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.
Splunk On-Call has proved to be a great help in incident response within my organization. With the scheduling and assignment feature it is never in question which engineer is tasked with each assignment/incident. Being able to quickly and easily access all relevant logs greatly expedites incident resolution time. I would argue that the larger the environment and incident volume, the more important a tool such as this will prove to be.
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.
VictorOps support has proven excellent for us. Because it is such a widely used tool, there is a lot of documentation on usage, and a large community of users to lean on. Also, many engineers have had experience working with VictorOps already, and the tool is so easy to setup / manage that much support isn't really necessary.
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.
Splunk is more intelligent, easy, and faster compared to other tools in the market. Easy to configure, and customization can be done easily. It's more user-friendly, and it adds more value when I mention about the navigation panel. Multi-level escalations and root cause analysis is done in an intelligent way. Troubleshooting is faster.
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
