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PagerDuty
What Is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) is a leader in digital operations management. In an always-on world, organizations of all sizes trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time. Teams use PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them in the future.
Who Uses PagerDuty?
Engineering teams, Support Teams, System Administrators, NOC teams at any scale -- from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
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Reviews of PagerDuty
Ensure High availability of your product to the end user by integrating it with PagerDuty
Comments: PagerDuty helped our product to become highly stable and it ensured high availability to the end user, overall had a great experience with it.
Pros:
PagerDuty is used to send alert notifications to developer, We can use it in a way that when ever failure occurs notify the developer who is scheduled to be on-call, Even a customer escalation to a email can trigger a pagerDuty notification alert, when the receiver email ID is subscribed with PagerDuty, PagerDuty has escalation policies , in which multiple users can be in different level, if level 1 failed to resolve the issue, the level 2 dev gets a alert etc .. and the dev's can be scheduled to rotate there levels in fixed time intervals, like weekly bases, It Dose a good job of maintaining the issue states & the alerted issue has different lifecycle such as triggered, acknowledged , resolved, snoozed, It maintains analytical dashboards on dev's which shows the responsiveness of the developer , like how many issues they have resolved and what is the average resolution time or have they escalated it etc .. it maintains history of alerts, it has good customer support, the resolution note's can also be added against the alert, We can configure the alerts as Low and High Urgency , based on which we can have different type of notifications, types of notifications are phone call, message, email, push notification in pd app etc ... pagerDuty deduplicates the alerts with same message, if a incident is in open state and if same incident occurs again and again , it will not be raised.
Cons:
Sometimes when i resolve the alert on web, i still get a call on phone, If the incident was resigned by the developer to a other user who is not in the escalation policy and if he did not answer the alert the escalation chain stops, instead it should be thrown back to older escalation policy from ware it begun
Alternatives Considered:
PagerDuty : A solution to almost every problem you didn't know you had yet
Comments: The software just works. We have had almost thirty thousand alerts flow through PagerDuty since we first started using it. The software completely replaced a rather broken SMS / Email alert chain overnight and has been by far the most valuable product we have purchased for keeping our system uptime levels where they need to be. Lastly a personal experience which I will always cherish. It's a snowy winter day and you're on call, but you needed paperless, and cat food, and pedlyte and diapers and other bits, so you took your 2 year old to a big box store. You're all the way at the back of the store and your phone goes off with "Something's broken... Something's Broken... It's your Fault! ... It's your Fault!..." In the box store, with a full cart and a toddler. Next thing you know... you're flying through the box store to the front, diapers falling out of the cart, sippy cup lost, toys missing, and toddler singing along with your phone since he now knows the words quite well. Get to the front, abandon the cart, the two children's voices still going full tilt, and get out to the parking lot just in the nick of time to production by ninja resizing a set of boxes as they are almost to the point of falling all over themselves. No one noticed. Thanks to PagerDuty. And now I'm *still* known as "The Something's Broken" dude by the managers of that store. They sing it to me every time I'm there 2 years later.
Pros:
Integration with CloudWatch, webhooks, Jira is outstanding, functional, and reliable. The application has gotten better over the years I have used it. Handles real issues in real time with everything you need Allows on-call individuals to customize their notification scheme to fit their life. Having full control over when, where and how you are "dinged" is just awesome.
Cons:
It's a little expensive per user if you need simple API things. The rule set for routing isn't as good as VictorOps for the same price point. PagerDuty is missing a "default route" option like VictorOps has. This is minor, because it's rather trivial to setup an extra account and use that "extra dummy account" as the "Default". I'm counting this as a "con" since we have had to do this for every single deployment of PagerDuty I've worked on where we wish to have alerts go to a team, but not actually notify anyone. Lastly, business-hours-only alerting is a little weak. (Maybe it has gotten better.) Every implementation I've found, we need to have some sort of queued' alerts which we don't want to wake us up in the middle of the night but we want to or need to know about next business day situation we have had to work hard to implement in PagerDuty.
On-call software with rich features
Comments: I have been using PagerDuty for 1 year now, and I'm with the product so far. The only negative thing about the PagerDuty is the big latency during the incidents.
Pros:
PagerDuty does the job. It's gonna wake you up in the middle of the night, no matter what. The number of ways they are providing for acknowledging an incident is great. You can get a call, an SMS message, a push notification on the browser, or a mobile notification for an incident.
