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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only.

Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings.

Recently, I've implemented Android notifications for an app. Even if you set "priority" : "high" (FCM level), some will still not be received right away, depending on battery level and polling frequency at device level. You may ask the user to disable battery optimizations for your app, but a call is still more reliable IMO.

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I'm also not sure about why multiple notification channels can't be used. If there's an alert I'd like to be notified by all means possible (depending on severity)

This definitely seems like something that's more about development priority that they're trying to sell as a feature....

Realistically, since they just autoescalate if the incident isn't acknowledged it appears, one would think any/all notification methods would be a positive. Let the user (or their manager...) sort out what method(s) works best for them.

I think the design is you use the automatic escalation if the page isn't acknowledged.

Yes, it will auto-escalate to your team mates, if you don't acknowledge.

I think this is a better model than what I've seen setup in PD.

Typically there was a fall-back escalation, and then it would go straight up the management chain, which seemed idiotic.

I cannot ensure that notifications are received. But neither can you with Email or SMS. Technically a Call might be more reliable, but still, your phone could be turned off or might not even have reception for a call.

A call is more reliable.

Furthermore if a call can't be placed the originating system is aware of this immediately, and can proceed accordingly (e.g. move to the next person in line). This isn't the case for any other notification method, which requires the (absense of) an explicit ack by the user to infer that the notification failed.

Pagerduty handles this very well. If you have the app it will first try to notify through the app. If there is no ack within a couple of minutes it calls you.

If you persevere with this project you'll quickly realize you need phone calls.

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