engineers unless somebody goes on holidays. That is the only time that we have to jump in there and make any changes.

One of the things with our incident flow is that it generates Jira tickets for us. So, its JIRA integration is a critical thing because we need to have that logged for compliance in a separate ticketing system. Having it go into Jira is great, where we can generate hard copies of the alerts and all the events around it. Also, it has the visibility to be able to update one particular location, so you can update Jira and that information goes across to PagerDuty, or you can update PagerDuty and it goes back to Jira. The integration that they have now is great. For example, if you are in the middle of a major event, where you have multiple incidents coming at you, the way it correlates events into a single incident is great.

It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise.

The scheduling feature is the main valuable one for us, because it was previously costing us time. For example, when I was doing the scheduling for the rosters, I would be spending maybe a day out of a month getting the rosters all sorted out. It was rather intense, and a fair chunk of time each month was dedicated to the schedules.

The flexibility in what we can send to it: emails, custom webhooks, and things like that.

We have our production and development environments. If an alert goes offline in the development environment, it's generally treated as a low priority. However, if anything goes down or alerts us from the production environment as a critical or high priority, then an engineer has to stop and fix it straightaway. 

Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it.

We have an on-call phone number. However, at the moment, it is routed to a static voicemail. We would actually like to be able to have that phone follow whoever is on-call.

I have used it for five or six years, possibly longer.

The stability is pretty good. There was one incident where push notifications stopped, but it failed over to SMS and phone calls, so it really didn't make much of a difference. Even then, because we didn't get that many alerts through at the time that they were having push notification issues, it didn't bother us. It was resolved very quickly (in about an hour). The only reason we noticed it was because they told us about it, not because we found it.

We haven't had any issues where PagerDuty caused an impact to us from their maintenance. Using their product, we have been able to set our alerts into maintenance, which is good. There has been no downtime from them being offline, or anything like that.

Before, we would have needed to have done a lot of alert path manual management, then going through afterward, enabling and disabling them. Whereas, within PagerDuty, it's so much easier. You just go in there and click a service on the maintenance, then it automatically does it all for you in the background. We don't have to sit there and think about it. So, it's quick and simple. This is saving us a good hour a month, because that would be one engineer sitting there going through, updating alert paths, etc.

Because we are a payment processor, we can't go offline. We need to be very on the ball and on point with any issues that come up. Having PagerDuty there means we're able to do that.

The scalability is pretty good. I haven't seen anything that would restrict it. Because it's a SaaS platform, you can pretty much plug anything you want into it. I haven't had any restrictions on what I can feed into it from an alert perspective, and we can just keep adding more users as we see fit.

It is an integral part of our operations environment, so we wouldn't want to change or reduce it in any way. If our production environment increased and we had to add more services to it, then it's easy enough to do. It's not as though that is a major problem.

We have eight users in the organization. We also have a couple of stakeholder licenses where we notify stakeholders of major events. These are not actually interactive. They don't get alerts, but they'll get notifications if we allow them, such as, adding them to an incident. They will then get notifications from it, not necessarily alerts. There are internal, as we don't have external clients in that loop because the information management is a something that we keep a tight handle on and that is very manual.

There are two other DevOps engineers who maintain it. There is redundancy if I'm sick. However, I still take the lead on a lot of the stuff.

We worked with technical support at one stage when we were trying to get a mail filter. We wanted to set up a complex mail filter with some rules around it. That is when we contacted them, though this is not an ongoing requirement. They were pretty good and very informative. They were to the point, without being blunt.

At the time of implementation, the solution was to replace our SMS-based solution, taking the rostering and management of the SMS rotation and making it easier. This was a bunch of homegrown shell scripts that had a little modem card, which would send SMSs to us.

We switch to PagerDuter mainly because of the maintenance and inflexibility of our original solution. We had to maintain it ourselves, paying for the upkeep of the modem, SMS account etc., then making sure that we could send the information to various phones on different carriers. By going to PagerDuty, we were able to come up multiple paths to be able to get those alerts, not just by our SMS.

Previously, we were manually copying and pasting the information. Per incident, it was taking us maybe half an hour, because someone would have to sit there and copy things backwards and forwards, making sure it was all in sync at the end of the incident.

When we first started looking around for a product to replace the existing alerting process, we found this product where alerts were more visible. Then, based on that fact, they were more visible. After a while, this naturally reduced the quantity of alerts by making them more visible. This made it easier to deal with issues because we were able to see alerts. Also, everybody saw them, not just one person.