Cons:
PagerDuty has some latency when it comes to acknowledging incidents. After acknowledging an incident by using the mobile app, getting an additional phone call about the incident is a little bit annoying.
Great solution for on-call and incident management for any organisation!
Comments: We have implemented PagerDuty across our SRE and Support organizations and are beginning to roll it out to our engineering teams. This is providing us rapid Incident response and rapid engagement of teams to assist during incidents, no matter what time of day it is or where the teams are geographically located.
Pros:
PagerDuty very easy to configure and use, I've given access to team leads with no instructions and they've been up and running that day.
Cons:
It'd be great if PagerDuty could integrate with all versions of Jira natively without a 3rd party plugin.
Alternatives Considered:
Great product, helps us a lot
Comments:
As much as i hate to see a call from pagerduty, i know its doing its job. Its served the purpose well, its rare that we have to login and change settings since you can ack and resolve from phone, or slack.
You could add snooze option to the slackbot, that would be awesome!
Pros:
- The flow of events, mainly. How it goes from Triggered, to ACK, to resolved with snooze options, it feels natural. - Notification flow: How I can set up to notify my phone, wait two minutes before texting me, and wait five minutes before calling me. - Slack integration
Cons:
- Configuration can use some redesign. Its hard to find some settings sometimes. I told a coworker about updating notifications, and it took them a while to figure out where they can do that. - Some important features are hidden behind a higher tier plan, eg: analytics.
Alternatives Considered:
The best option if you need to be alerted for when things go down
Comments: We were tired of paging everyone all the time on things going down or coming back up. Now it pages one person during business hours only. Also if the server comes back up it'll close the ticket for us and resolve the call. Our admins can now sleep at nights and not have to respond to every page with people trying to figure out who is handling the situation.
Pros:
Most? There are so many features with pagerduty. I like it only alerts one person on call instead of the old way we use to page people. We use to page everyone on everything. Now it's just the person on call and he doesn't respond it goes to the next person. Very nice setup.
Cons:
Scheduling times is a bit difficult for me to grasp, but once you figure it out you only have to set it up once.
Alternatives Considered:
The standard in on-call notification
Comments: I have used pagerduty for years, and I have to say I use it as the gold standard for other notification services. So far, competitors either don't have nearly the same level of features, or cost a fortune.
Pros:
Easy to set up. Inexpensive. Reliable. It has a number of integration options for various monitoring systems, and they are always adding more. They also have generic versioned APIs for any custom software you might bring to the table.
Cons:
The Mobile app sometimes has issues refreshing when there is a lot of activity.
Alternatives Considered:
PagerDuty is the perfect solution for managing our production support team
Comments: PagerDuty gives us peace of mind. With PagerDuty it's great to know that the right person will be contacted as soon as a production incident is logged. Keeping track of who is on support is no longer a hassle. I can't imagine us managing production support without it, especially considering the fact that the team is spread across multiple continents. I can't recommend it enough!
Pros:
- Great integration support - Mobile app works great and continues to get frequent updates - Flexible configuration options without being overly complicated - Allows us to easily manage our after-hours roster and schedules - Ability to create incident reports is a great time saver
Cons:
- Pricing is a bit more than some competitors
Alternatives Considered:
Pager Duty
Comments: Helps monitor critical systems and alerting
Pros:
The alerting, even when you turn the volume down on your phone if an alerts triggers the volume will get turned back up for that alarm
Cons:
After a few years the price started to increase.
Alternatives Considered:
PagerDuty is the defacto incident management software
Pros:
PagerDuty takes the complication out of scheduling and lets us focus on keeping our services up and healthy. We set the schedule and forget about it.
Cons:
The Terraform provider is very buggy. We often find we have to go through multiple rounds of guess and check to get Terraform config to match up with how we want it to end up in PagerDuty. I understand that Terraform is not the primary UX you are focused on but for Terraform power users managing many teams and services it is indispensable.
Easy notifications and escalation
Pros:
We have been using PagerDuty for years for incident management and it has been a key part of our business. We mainly use the notifications and incident escalation side which automatically adjusts to the on call schedules we set.
Cons:
We haven't anything bad to say about the product as it does everything we need and does it very well.
Best Incident Response software in the market!
