Relaible & flexible paging system

We are using PagerDuty within our Service Operations department helping us with after-hours on-call management. We have a team of 8 analysts. Before PagerDuty, we were using a paging type system where Service Desk would call a common number and leave a message. The on-call analyst will call the messaging system and retrieve the message. This caused unnecessary steps and delays in response. PagerDuty helped us streamline the process and shorten the response time.

So far we have received 100% uptime for the past four years. Being a cloud-based system, it does not rely on our internal communication system, which we are sometimes trying to restore in case of an incident. We know we can reach out to the right analyst either by phone or text.

Due to security and privacy reasons for our systems, we could only use the email integration. The live call integration is only available with additional cost. We could not use other API based integrations. I am sure that would have given us better control and the ability to process based on the rules.

We are using Automated Response for low priority incidents, where based on some keywords, the system automatically acknowledges the incident and waits for a predefined time before escalating it to an actual human responder. If a second all-clear email is processed within that waiting time period, it closes the original incident as resolved.

PagerDuty has some excellent reports and analytics built-in. It helped us analyze the response times, bottlenecks, and any other pain points. By addressing those hurdles, it has given us the ability to continuously process improvement. The data can be reviewed by managers and analysts, each can figure out what went right and what went wrong in any indent response.