PagerDuty Operations Cloud Reviews

It's mainly for IT call scheduling, emergency contacts, events, and those kinds of things. It's integrated with AWS, MS Teams, Remedy, and other solutions.

Previously, people used to use pagers. Nowadays, nobody wants to carry another device. PagerDuty has replaced that ability to contact somebody in case of emergency without fail. That's how I would characterize it in improving our organization. 

The most important feature that is used is call scheduling. We are also able actually to call IT folks in the case of an emergency.

I have not heard anything bad about its stability.

It has scaled well for us.

I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense.

The company has been using the solution for two or three years. 

I have not seen or heard anything bad about stability, so I would assume no news is good news. My understanding is it is stable. 

I would say it is a scalable solution. We initially started with a limited number of licenses and then expanded to much broader usage. We never had any issues scaling as needed. 

We have about 1,000 people using the solution right now, although it may have grown to include even more.

I have not seen any requests coming through directly to me regarding increasing the budget allocation for the solution for 2023. If at all, it comes through maybe a later part of 2023. I have not seen any request for an increased budget and therefore do not see us increasing usage in the next little while.

I've never dealt with technical support. I have no experience with them. 

We had multiple solutions before PagerDuty. There are still some in use in other parts of the company. For example, there is a tool called Arrcus that is used. We use it for our line technicians and others, however, no longer for IT support.

I did not get involved in the setup. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the process was. 

In terms of witnessing an ROI, no one has really done that level of due diligence. 

This is a SaaS solution. 

The pricing may be about $1,000 per user. 

We did a detailed coverage to choose the right solution for us. We tried Everbridge, for example. In the end, we decided to go with PagerDuty.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

It has been fantastic. I've used PagerDuty across multiple companies throughout my career. I brought it with me through several companies. It is one of the most affordable solutions. It is highly API driven.

Over time, they went from just being a really simple solution for sending you a text or an email to being something that can send you alerts, push notifications, and all types of things that guarantee that the people you're trying to reach can be reached. The multi-way messaging, as well as everything else, has really helped make it reliable and consistent. That's something that we necessarily need for on-call operations and those types of activities.

The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features.

The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that. 

I have probably been using it since 2012. So, it has been a good 12 years at this point.

We're using the current web version and the mobile applications. It is on the cloud.

It is extremely stable. I've very rarely had issues with PagerDuty. Every once in a while, with some of the newer versions, there were a few issues. When they were putting a new feature out, such as some of the group configurations that they did four or five years ago, I remember a handful of pages that didn't work quite right in those areas, but for the most part, PagerDuty meets like four nines. So, there is consistent uptime.

It is very much scalable. I've seen it being used in organizations as small as 30 people. I've also worked in organizations with a hundred thousand people on PagerDuty. Currently, we have about 150 people. We absolutely have plans to increase its usage.

The product is so self-intuitive that you very rarely need to reach out to their technical support, but when you do, they're pretty quick to turn things around and resolve them for you. I would rate them a four out of five.

Positive

We've used all kinds of paging solutions where we've attempted and tried to do things, but there is just not a lot of great competition to PagerDuty. If you go outside of PagerDuty to other peers in that level of scale, they're either significantly more expensive, or you have to do a whole lot more homegrown stuff. For example, if you wanted to use Amazon SNS, SQS, or SES, you can build these types of solutions, but you end up having to put a lot of infrastructure, time, and engineering effort into them.

It has always been straightforward.

It is always implemented in-house. Its maintenance is effectively zero. Realistically, it is a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution thing, and then it becomes just a regular DevOps task that you tax to your DevOps or your CI/CD teams. For the most part, there are not a lot of changes that need to be done in there, but when a change is needed, it typically takes less than an hour to get that implemented and tested.

We have absolutely seen an ROI.

They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing.

It is one of the most critical things you can do in your infrastructure, and it is a no-brainer, just do it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It is literally peerless among its competition.

We primarily use this solution to track alerts from our cloud environment and monitor and respond to alerts on our cloud platform.

The ease of having it on a mobile phone is valuable. We can always track incidents wherever we are, even away from our computers. Additionally, the escalation feature for incidents to senior engineers or other people is very useful.

The user interface could be more intuitive. Initially, when we started using it, we had issues viewing some options because we had information issues in my role as an observer, not the responder. Therefore, I couldn't view buttons like acknowledgements because they were not showing up.

We have been using this solution for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Our technical support is not directly from PagerDuty. Instead, it involves us rotating within the teams within the organization.

We previously used Dynamic which is similar to PagerDuty but with more Microsoft resources.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We don't use a reseller or consultant.

With the number of features we get, I believe it's a handy tool that is worth the money, so it's a great return on investment.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good, but the user interface could be improved. I advise new users to spend time reading documentation or about the type of features to understand how it works and how to set it up.

I interact with customers and then see the use cases and how they would use the PagerDuty tool and the integrations that come with it. I basically see how the customers will use the product. I then have conversations with the higher members or the stakeholders in the company on what ROIs they would get from this tool and the measurements of metrics, etc.

The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable. 

It's an incident management tool. So, its main functionality is to integrate with monitoring tools. There is a flexible and easy way of integrating with monitoring tools. That's what I have observed in most of the scenarios. It allows us to configure the integration with APIs and plugins as well.

The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident.

PagerDuty can introduce machine-learning concepts for detecting incidents earlier. They haven't implemented that, but that might be on the roadmap.

It has been one year.

It is stable. It is rapidly growing, and all the features are being built in a stable way for the users to work with. I don't see any difficulties in handling any of the functionalities in PagerDuty.

It is scalable. It is used by enterprise customers. Only good planning is required in the initial stages for us to implement it fully.

