Item: PagerDuty
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used as the alert mechanism for all issues pertaining to our infrastructure. Currently, it is only utilized by our platform and operations teams.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Makes good use of alert tones, allowing you to choose how you are alerted to a problem and deciding which alert will wake you at night.
The override option is a nice feature and is easy to use. It allows me to configure times when I am unable to respond to alerts and allow someone else to handle specific dates and times without revamping the entire after hours schedules.
Allows users to send specific events to other users if they are more capable of handling a specific problem.

Cons

I wish you could snooze an alert for longer than 24 hours. This is the maximum time allowed and there are outlying cases where it would be nice to choose a longer length of time.
It is generally not very intuitive from the mobile app to set an override. The user interface could stand a little help with the navigation panes.

Return on Investment

Aside from being able to know when there is a problem, I don't know how much ROI this product has. It does the job and is easily configurable.
PagerDuty also has multiple ways to receive an alert, whether that is via email, text or via API.

I think PagerDuty is a good product. I have used VictorOps before and found the interface to be too cumbersome and tedious to set up. They have a rich interface with many great integrations, but sometimes less is more, and I have found this to be the case with Pager Duty. They have a singular job and they do a nice job at it. It would be nice to have more of a history and to be able to add links to tech articles and wiki pages, but the simplicity of the interface and setup is a win in my book.

Other Software Used

SolarWinds ipMonitor, Splunk Cloud, Octopus Deploy, AppDynamics, GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

I am a big fan of waking up, taking care of the problem, and being able to go back to sleep. The dark interface of the mobile app allows me to quickly see if there is a problem and determine what the issue is without having some bright, blue interface that stimulates my brain more than is needed. Overrides and reassigning an issue to another user is also very helpful and easy to use. It is also nice to see what other users are dealing with when not on call, giving the ability to reach out for assistance without being asked if needed.
I would like to be able to upload alert sounds to the app if there was not one I liked using.

Comments

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PagerDuty Love/"did I just get another alert!" Relationship