Item: PagerDuty
Rating: 9
Author: Rob Sutherlin

Overall Satisfaction with PagerDuty

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PagerDuty is being used for on-call teams throughout the organization. When issues arise, whether it be with SQL or the network, alerts are sent to PagerDuty, which are then transmitted to the on-call engineer via an API call. It also houses the on-call schedules and contact numbers for all teams.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Network outage alerts
SQL outage Alerts
Contact tree notification
Automated escalation

Cons

When getting a phone call, PagerDuty doesn't seem to allow acknowledgments of alerts through the phone, which it says it does. I constantly receive a message that it was updated by another person - when in reality, it wasn't.
Smarter notifications. If an alert was snoozed for a time, when it comes back, it sends out another alert. It should, I think, send a message asking if the alert is still an issue and give the option to close.
Make schedule changes more intuitive.
One button to acknowledge and close an alert.

Return on Investment

If set up correctly on the Network Monitoring side, PagerDuty allows for a HUGE ROI by alerting teams of outages and helping to minimize the impact on the business.
PagerDuty does require that integrated systems, especially Solarwinds, are set up and administrated well. Poorly created alerts or systems without good parent/child relationships will lead to engineers getting calls on issues that should not require them being woken up at 3 am.
PagerDuty is great for a single pane of glass solution for issue escalation, contact, and scheduling.
Third-party integrations. PagerDuty can be easy to integrate (like with Solarwinds) or much more time-consuming (like with Cherwell). So knowing what you want to integrate PagerDuty with is important, and finding out what steps are necessary for integration is key when determining the level of work required.

Alternatives Considered

xMatters

PagerDuty is very similar to xMatters, with only slight differences. The integration with network monitoring tools and the ticketing system is more involved. Instead of simply forwarding an alert from the monitoring tool to the paging service, xMatters requires the creation of an alert with a specific payload. That payload then has custom properties and fields extracted and placed into the ticket that is created. However, when it comes to just alerting engineers of outages, xMatters performs similarly to PagerDuty.

Support Rating

While it is exceedingly rare, whenever an issue has come up with PagerDuty, it has always been quickly addressed by their support team. Furthermore, they are very much aware of what is happening and will often times proactively alert users of issues and notify them when those issues are resolved.

Key Insights

Do you think PagerDuty delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with PagerDuty's feature set?

Yes

Did PagerDuty live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of PagerDuty go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PagerDuty again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cherwell Service Management, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm)

Likelihood to Recommend

PagerDuty is great for network alerts. However, it is necessary for parent/child device relationships to be formed correctly. If that is not done, on-call personnel will be flooded with alerts, especially in the event of a power outage or network outage. PagerDuty is also well suited for alerting when critical servers go down or are unreachable. In this scenario where parent/child is less important, PagerDuty really shines in letting the engineers know something is down and providing a single pane of glass for who to contact on other teams, if necessary.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

PagerDuty does its duty.