A reliable and well-featured enterprise alerting system
March 07, 2020
A reliable and well-featured enterprise alerting system
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty
We are using PagerDuty in a large department (700+ services configured) to enable monitoring and alerting on services that we are building. PagerDuty allows for automatic alerting integrated with standard tools such as Grafana as well as manual alerting for incidents and troubleshooting. It helps to ensure timely responses when someone is needed urgently.
- Flexible notification rules via a variety of channels allow users to set up alerting as they prefer.
- Escalation policies allow flexible scheduling and generally useful ability to override when providing cover for another team member.
- The basic events API is easy to trigger so automatic alerting can be set up easily.
- Services have a range of options such as high or low priority alerting, so only those notifications which need to wake someone up can do so.
- The web interface can be unintuitive, though improvements have been made to it recently. When configuring an override, it tries to be helpful by not letting you select an end time before the start time, but this often causes me to submit an entirely wrong override. It also does not warn if you override someone with themselves (which is pointless and an error). Validation for overrides should be done when you press submit (or by displaying non-blocking warnings), not just ignoring the input you made.
- The mobile application (I use Android) is awkward to use for anything other than basic tasks. For example, setting up an override on the mobile app is quite tricky to do. It's typically easier to turn on a laptop.
- The mobile application does not seem to understand time-limited. Do Not Disturb settings on Android, so if it overrides Do Not Disturb (essential for prompt notifications), it leaves Do not Disturb switched on permanently rather than turning itself off again at a later point.
- Your personal contact information is visible to all other users of PagerDuty in your organization, and there is no option to hide it. I would prefer this to be an option.
- PagerDuty means that someone is always easily reachable for our service in times of business need.
- PagerDuty acts as the focus of our alerts, and we know that any alerts coming through it should be given some attention.
- PagerDuty helps to make sure that an engineer is aware of an issue as soon as possible after our alerting detects it.
We need PagerDuty to be reliable because we need to trust our alerting tool. If we can't trust our alerting tool, then we would need to create backup alerting, and that would be a nightmare. When PagerDuty had some reliability issues years ago, it concerned for us. However, since then, it has been extremely reliable, so we feel we can trust it to deliver our alerts promptly and efficiently.
We do not use many pre-built integrations but use a lot of API-based integrations, many using the easy-to-use PagerDuty library for Python. These make it easy to trigger alerts. We also use the API-based alerting from Grafana, which is convenient and straightforward. We also use integration to notify a chat room of the alerts that go off so that the whole team has some visibility.
We have not used the full incident response workflow provided by PagerDuty. We find that each incident is so different from the next that a standardized procedure is likely to be too cumbersome.
We do not use PagerDuty analytics.
Do you think PagerDuty delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with PagerDuty's feature set?
Yes
Did PagerDuty live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of PagerDuty go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy PagerDuty again?
Yes