What needs improvement with PagerDuty?

The noise aspect of PagerDuty Operations Cloud could be better. What happens is if there is some sort of an issue occurring, it keeps on repeating and calling again and again. Once the alert is acknowledged, it should stop calling because it creates noise. When we are handling production critical issues, once we have acknowledged an alert, we are still receiving calls, which becomes a distraction because we are also checking an incident and trying to resolve that particular issue. Generative AI must provide some significant value to the incident management workflow in PagerDuty Operations Cloud. It helps in faster incident triaging, reducing the time spent understanding the alerts and identifying the root cause. It quite helps at a certain point in time, but suppose we have an issue which is not under the capabilities of that particular functionality. In those cases, it does not help. However, if we have integrated our internal services with the system, it collaborates by providing the context in actionable information using that.

The features PagerDuty Operations Cloud has are completely fine. I don't think any new enhancement is required to PagerDuty Operations Cloud as of now. I have never faced any issue with PagerDuty Operations Cloud tool itself, so I never had an opportunity to get in touch with them. If I really wanted to have contact with them, I have an option directly from the website to raise a ticket if I'm facing anything. The option is clearly visible over the user interface. I don't think much that I can improve with PagerDuty Operations Cloud as of now because they are completely updating all the features. Artificial intelligence is also implemented into PagerDuty Operations Cloud which is making my work very smooth. As per my needs, it is absolutely fine as of now.

PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by being more sequenced in terms of adapting into the incident life cycle. For example, an alert cannot be an incident. An incident should be completely unrelated to an alert.

Currently, improvements for PagerDuty Operations Cloud could be made. It mainly acts as a monitoring alert tool. We need to prioritize tickets according to P1, P2, P3, and perhaps create a dashboard for program-based insights. Additionally, features related to hardware and software agents should be included. Currently, it only notifies us about incident management. If we install an agent or similar tool to collect data from a server at the hardware or application level, we could present multiple metrics in the same tool, which would be more beneficial.

I do not see any improvements needed in how I use PagerDuty Operations Cloud; it is still good. We receive phone calls and emails, but the use case is limited. It needs to be integrated with some other applications. I expect it to be one platform for all operations; it should not depend upon Splunk, DataDog, or other applications or tools. Everything should be in one place to make things easier and reduce complexity. Otherwise, we have to manage different tools. I expect monitoring tools to be consolidated together for better results and less complexity.

I do not have anything that I dislike about PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Sometimes it hangs and occasionally I am unable to open PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which occurs due to an outage or similar issues. Other than that, I do not have any other issues with PagerDuty Operations Cloud. PagerDuty Operations Cloud developer team is working on enhancements. From my understanding, it is learning quickly and helping me when I require suggestions. PagerDuty Operations Cloud AI provides a combined benefit for my work.

One area for improvement in PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the unpredictable costs that can cause issues in our organization and project complexity, along with the occasional perception of an outdated user interface by non-tech personnel.

Using GenAI, PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be very much helpful. If the noise of alerting can be reduced, that is something which I believe was impacting so much. That is one of the things I really wanted to improve in that particular area. We used to set up alarms, but those alarms were quite frequent and did not stop at all, even after closing the alerts. Sometimes duplicate alerts were coming because of this. Using GenAI we can remove this data and duplication of alerts. I have deducted three points for several reasons. One is because of the front end, which is quite confusing. I deducted one point because of the alert duplicacy. It used to alert so much and created noise when there is a real alarm, so it just creates so much noise. The third thing is that the product is expensive in my opinion. In the technical support solution of PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I would still give a seven rating. The UI complexity because the front end is not good. I did not like using it to be honest. Second, the noise part really creates a lot of noise. Third, if we can have better analytics or reporting, that could be helpful. Till the time we are using PagerDuty Operations Cloud, it is worth the money. There are a few things which can be improved, but it was definitely worth the money. It sometimes helps in improving the mean time to resolve. It also helps in root cause identification and fast incident response.