Comments: PagerDuty is an amazing software and a must for support projects which deal with high severity tickets and tasks. It is very useful in keeping track of the tickets and in ensuring there is not a miss in working on the tickets within the stipulated time.
Pros:
PagerDuty is very important in projects that deal with tickets, incidents, and tasks that are bound by service level agreements. This is the case in all the 24*7 projects. The PagerDuty administrator can allot different severity tickets to the PagerDuty and specify the method by which the users can be notified about the same. The PagerDuty provides different ways of notifying the user: Via email, SMS, or call. The best thing about this software is that if the user does not respond to the ticket on the PagerDuty portal within a specified time, it will send the user an SMS. Then, if the user still is unresponsive to the ticket, a call will alert the user to work on it. This process ensures that high criticality tickets are not missed. In this way, SLA breaches are avoided and so are escalations.
Cons:
There are no major drawbacks to using PagerDuty since it is very useful software. But, at times when there are multiple administrators handling the software, if one administrator makes changes to the setting of the software, the other administrators might not be notified of the changes. This might cause a confusion between the users and the alerting process.
Alternatives Considered:
PagerDuty A guide for incident response.
Comments: Overall, PagerDuty is good product which can be considered if you're running some critical services, infrastructre in your organization.
Pros:
Followings are the PagerDuty benefits: - It is a SaaS based alerting systems allowing companies to use their in house technology for incident response. - It provides the realtime monitoring for all the infrastructure and services. - It provides a lot of integrations with other products for example Jira and Slack. - PagerDuty has a level of escalation setup that allows incidents to follow a process chain. - PagerDuty features like SSO, RoleBased Access.
Cons:
Followings are the Cons for PagerDuty: - It is expensive as compared to its competitors. - Its integration lacks some features like easy set up. - It has a way to improve its configurations so that a user with zero technical knowledge can understand it.
Reliable Incident reporting tools
Comments: It is quite a helpful tool. We use to get different services, we clearly got enough info on the incident row itself we do not have to go and check the whole incident.
Pros:
I like the notification services, I got notified for each incident. It has a mobile app as well which is helpful. We can see a history of similar incidents, We can acknowledge and resolve incidents.
Cons:
It is difficult to understand the schedule if there are a large number of developers. We do not have access to resolved incidents. there is no way to unresolve them.
Incident Management Expert
Comments: Incident management, alerting, reporting. Escalations.
Pros:
Escalation matrix. Easy to use. Multiple integrations with the market available critical tools.
Cons:
It was wasy to integrate. Up and running in short span of time. All good.
Get alerted when your services go down or on urgent mails from the customer, and track it
Comments: PagerDuty has continually helped us in identifying the unusual issues and edge cases, now our product is stable, and we ensure high availability of our services , it has been a great experience with it
Pros:
You can use pager duty for different purpose to get alerted and track the alert till the alert was addressed, we use it for the alert on service down and failures, so that the product issue can be addressed and fixed at the earliest, Pagerduty serves this purpose good, it alerts in different mediums and at different levels, and there is a rotation policy, if a level 1 user dose not addresses then it alerts the level 2 user and this rotation gos on till the issue is properly addressed, and there are good features like time tracking, historic analysis , team groping, different alert policies, scheduling the users to be on call, snoozing the alert, escalating to other user, etc
Cons:
some times the web UI becomes slow, the app version dose not have all the features that the web version has
Be alerted when your process or application fails, to ensure high avilablety
Comments: This is a good way to keep our applications in a highly available state, it is really useful and great tool to have
Pros:
This Tool is simple and effect, the sole purpose of this tool is to alert the developer, and keep track the alert was resolved or not, so , there are escalation policies that can be defined, such that when a primary user dose not acknowledge the alert, it wold be escalated to a other user in the list ,order wise there are different type of alerts hards and soft, so we can set different notification methods for both, supported notification mediums, phone call, SMS, app notification, email etc.. We can add note for all alerted insedents, we can see the history of alerts and to come to a conclusion and fix it for a long term, they have a great support team
Cons:
I don't see any issues with the service, some times even if we resolve the alert in the web UI, we still receive the call
Achieving zero downtime and 24X7 oncall made easier
Comments: Overall experience has been very seamless. Very easy to setup and use. But a little on the expensive side.
