Hacker News Reader

Comment by techntoke | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, too many good open source solutions now. No one thinks of alerting as paging anymore. You can use email to text now, chat solutions like Slack/Mattermost/etc. You no longer need an SMS gateway and if you do then Prometheus supports Twilio. All PagerDuty has going for it is a sales team trying to get managers to sign up for a service before exploring alternatives.

View on HN

I swear half the time my Slack notifications don’t go off on my phone. Even with background refresh on. I would never trust that service for critical alerts. As in, you need to wake up and fix this now.

I’ve run my own monitoring solutions. My own Asterisk systems. Even my own Twilio integrations. You are grossly oversimplifying what is needed to create and maintain those systems. For many, PagerDuty is absolutely worth the cost, which is why it’s so popular. People will pay for reliability they can depend on so they can focus on their core business.

I think by default slack has Do Not Disturb enabled from 10PM to 8AM. May want to double check that!

Figured that was it, but it’s happening during my daytime outside of the DND.

Slack notification delivery is definitely not what it used to be.

You mean to say it's slacking off?

The value of Pagerduty is not in its notification, but the workflows around it. Alert in the middle of the night? Don't page unless its critical. Management of on-call schedules, escalate when on-call engineer doesn't answer. We use OpsGenie for this (in addition of sending messages to a chat, but off work that is usually muted or not installed on engineers phone), but PagerDuty has the same functionality.

Out of genuine curiosity, do you have a list of good alternatives or some reading material on "paging" best practices? My team uses PagerDuty but I've never really questioned if there's a better method out there because the system PagerDuty replaced for us was so terrible that PagerDuty seemed like a godsend.

Google's free SRE handbook has some info.

You guys are out here giving very strong dismissals of a very good service, and then referring us to a resource you wont even bother to link? Maybe you can link the actual resources to prove your argument instead of assuming you are correct and dismissing people to figure it out on their own. Usually, the standard for conversations here is held to a higher, non-twitter level, and I for one enjoy conversations held to higher standards.

I think they must be referring to this: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html

I don't see alternative services on this page (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-...) Do you have any alternates you would recommend?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com