The initial setup was really easy. We just went in there and clicked a couple buttons, then away we went. 

Anytime you need to set something up, the initial setup is great, quick, and easy. It's when you get into some of the nuances, like rostering, where you have to take a person out of a roster, then put them back in. That sometimes adds a bit of complexity. However, the initial setup was one of the things that sold us on it since it was so quick and easy. That is because it is a SaaS-based solution.

When we initially started it, it was like me fiddling around on one weekend. I said to the guys, "Look, I've got this going," then it pretty much went from there. So, it might have been an hour at the most. It did not take long at all.

I was the only person who deployed it.

The main flexibility and return on investment we get is that we don't have to do the maintenance on the products that we previously had. It's just seamless. It's like, "Oh yeah, it's reliable. We don't have to do anything else." Whereas, previously it was, "Ah, is the pager actually working?" This reduces worry and everybody's comfortable with the fact that it's going to work. So, the return on investment is more a comfort factor, knowing that we're able to rely on it and not worry that, "Oh, hang on, the alerting's not working," then go and chase up what's wrong with the alerting as well as chase any other problems which come up.
The best thing that we've had is that we get alerted before things happen rather than after the customer's having a problem or notices the problem.

As a result of the reduced white noise, we have reduced engineer fatigue. This means that because the engineers are not tired, their work throughput increases. It is definitely noticeable. If our engineers is working and gets called after hours every night, then when they come in to do their shifts, they're tired because they've had interrupted sleep. Whereas, if we make sure we don't have the white noise and everything else coming through, they're still able to get through their normal workload as well.

If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions.

PagerDuty's pricing seems competitive. At one point, we were looking at OpsGenie because part of their current pricing includes the call routing that we wanted to include. It was actually cheaper to get that plus the call routing than it is on PagerDuty at the moment. However, we would have to go and buy an extra module to go with it. What we have at the moment is solid, and it would be a hard sell to say, "We'll go to something else that we're not familiar with."

If we wanted phone calls or additional SMSs, we would have to pitch up for those. They give us so many per month per user, then we have to pay extra if it goes over that.

Over the years, we have looked at other solutions: OpsGenie and VictorOps. There was another one, but they faded away. We were also using Pingdom at one point. Some of them are still a little bit green in this space. They're definitely coming up to speed.

So far, we're settled on PagerDuty because they were the leader and only one around at the time we were evaluating solutions. Since then, we've started looking at other products just to make sure that they're still on point with what we need.

The alerting functionality is not too bad. I have evaluated other competitive products for the way you can set different types of alerts, e.g., for non-critical or critical. PagerDuty will alert you differently based on those settings, which is an advantage that we like. It will also try multiple paths so you can set it up to email you the alert, send you an SMS, phone you, or just a push notification to your phone. One of those four mechanisms means the engineer will get notified one way or another. If that doesn't work, it automatically escalates to the next person in the alerting path.

We do have a project in the pipes for probably the beginning of next year to go through and do another review to make sure that the solution has everything there. We also want to do comparisons for what other options are available, make sure the pricing is still competitive, what's on offer, and so on.

For whatever solution you have for alerting, and it being such a critical role in incident management, you need to be able to rely on it. PagerDuty allows us to do that.

Ensure you sit down and identify what you want in any alerting platform, whether it's PagerDuty or OpsGenie. Sit down and define what you want, particularly around your scheduling, what alerts you want to be able to ingest or handle, who you want to be able to process or send those alerts to, and any other possible bits and pieces in there that you may need before you sit down and look at an alerting platform of any description. Because sometimes, depending on what it is, there may be another way of doing it when you actually go and talk to the salespeople or pre-sales engineers. They'll go, "Oh, well, you can do this, this, or this." This will avoid bright light problems where, "Oh, that's a nice, shiny light. Yeah, we need that." You actually have in front of you what you need, not necessarily what they're trying to sell you.

We have looked at the solution’s analytics, but haven't gone much into them. At the time that we were looking at it, we didn't see any real benefit to it since we are only a small team. If you would look at a larger organization, you would get more benefit out of it. However, because we're such a small team, everybody knows how many alerts are coming through. It's not as though we need to do a full-on detailed, analytical review of things.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. It is a reliable solution that works.

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.