In terms of integration, while I cannot speak for all developers, some have encountered anomalies, but I expect they will resolve over time. Our developers noted that integrating incident bots or chatbots created with AI tools occasionally presents challenges with PagerDuty Operations Cloud. This is the only negative feedback I have encountered. From a security perspective, I believe there could be more layers. When scheduling on-call rotations for different team members, access should be restricted to specific users to prevent unauthorized changes to the on-call module. Despite this, the security features have been functioning well.

PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by adding more features. Whatever manual work is there could be automated using scripting. Then it would be more efficient. When we receive a call, it has to be entered all the way. If one thing had been entered, then multiple things need not have to be entered multiple times. It does not need to be entered repeatedly. It could be automated in that way.

Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning curve to understand the platform. With many new members, they need training to set up runbook workflows, event orchestration, and manage complex on-call schedules across 23 services, making it a challenge for new users. Additionally, I feel the web interface requires improvements. I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows. The primary reasons for rating it an eight include the complex configuration which makes it challenging for new users, as well as their difficulty in setting up advanced runbook workflows and managing complex on-call setups. The web user interface also requires improvement. Although I receive alerts via the mobile app, which is beneficial for handling schedule maintenance, the same features should be added to the web interface. Customization issues persist, such as the inability to clone entire schedules as part of the workflows, and I want to keep incidents open for a specified duration, neither of which I can currently customize. Thus, I raised a ticket with PagerDuty Operations Cloud to address these concerns. Furthermore, the cost is high, making it one of the more expensive incident management solutions.

The system is very smooth right now.

PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by using automation or AI to advance the product in such a way that it allows the implementation of automation to resolve issues or speed up workflows.

I would suggest that the calling service could be adjusted since if a system goes down, the user receives continuous calls, which can be overwhelming. Once a user acknowledges the alert, it may be unnecessary to continue calling again and again, as it distracts from their work on resolving the issue. That is the only improvement I can suggest regarding the calling aspect of PagerDuty Operations Cloud.

Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.

It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty. You can set up email alerts, but you cannot build any triggers using those email alerts. There are limitations; you cannot extend it to send alerts to other teams. You can escalate it within the team but not redirect the alert to different teams.

It’s quite hard to reach the support team.

We were exploring ManageEngine ServiceDesk. So, we need a feature where we can, like, when an alert triggers, we should alert the recipient by on-call. So, when an alert is detected, a ticket is generated in the management team, and we want to notify them on-call. Like, this ticket has been generated and stuff. So, I would like to see a similar feature in this solution. This is why we want an alternative to PagerDuty. We want an alternative to PagerDuty. So we are getting on-call notifications using PagerDuty, but now we want to replace PagerDuty with ManageEngine ServiceDesk. So whenever some incident happens in the cloud infrastructure, we get data alerts from cloud security. We want to integrate a service that will provide us with notifications on-call. That this server is down, or this website is down, or this thing is going wrong. Another area of improvement is integration. It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system. That's why we are dropping PagerDuty. We won't continue using it due to integration issues.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it. We have an on-call phone number. However, at the moment, it is routed to a static voicemail. We would actually like to be able to have that phone follow whoever is on-call.

The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this. The solution has not enabled us to go beyond responding to incidents and to start predicting or preventing them. It would help if they simplified the way you try to get insights or information about instances and to improve your situation regarding the groupings of alerts. Even if there are a lot of different functionalities, a lot of prediction abilities in place, it's not really clear what the best practices are for using PagerDuty to get the best out of the platform. The concepts are quite complex, at times, for people to understand. They need a more straightforward way to use the product and get the best out of it. With all the concepts of escalation, services, and the schedule, it gets confusing.

There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule. Due to that, I need to do extra work to adjust it, due to specific team needs or how I'm staffing my team. It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process. I find myself redoing the schedule often. Every month I need to make another schedule. It's not so bad but it could be improved.

Something that needs to be improved is adding multilingual support.

I would like to see them increase the content base and add integrations with different systems, for example, with ZenDesk or Slack; if it could integrate more with those types of systems. We use ZenDesk; I’d like to link this to ZenDesk. I’d like more integration points.