Worth the effort to implement
July 15, 2020

Worth the effort to implement

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty

We use PagerDuty in our IT Operations department. We have an on-call rotation for both company calls using the PagerDuty voicemail to alert service as well as automated alerts coming in from multiple monitoring services. It addresses our need to know when things are broken before either other departments or customers, as well as giving a single number anyone in the company can call 24/7 that gets escalated to someone. We have a rotation of admins, with escalation policies headed up to the director of IT and past that the CTO.
  • Event routing. The new event routing pipelines are really nice and we need to transition to them
  • Phone to alert service. This is a nice way to offer a 24/7 phone number but also give someone on the backend time to answer it.
  • Escalation. Making sure alerts never get dropped as long as you configure the escalation policies right.
  • Really easy to disable alerting during scheduled maintenance.
  • It's allowed for our department to trace incidents and justify the need for a third shift IT person.
Though we have seen emails from PagerDuty announcing that incidents were either delayed or not coming at all a few times, overall, they are highly reliable, which helps us respond quickly to incidents and meet our uptime requirements.
We largely use email integration, however, we do have some direct API integration, especially tied to our build systems. We use that API to disable alerting during downtime builds from time to time. We have found that it's better to have more centralized monitoring where alerts are easier to find, vs digging through random boxes for scripts someone wrote that fire directly to PagerDuty.
We do not have any automated incident response workflows. We alert the on-call person, then escalate up to supervisory roles from there.

Do you think PagerDuty delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with PagerDuty's feature set?

Yes

Did PagerDuty live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of PagerDuty go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PagerDuty again?

Yes

Pagerduty is exactly what you need if you need to setup a number that people can call that gets recorded and sent as an alert to someone else. It's also exactly what you need if you have a well-established monitoring platform that can make API calls/emails/etc. to PagerDuty.

If you're in the infant stages of system monitoring and don't have a good monitoring platform in place, I might recommend holding off on this until you are sure you can effectively monitor your systems. Can't alert on what you can't monitor, if that makes sense.