What is our primary use case?
The usual use cases for PagerDuty Operations Cloud include incident management. I ran the infrastructure teams and SRE, so the primary use case was incident management and spinning up RCAs, tracking remediation. We also used it for identifying key stakeholders of projects. We relied on the escalation chains and the groups. Even if it wasn't an incident, if somebody had a question or they needed to get a hold of the CMS team, they would go into PagerDuty. We had a lot of integrations into Teams chat.
The heart of it was obviously kicking off pages from alerts within PagerDuty Operations Cloud. It was fully automated so that when an anomaly was detected, it automatically created an incident in PagerDuty. That automation was just table stakes. We also had some good automations to follow up and close out Jira tickets that would integrate with the PagerDuty incident. The primary one was simply calling the people when something happens.
What is most valuable?
My favorite feature about PagerDuty Operations Cloud is that it just worked. It was one of the tools we didn't have to worry or think about. It was very well polished. It did what they said they were going to do, and it didn't require a lot of customization. I think it facilitated us organizing the teams, groups, and escalation chains really well. However, there is no feature that stands out significantly.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud absolutely requires maintenance on my end. Escalation chains and people get stale very quickly. I wish it would integrate into org charts or an HR system so that when people get terminated or shift roles, PagerDuty knows about the changes. We had one escalation chain where it went up to an executive that wasn't in the company anymore.
What needs improvement?
The users would complain that they always had a hard time maintaining their schedules, their escalations, and installing the app. I got a lot of complaints from the people that responded to pages rather than from the people who administered PagerDuty.
The complaints I remember were about how users wanted to be notified. It was very common for somebody to misconfigure their own communication chain and not test it, so when an alert went off, their excuse was they didn't get the page or they didn't get the SMS. I got a lot of feedback from users that they struggled to do their shift when they needed someone to cover their shift. Often that wouldn't get done. Anything that can be done to make that as easy and simple as possible would be helpful.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have probably used PagerDuty Operations Cloud for about five years total.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of PagerDuty Operations Cloud has been great. I have not experienced any stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have no problems with scalability. I have used it for like 500 engineers and experienced no issues.
How are customer service and support?
I did not have any partnerships with them. I was just a customer and user.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used some alternatives. I used Grafana incident management a lot and we used something called RingCentral.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment for a new client when starting with PagerDuty Operations Cloud was moderate. I would say it was more difficult because the biggest problem we had was just identifying who the responders were. It does take a bit of setup. We also did the Teams integration, which requires security and permission. The setup is always hard, though this is not necessarily a criticism on PagerDuty.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am not current on what the current pricing is for PagerDuty Operations Cloud, but I assume it is per seat and per responder.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
If I were to pick one, PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the one I would pick if there were no budget concerns. If I was budget-constrained, I would pick Grafana.
What other advice do I have?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud did influence the volume and nature of alerts. We had more of them. I have implemented this three major times in my career, and the number of incidents immediately shot up and then came down. What happens is you identify the incidents more aggressively and then you actually fix the problems. I think that is a good thing.
I have not used Incident Workflows or Event Orchestration to automate toil from the incident management process. We played with it, but I did not use them in practice.
I did not use the AI agents at all. I would rate this review a 9.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
