Item: PagerDuty
Rating: 8
Author: Rita Lo

Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PagerDuty for engineering incident management. It alerts us about issues in our production pipeline, and offers escalation policies and alerts so we can address the SEVs in time. By paging the on-call engineer to look into blockers in a timely manner, it allows us to improve our service metrics.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy escalation to the relevant stakeholders, driving ownership and accountability
Responsive in managing and sending alerts and notifications
Multi-modal - allows phone, SMS, mobile app push for notifications
Easy scheduling for on-calls and out of office overrides

Cons

Not a very customizable product - would love integration with tools like JIRA
UI can be more intuitive

Most Important Features

Workload management and processing
Error alerting
Monitoring

Return on Investment

Allow our service to be available 24/7 with minimal downtime, improving customer experience
Monitor incidents and allow us to customize/schedule alert notifications, making engineers' jobs easier and preventing turnover
Prevent SEVs that could deteriorate, bring down our service, and cost us millions of dollars from loss in bookings

PagerDuty Reliability

Since our services are 24/7, any SEVs that impact customers can cost our company millions of dollars, as entire regions can be taken out, paralyzing our operations. In these events, engineers need to be alerted immediately regarding the incidents - and mobilized to resolve them. PagerDuty allows us to detect any incident in our lifecycle, giving us a head start to resolve them before they spread. It also integrates with ServiceNow and Slack so stakeholders can be informed as the solutioning happens. It constantly listens in the background, and responsibly alert the relevant parties when need arises.

PagerDuty Integrations

PagerDuty offers native integrations with email, via their customer API, and through their PagerDuty Agent. It allows for integrations across customer service, process automation, cloud, communication, marketing, analytics, and many more. It can notify on call responders of alerts sent from some of these integrated systems, and send custom alerts via Slack accordingly. Some of the integrations we find helpful are with Datadog, Slack, ServiceNow, Zendesk etc. All in all, a great ecosystem.

PagerDuty Analytics

PagerDuty Analytics is great at filtering, categorizing and analyzing tickers, so our engineering teams can improve their on-call experience. We can use the dashboards to see summaries that allow a one-stop-shop to understand where we are lacking in terms of the customer experience. The pre-built analytics metrics/queries provide us easy access to reliability performance by each incident type without advance set-up. The smart recommendations also give insights on where we can reduce noise and avoid employee fatigue.

Key Insights

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?

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

Other Software Used

Slack, GitHub, Bitbucket

Likelihood to Recommend

PagerDuty is great if you want a tool that integrates well with your existing infrastructure to provide digital forensics and incident responses. It is easy to set up, and has decent API integrations. It does a good job of notifying/escalating incidents to the right teams expediently, allowing for SMS, mobile app, and other options for notifying. It is also easy to set up and configure out of the box.
It's not the tool that allows for total granularity and control, but if you want that, you're probably better off building it in house. The UI and some reporting functionalities can be improved, but all in all its a solid tool for its convenience.

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