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PagerDuty has the features you need to solve complex incident management situations
July 19, 2020

PagerDuty has the features you need to solve complex incident management situations

Brendon Wilder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty

PagerDuty is used for Incident Management and is an integral piece of our observability platform across all development teams within our business. In general, all monitoring and alerting tools used by various teams report into PagerDuty, which informs both on-call staff through a variety of means (email, SMS, Slack, etc.) and customers through our platform status page.
  • Lots of integrations that development and first response teams use.
  • Scheduling resources
  • Noise reduction
  • Analytics
  • Pricing tiers and available features don't always fit needs, making negotiations somewhat difficult.
  • This platform has LOTS of features, but support and guidance aren't always helpful. Documentation is good but would benefit from a more custom approach.
  • Permissions are somewhat complicated
  • Individual pages in the web app often show too much data and can be confusing.
  • Improved time to respond and time to resolve critical issues.
  • Tracking of key response metrics over time.
  • Integration with other important DevOps/SRE tools.
Since an incident management tool is key to a business' ability to provide the reliability of their own tools and services, it needs to be rock solid. Over the years, PagerDuty has proven to be very reliable, with only one noticeable outage, which also happened to impact a significant portion of the internet and AWS as well. When issues arise and support needs to be involved, they are responsive.
Integrations are one of the core reasons we chose PagerDuty. They have always had integrations with all of the major communication and issue tracking services on the market including Hipchat(when it was a thing), Slack, Jira, Sumo Logic, New Relic, and many more. We've also used the API extensively to gather information that helps us track key metrics like MTTA, MTTR, Error Rates, and more.
Instead of automating incident responses, our business instead emphasizes addressing issues in ways to mitigate future occurrences wherever possible. That said, we have trialed these features in the web app and mobile apps and found them to be interesting and effective.
Much of the more interesting out of the box Analytics features are only available at the higher pricing tiers. That said, their High Urgency Incident Analysis charts have proven a good starting point for most teams and are the main staple for most of our teams. If teams want more in-depth analysis, they either need to purchase the product at a higher tier or perform some acrobatics with the API.
When compared to VictorOps and OpsGenie, PagerDuty is clearly the best of the breed. It provides a more polished UI, more integrations, and more features than the others, but it's priced at a premium. Smaller teams will probably get more value out of another alternative that offers less at a lower price.
Their support is always responsive and operates within their SLA, but their responses are usually tier 1. The first response often redirects you to documentation or asks the most basic questions regardless of how much information you provide when you open an issue. Documentation is pretty good, but if you have a complex situation that you're unsure how to apply their tooling to, you may get fed up with trying long before their support team can give you reasonable guidance.

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?

No

Would you buy PagerDuty again?

Yes

If your team and/or use cases are very simple, this tool is overkill. If you have a large organization, centralized resources, and lots of complex use/response cases, this tool probably has everything you could ever need, So long as you're willing to work for it, you can configure this product to do pretty much anything you need, but you shouldn't expect much from their support unless you're willing to pay more.