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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Pagerduty doesn't have a big moat, either. They've just cut loose a bunch of people who know the intimate details of how to build a product exactly like theirs, ripe for the plucking by a competitor who knows they have a business with healthy margins.

Looking forward to more competition in this space, PD is not as cheap as it should be.

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We need a competitor. I find PagerDuty to be over priced for what they are, and Atlassian is doing their best to destroy all of their services including OpsGenie which was very good until Atlassian bought them

Those are the big 2 in the space, who else is there?

victor ops? but we switched from them TO pagerduty alas

They've been on life support since being acquired by Splunk unfortunately.

Ex-Opsgenie here. Sorry it turned out to be that way but I’m saddened by the state as well.

Small chance you worked anywhere near it, but just wanted to say the logging in OpsGenie is amazing - I kinda love working on anything that requires me to dive into the OpsGenie logs because they are so verbose and well done.

This might surprise you, but I've worked a lot on that logs feature, including two new architectures for the infrastrucutre of it over 3 years.

Well, good job on it! Seriously I wish this was the standard for any enterprise SaaS tool. Debugging these things is always a pain without logs like it. Useful and performative, plus easy and intuitive to use.

My only complaint was remembering it was /log and /logs would 404 - so I just made my own redirect rule for it haha.

I think Datadog is getting all the pieces in place to checkmate Pagerduty. They've been steadily building out their Service Catalog feature with fields for on call contact info for teams responsible for services. Once they have all that in place, they just need to wire something up to a dialer/SMS/push notifications, set up a scheduling tool, and they can start consuming Pagerduty's lunch.

And with Datadog's reputation, it's almost a guarantee it will be even more overpriced than Pagerduty.

Datadog isn't cheap, but trying to replicate their complete functionality in house, with their uptime, would require a dedicated team and infrastructure that would be even less affordable.

Yeah, it's not cheap but there are a lot of places who don't manage their datadog bill at all because they either don't understand the pricing models like metric tag cardinality, or they use logs/APM/rum for something they should be using metrics for, or using metrics for something that should be logging etc etc.

Grafana has an Oncall tool now. I've not tried it, but will soon - I'm generally a fan of their products.

https://grafana.com/products/oncall/

Big fan

Have you seen Firehydrant [1]? Not affiliated with them, but met the founders here in NYC and they seemed like great people.

[1] https://firehydrant.com

Ex-PagerDuty here....my company uses Grafana Cloud and we love it!

Check out Ready Five - https://www.readyfive.io. We originally built it because we weren't happy with the big 2 either.

Founder of ilert.com here. We're a Germany based SaaS for alerting, on-call and status pages. We even have an importer that migrates your data (escalation policies, schedules, etc.) from PagerDuty to ilert.

I would love a PD competitor. I've considered building one in the past, I'm mostly just afraid of the oncall/reliability load.

It's expensive and hard to use. Lot of opportunity to someone to come in on the "pagerduty but simple" train and start taking market share away.

Challenge is that the biggest, best customers are most inclined to get something that is part of a big product suite. So you can start a competitor, but likely stuck with with low end of the market where there is the least chance of actually eeking out a living, until you get big enough for a big company to come knocking.

Did I read this wrong or were the layoffs exclusively for GTM and G&A?

So no R&D, which is who would know the intimate details?

big cloud providers will probably throw this in for free or really cheap.

they haven't yet though, have they? why not? this isn't a new market need.

Something like AWS Pager would make a lot of sense to me...but I could also imagine it being like AWS CodeCommit or CodeDeploy, a weird and inferior service you only use when your boss' boss decided to be really cheap 3 years ago.

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