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ok, so PagerDuty's main focus/differentiation is duty and scheduling management? I do see the value of such system, you want to wake only Joe instead the whole team up if he is on duty that night.

Maybe you should highlight that? My first impression was "what, yet another pingdom"? Definitely need a bit fine tuning there.

Wondering who will be your main target customer? Any website that has more than one sysadmin?

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Yeah, we're going after companies with big uptime requirements that have already grown to the point that they have an operations team of more than one person.

Nagios does that too. You can define schedules to your heart's content, and it will send email anywhere. Given that basically all pagers/mobiles have email addresses, you're set.

The only thing that this does that is really new is two-way SMS.

PagerDuty also includes voice calls, which we've seen through experience are more reliably delivered than SMS messages (esp. SMSes through email-to-SMS gateways). As with the SMS messages, you can immediately acknowledge or escalate during the phone call using touch-tone.

I also think PagerDuty's ability to graphically define the on-call schedule and escalation rules is much nicer than mucking around with Nagios's configuration files, but I'm a bit biased :)

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