It is best suited for Server Environments and Enterprises which have their IT infrastructure spread over a wide and different geographical location because since it is cloud based, monotoring can be be done from a single interface, it even comes with a mobile app so you dont allways have to be in fron of your laptop or Dasboard Screen to be able to do helth check or to have visibilty on occurences in the environment.
OnPage is excellent as an on-call doctor paging system; it replaces the need for our call center, lets us have our answer, and either take patient information or be patched immediately through. This gives us time to finish anything we may be doing that might be urgent without losing their information as it is written in the app or time to pull up the patient's chart before calling them back.
Not really a "downside": because it works so well, any details we haven't documented from our initial setup are probably lost. It's been almost four years since our initial configuration, and I can no longer easily navigate the OnPage site because I literally haven't logged in since the initial implementation.
The user interface is extremelely user friendly despite the challenges we experienced during the setup stages, The real time monitoring is also worth complimenting, its like having a birds-eye view of your whole infrustructure and trust me our infrastructure is massive, spreading accross 3 continents. Aided with the mobile app, you can monitor your environment from almost anywhere at anytime. It allows for some degree of customisation so you can tune it to meet your specific needs.
Out of these, PagerDuty has been my favorite. OnPage is my second favorite so far. The two systems do the same thing. OnPage has a less painful punch in the wallet for the needed technology. The xMatters and ShoreTel Connect only redirect the call and trigger a single alert. Neither of these two products alerts a second time or escalates the ticket. OnPage and Pager Duty have escalation channels. OnPage has an easier scheduler to understand than Pager Duty, however.
Its ability to intergrate with ticket logging systems certainly cuts the need for human resources to manually do health checks and lod tickets with service desk against the alerts raised.
Once set up, the dashboards are easy to understand even for non technical staff so there isnt need for too much to be invested in training.
It allows for customisation to suit our organisations specific business objectives.
Eliminated the concern that on-call personnel were not notified of an issue at all or on a timely basis
The reasonable cost, ease of use and reliability reassured management that any issues arising would be handled quickly
Users disliked carrying the bulky, unreliable and battery operated pagers. Today all users carry cell phones and can easily install and manage OnPage software