Reliable but Missing Core Incident-Management Features
January 28, 2020
Reliable but Missing Core Incident-Management Features
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty
PagerDuty is used by the engineering division of our organization. It is used to schedule on-call rotations and to receive alerts from applications. Engineers on call are expected to respond to alerts received by PagerDuty and they interact with the UI while doing so.
- PagerDuty reliably captures events. This requires that it be available and also perform consistently. This is the absolute backbone requirement of a service of this kind, and I have never had an issue where PagerDuty was unavailable or performing slowly. You need to rely on PagerDuty for the function it serves, and you can.
- PagerDuty has useful features for creating teams and schedules associated with teams. These features integrate with alerts well so that that alert notifications are routed to the correct person.
- By far my biggest complaint about PagerDuty, one that I have made repeatedly on Twitter, is that it doesn't have Search. You can't search Incidents!!! For a highly capitalized, mature, market-leading product in its category in 2020 this is simply astonishing. It also causes hardship for me any time I am on call and there are a lot of issues -- in other words, when you are under the most demand when on call you need your tool to support you the most, and it doesn't.
- Another glaring omission is that PagerDuty doesn't support de-duping events. Airbrake had this feature when I used it in 2011!
- I don't have data to measure this directly, but reliably responding to production outages is essential to Beeswax buying ads on behalf of its customers correctly and without interruption. This is the core service we offer and so PagerDuty is related to customer satisfaction and customer trust in the platform. Satisfaction and trust lead to retention and increase in spend on the platform. Increased customer spend in turn leads to increased revenue for Beeswax.
- Like any SaaS application, PagerDuty improves Beeswax' margins because engineering spends essentially no time managing alerts and can devote that engineering time to value-generating activities.
As mentioned earlier, we spend no engineering time ensuring alerts will be available, letting us focus on generating value. From an alert POV, we focus on defining and implementing metrics collection and alert generation, secure in the knowledge that the alerts will land in PD, be available and be routed correctly. This in turn lets us operate and on-call function with confidence.
We don't use too many integrations. We used Slack for a while but found it redundant. At this time I'm not aware of any other integrations we use. I could imagine getting value in the future from linking PD to a ticketing system such as ZenDesk or Jira, but we haven't done so at this time.
We haven't made use of this feature. I will say that building out such advanced features while not building out obvious features like search and alert management (as I have mentioned earlier) has biased me against the product. In retrospect you could argue these features are targeted at administrators of PD and thus at enterprise customer decision makers. So this may make sense from a business perspective, but putting such features ahead of those that directly benefit the user, the engineer on call, seems short-sighted. Engineers start the enterprises of tomorrow and bad word of mouth matters. In the cloud era it is not at all inconceivable that an open-source or disruptively cheaper alternative to PD arises that duplicates the feature set of PD.
We looked at VictorOps at the time, but essentially chose PD based on 1) market leadership 2) past positive experiences with the product by team members 3) competitive pricing.
Do you think PagerDuty delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with PagerDuty's feature set?
No
Did PagerDuty live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of PagerDuty go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy PagerDuty again?
Yes