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Comment by juliennakache | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to trying this out. I've always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering. It costs something at least $250 per user for organization larger than 5 person - even if you're not an engineer who is ever directly on call. At my previous company, IT had to regularly send surveys to employees to assess if they really needed to have a PagerDuty account. Alerts are a key information in an organization that runs software in production and you shouldn't have to pay $250 / month just to be able to have some visibility into it. I'm hoping Grafana OnCall is able to fully replace PagerDuty.

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Time and time again.

"Business should focus on its core competency"

* Outsource in-house infra to cloud. This begets lock-in as every engineer is doing heaven knows what with Lambda. Still need that huge infra team to manage AWS.

* Outsource in-house metrics and visibility to SignalFx, Splunk, DataDog, NewRelic, etc. Still need a team to manage it. Costs get raised by more than double because we're beholden, so now we need to fund 20+ engineer quarters to migrate everything ASAP.

* Feature flagging system built in house works like a charm and needs one engineer for maintenance. Let's fund a team to migrate it all to LaunchDarkly. Year+ later and we still don't have proper support or rollout and their stuff doesn't work as expected.

Madness.

Expensive madness.

SaaS won't magically reduce your staffing needs. Open source solutions won't reduce your staffing needs either, but they'll make costs predictable. As these tools become more prevalent and standard, you can even hire experts for them.

> I've always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering

For anyone out there in the same spot, I'll say that I switched my last company to Atlassian's OpsGenie and it was a 10x cost savings for the same feature set.

the opsgenie api is really bad though if you want to manage it as code/declaratively

We evaluated a bunch of solutions and came to that conclusion as well. Everything we do is in code (Terraform) and will gladly pay for something that has friendly APIs and an already existing Terraform module. Conversely, we'll not engage with or throw away anything that doesn't have friendly APIs.

I really can’t find myself to ever recommend atlassian products though.

If cost is the only measure: I understand. But time lost in various areas of the software package (performance alone! Before we get into weird UX paradigms and esoteric query languages, shoddy search systems etc;) surely has an impact on cost. Having your employees spending a lot of time navigating janky software has a cost too.

At least with OPsGenie it feels like too few features instead of feature bloat hah. But it’s been fine for me as an engineer.

We did the same thing. We were fairly early and heavy users of the pagerduty API. We'd been using it for over a year and had integrated it fairly deeply into our SRE stack. When the renewal came up (we had a 3 year contract), they wanted to massively up the price due to our API usage. IIRC, it was more than 5x more. Our CTO had us port all of the tooling to opsgenie and we've never looked back.

I'm generally not a fan of Atlassian anything, but Opsgenie was really good before Atlassian purchased them and they're still really good.

I made that leap too (moved from a company that used Pagerduty to a company that used Opsgenie) and it is the same feature set but not the same quality. Pagerduty in my experience is rock solid - I used it on various high-page-frequency rotations for something like seven straight years and literally never saw a dropped alert/notification once.

On the flip side in the 8ish months I used Opsgenie I saw a litany of issues, like the mobile app silently logging people out (and thus not delivering push notifications) and the app failing to send SMS notifications. We had pages get dropped by the primary because they never got a notification.

I want exactly one feature from my pager, delivering 100% of my pages. It's not a situation where I'm ok with 99% success rate, and that seemed to be the tradeoff and what you are paying for with Pagerduty.

I knew Pagerduty was going down the toilet when their sales folks started aggressively pitching BS products nobody really needed before their IPO. They couldn’t even release a proper incident management tool.

I really hope this project gets good enough to ditch PD. PD should literally lay off most of its staff and just maintain the existing product, cut costs and focus mostly on integrations. There is no way they have any other future.

I agree with the weird pushiness on other products that add specious business value, but I do think there is room for feature growth in the main product.

For example, the auto-merge functionality is somewhat useful, but it sometimes gets it wrong. Both merging and splitting alerts is extremely clunky. I'd also love to be able to have policies like "this alert is low-priority outside of business hours". The ability to re-open an accidentally closed alert. The ability to edit the alerting rules (the Global Ruleset) without needing to be a super-admin, as the Power That Be are reluctant to hand that out, also, the ability to just read the Global Ruleset with my peon privileges.

… the sort of spit & polish that doesn't happen, IMO, anymore, because everything is an MVP feature, before the agile scrum PM moves on to the next MVP feature. "Polish" just accumulates in the JIRA graveyard.

    > … the sort of spit & polish that doesn't happen, IMO, anymore, because everything is an MVP feature, before the agile scrum PM moves on to the next MVP feature. "Polish" just accumulates in the JIRA graveyard.

This is the #1 complaint about Agile I've heard from customers, engineers, and The Business. "The team under-promised, under-delivered, and told us 'that'd be in the next sprint.' We've never seen a .1 release of anything."

It eats away the trust and collaboration that get good work Live and adopted. IYO, is this an indictment of "Agile," or more of that org's approach to it?

Check this ;) https://github.com/grafana/oncall/tree/dev/tools/pagerduty-m...

Thanks, I think I finally understand why some friends of mine, who can implement this for any company in half a day, take $2000/day...

Agreed. Cost really is the big selling point of Grafana Cloud - it’s far, far cheaper than most competitors, and good enough. Not as good as NewRelic, DataDog, etc., but you get good enough metrics, logs, alerts, distributed tracing, and now incident management, at an excellent price.

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