Pros:
- Easy Integrations - Simple User Interface, very easy to navigate - Lots of features and functionalities - Very easy to setup - Schedule creation and setting up rotation
Cons:
Pagerduty is definitely the leader in this space, but it is fairly expensive and hence we have started looking at other options.
Tool used for notifications of Priority 1 tickets for our Hosting team.
Comments: Knowing that you will get notified if a High priority ticket gets in the queue (without having to pick at your phone every time you get a work email like it used to be before PagerDuty).
Pros:
You can login and see the schedule for all the teams involved in the on call process. It is nice to be able to find out not only about the current week, but the future on call times as well.
Cons:
The reminders when your on call turn ends. I see the need for the reminder when starts, but I don't really see the point of the reminder when it ends.
Crucial and Fantastic
Comments: I'm not really sure how I lived without PagerDuty. Once I started using it, I can't imagine not using it. Our ops group was/is small, and we needed eyes on at all hours, with a failsafe way to make sure someone got woken up. PagerDuty has been dutifully letting us know things are broken for 3 years, for a fraction of the cost of a manned "NOC".
Pros:
First and foremost, that it works as advertised. The core product has done what its supposed to do without fail for us. Additionally, the ability to effortlessly set overrides to schedules is something I've found very helpful. But perhaps more than anything, honestly, are the people. Everyone I've interacted with, be it emails with support, or discussions with our rep on the phone has been fantastic. They're enthusiastic, know the product, and eminently helpful.
Cons:
I can only think of one minor thing: the phone number that alerts come from has a tendency to change. In some senses though, this is a bit of a "pro". From discussion with support, this changes because of the redundant outbound calling facilities used. So I'm happy to trade the minor inconvenience of occasionally not recognizing a number as being PagerDuty in return for knowing that my alerts will go out.
Set it and forget it
Comments: Over all, it is easy and reliable.
Pros:
It was fairly easy to set up and once it is, you almost never have to change it.
Cons:
Sometimes, the pages that come in are not the usual ones and you have to add the number to the "Not spam" list or add it to the contact info on the cell phone
It is hard to beat PagerDuty for the functionality and itegration into alerting systems
Comments: On-call rotations are managed through PagerDuty and it allows each functional area to build their own escalation procedures. We are exploring the newly added teams and business process functionality of the software to improve collaborative efforts between teams.
Pros:
Lots of Integrations with other tools and ways to integrate even without commercial integrations, with RESTful interfaces and email integrations.
Cons:
Working with the software renewal and licensing aspects of the software has been challenging. There were some legal snafu's that made getting the agreement signed quite a chore.
Review about PagerDuty, from a user standpoint
Comments: Over all as I said it does the job. Minor UI improvements will help to make it more convenient.
Pros:
First of all, PD does the job. It means that my company can customize it as they wish, and I get alerts efficiently using email, SMS and phone calls (and the app). The alerts are effective and the needed information is found inside the incident body. It is not trivial to have a system that works in large scale as it does in Taboola.
Cons:
There are some end-user UI issues I would like to raise: 1. It is too easy for me to see others' incidents. I do not want to see it - it's confusing. Once I actually closed an incident of another person, mistakenly. Yes it was my mistake and perhaps my IT department's configuration mistake, but the UI shows me these incidents. I am only interested in mine. 2. In "alerts" I see many alerts which are not mine! again you are loading me with details not relevant for me. 3. In "indicents" in the website, I put on "any status" but I don't see closed incidents. 4. The smartphone app is great, very focused to what I need. Why not add the option to add a calendar entry for PD on-call shifts?
PagerDuty keeps my team on point
Comments: PagerDuty has been instrumental in notifying my team when problems arise.
Pros:
Integration with monitoring software is extremely powerful. My team integrates PagerDuty into Slack which increases the visibility for the times other team members are not on call. The ability to auto-resolve issues on PagerDuty when the monitors become healthy increases my productivity (especially when I want to go back to sleep, haha!).
Cons:
PagerDuty cannot penetrate do not disturb mode on my iPhone. This means I have to turn off other notifications on my phone when I sleep. A minor annoyance for an otherwise great product.
Page Duty for Operations
Comments: It provides a quick and efficient means to notify tier 3 support and On Call resources assigned to facilitate system outages.
Pros:
The use of email, SMS, or phone to communicate alerts efficiently. It also has the ability to escalate based on a user's response.
Cons:
The calendar override feature is problematic and sometimes doesn't apply when creating an override policy.