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Comment by halfmatthalfcat | Hacker News Reader

Is there really anybody else in the "Pager" category of SaaS products other than PagerDuty that have any traction?

I work on/for an open source solution that we based off of PagerDuty, called GoAlert: https://github.com/target/goalert

Target uses go alert across the enterprise for all on call. Definitely enterprise capable!

Target having a GitHub org has bolstered my future use of Target pickup orders. Didn’t know Target open sourced tech, love to see it.

Thanks for your comment! We are working on doing more in open source to help pay back our use of open source. We can and will do more!

Yep. This is a great product. Has the features you need, is super reliable and easy to manage.

We use OpsGenie. not sure how widely it’s used but given its Atlasian I’d guess a non-trivial amount.

DataDog also launched their own Incident Management tool, not sure how widely it's used: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/incident-response-with-datado...

Technically Splunk On-call. But I have a few pain points with it, and I miss pagerduty.

If you want to see what teams you are on as the current logged in user, the only way to do it as far as what support told me, is to search for yourself and then check that result.

I see my teams listed under my user profile. Or if I go to the left side bar and click on my name, it says when I'm next on-call for various teams. But the UI looks different than last time I logged in a few weeks ago, so maybe something has changed.

Disclaimer: Am an employee.

I've been seeing them recommended more and more, and myself have been keeping a passive eye on BetterUptime (which has an on-call feature): https://betteruptime.com/incident-management

There is xMatters: https://www.xmatters.com/

Disclaimer: I work at xMatters.

We started using Squadcast: https://squadcast.com

Their free and lower prices tiers offer a lot of what others have on their top/most expensive tiers. Also, integrations with various alert sources are just easier in most cases. I spent I don't know how long trying to get OpsGenie to work before I gave up.

PagerTree - https://pagertree.com

My team uses PagerTree. Easy to get started with, has the tools you need without being overcomplicated.

PD does two big things:

  1. Alerting: Phones you when your servers are down.
  2. Incident Management: Help coordinate a response across multiple people.

For the first, there's also:

  - OpsGenie (owned by Atlassian)
  - Squadcast
  - VictorOps (now Splunk On Call)
  - xMatters
  - PagerTree

For the second, there's a bunch of new contenders:

  - Datadog now has an IM product
  - Blameless
  - Rootly
  - Incident.io
  - FireHydrant

https://allma.io/ is also in the 2nd category and is a pretty awesome product so far, IMO.

Can also checkout https://tellspin.app for a directly in Slack solution

Spike.sh - https://spike.sh

I may be biased as a co-founder of Spike.sh, but I think we have one of the best designed incident management products out there. We've focused on making it easy to create on-call schedule and overrides, and added templates for escalation, on-call and alert rules.

I use VictorOps (Now Splunk On-Call) currently and it does the job. Its shift override functionality is quite confusing to get your head around at first but makes sense after the first few times.

I've also used OpsGenie (Atlassian now) and really enjoyed it. The amount of integrations they have is staggering.

There’s Splunk OnCall (formerly known as VictorOps). It’s a very decent solution.

Also what happens if pagerduty goes down?

Ideally, the services you use should handle that (detect a non-200 and fire off a backup method like a slack webhook or email.)

In reality, probably a lot of missed downtime events, and ops sleeping peacefully I guess.

It's very rare for them to go down. I think I can remember one major outage during business hours in the last few years at which point we just switched to manual monitoring for the few hours.

If that is within your outage model, you'd probably want a redundant on-call service I suppose, even if it's just escalating to a single known email or sms group.

Your service(s) going down and pagerduty going fully down is very unlikely to happen. Even if it does, you're probably going to get called by customer support because users never go down;)

In the year I used it, I never personally noticed it going down. Although that being said, their SLA is only 99.9% delivery in any calendar month within 5 minutes. The penalty for missing that SLA is only 10% of that month's bill.

> Once an Incident is triggered, PagerDuty will deliver the First Responder Alert within the Notification Delivery Period for 99.9% of the notifications sent by PagerDuty for the Customer during any calendar month. The “Notification Delivery Period” is five (5) minutes and it is measured as the time it takes PagerDuty to deliver a First Responder Alert to telecommunication providers in accordance with the Service configuration and Contact Information.

> ...

> If PagerDuty fails to meet the SLA set forth herein, Customer may receive a service credit. Customer will be eligible for a credit toward future fees owed to PagerDuty for the PagerDuty Service. The Service Credit is calculated as ten percent (10%) of the fees paid for or attributable to the month when the alleged SLA breach occurred.

https://www.pagerduty.com/standard-service-level-agreement/

xMatters

Opsgenie?

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