So far, we have not reached out to their support team. We were able to support the customers with the solution that they needed when they reached out to us.

Most companies these days are partner-led companies. The first hand that goes into support is from a partner. Partners like us support the customers in any P3 or P4 issues. We also help with the P1 issues if they're finding it difficult to manage the application, and in turn, if the partners need support from the PagerDuty support team itself, they get support within one or two hours. So, it is easier for customers to go through a partner.

It depends on the complexity of the environment a customer has. If a customer only wants to track one application, then it's just a straightforward integration. If a customer wants to set up the tool at an enterprise level, there should be a real plan that requires having discussions with all the teams. We need to build a plan and then methodically integrate all the tools one by one. It's not always complex, but better planning helps in configuring these tools properly. In most of the scenarios, it provides us the integrations that are readily built, and we have successfully configured it in most of the customer environments. Overall, I would rate its setup a 4 out of 5.

It's not only the budget that goes into the product. We see all the other factors as well, such as the services that they buy and investments they make in the resources for configuring, working, training, etc. It could help an organization not only financially but also performance-wise in the long term.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We use PagerDuty for alerting and escalations. We have it integrated with our monitoring tools.

PagerDuty integrates well with many other monitoring applications, it provides us with a centralized view of what can be configured in terms of escalations, and who's on call. 

We can control who is going to be notified through PagerDuty. If one team needs to contact another team, we can contact them through PagerDuty to get other teams involved in different incidents.

The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO,  the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting.

PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform.

I have been using PagerDuty for approximately two years.

The stability of PagerDuty is good.

PagerDuty is scalable. They have APIs that are compatible with Amazon web services. You could send alerts directly to PagerDuty from different platforms.

There are a lot of different teams using this solution in my company, such as engineering teams and IT. We have approximately 200 people in the company but not everyone needs to use the solution.

As the company grows we will increase usage.

I have not had the need to contact the vendors.

The solution does not require a lot of maintenance. We integrate PagerDuty with Okta for single sign-ons. If we need to add new users, the associate director and one other person have administrator permission in PagerDuty to add new users. We can integrate those users with Okta, which allows them to log in through Okta.

I recommend PagerDuty to others, it's a good solution, and it works well.

I rate PagerDuty a ten out of ten.

We use PagerDuty for incident managment. We're looking at integrating PagerDuty with Rundeck in the future.

PagerDuty has allowed us to identify issues and incidents within the infrastructure that we wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

PagerDuty's notification process is the most valuable feature.

I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions.

We have been using PagerDuty for about five years.

I rate PagerDuty support 10 out of 10. 

PagerDuty was deployed before I joined the company. Finding the information about what I wanted to do was complex, but it was straightforward once I found what I needed. Overall, it has been a fairly easy solution to use and maintain. 

We have seen a return.

I think the license costs around $30 per person.

I rate PagerDuty nine out of 10. 

The primary use case of the solution is to alert the on-call person when there are any critical errors or when the servers are down. It is also used for the on-call scheduling of personnel.

The most valuable feature is the phone app that allows us to send notifications without additional fees when sending by SMS or phone calls. There is also an escalation metric that allows any alert that goes unanswered to automatically move on to the next person on the list.

The product can be improved by including out-of-the-box integration with other standard tools used in our fields such as Confluence and Jira.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable and we haven't had any missed alerts in the five years of use.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The cost is based on the package you select.

I rate this solution seven out of ten.

I recommend anyone looking for an alert solution to try out other similar products such as Opsgenie. Opsgenie is more user-friendly out of the box and is available at a lower cost.

The two major use cases were alerts for events and scheduling of engineers to get pages based on incidents.

Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful.

It is a very non-customizable product, so you cannot add things like root cause analysis or the classification of incidents based on the area where you are getting more incidents. For example, if you're getting a lot of database issues, that may be an are you want to probe.

There aren't any capabilities to integrate with any problem management issues, like repetitive or high impact issues to deep dive and track them in the PagerDuty system. That is, I would like to see integration of problem management with incident management. That would be one nice feature to have.

It is a stable product.

It's scalable. We had 120 users.

We used Evanios and switched to PagerDuty because deduplication of the alerts was not occurring in Evanios.

The initial setup was not very difficult. It took us about four months to set it up because we were trying to make PagerDuty fit to the best possible use cases that we had. We also had quite a number of alerts to move.

I'd rate the initial setup process at three out of five.

Set your objectives and have a plan regarding your goals, timelines, and what you want to achieve. Figure these out in terms of the implementation of the tool and whether your objectives will be met by the tool.

Overall, I give PagerDuty a rating of eight on a scale from one to ten. 

I tie alerts from our GCP tenants to PagerDuty.

PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back.

PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement. In the next release, PagerDuty should include the ability to get raw data about usage and put it on a dashboard.

I've been using PagerDuty for five or six years.

PagerDuty is stable for the most part.

The initial setup can be difficult for those without experience in onboarding.

PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users. There is also a free version available for a limited number of users.

I would advise trialing the free version before committing to paying for a license. I'd rate PagerDuty seven out of ten.

I use PagerDuty for incidents, event orchestration, alerts, and creating services.

The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances.

PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration.

I have been using PagerDuty for approximately six months.

PagerDuty is stable.

We have 20 people that are using PagerDuty.

I have contacted the support from PagerDuty and they were very good.

I rate the support of PagerDuty a five out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of PagerDuty is easy. It only takes one day to set up.

There is a license needed to use PagerDuty.

My advice to others is for them to use API reserves and API rest to test the payloads before putting them in production. To understand better the PagerDuty communication. For example, they can use Postman to create APIs and then create a payload. It's a useful tool to test with PagerDuty.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate PagerDuty a nine out of ten.