479 karma · joined January 11, 2008
Email: alex [at] pagerduty [dot] com
Which PayPal product are you using? Website Payments Pro? We'd like to chat with someone who's gone through the process of setting this up already. We are also trying to evaluate which provider to use. Can you please send me an email (alex [at] pagerduty.com)?
For my startup, we initially thought the idea would take 2 weeks to do. In reality, it took closer to 3 months. In my case, once we started working on the idea, we discovered it was quite a bit more complex than we anticipated.
It's harder to tell with sites launched around the mid-90s, when webpages were a lot less sophisticated.
I usually don't put any titles in the actual email itself. In the signature, I sometimes go with Co-founder, other times, just put the company name.
My guess is that they have some office space and cash to spare (it's probably not all that expensive to run such a program). Plus, they're going to get a lot of positive PR as a result.
We actually support having the same email address for multiple alarms in the system. We also have regex trigger rules for each alarm, which are based on the subject and/or body of the trigger email. This means that you can set up a single email address, and trigger one alarm if "port XX on switch YY" is down, and trigger a different alarm if the "CEO video conference network" is down.
It might be easier to discuss your requirements over email. My address is alex[at]pagerduty[dot]com.
This is configurable under the Settings tab.
I do like the idea of making the design more minimal. I guess we are somewhat worried about the possibility of not explaining well enough what our product does.
The email addresses for alarms are editable; if you get spam to one of these addresses, you can change the address. We were also thinking of adding an option to obscure the email address by adding a uid to the end. An example would be trigger-my-alarm-5j3rt@acme.pagerduty.com.
We also offer regex-based filters on both the subject and the body, so you can configure an alarm to only trigger if a certain keyword appears in the message.
We use Wormly to monitor our site, email and DNS. We also have an exception reporting system which alerts us about any 500 errors in the site. We also alert if phone call or SMS messages sit in our event queues for more than 3 minutes after the scheduled delivery time.
We also have redundant data centers and rapid rollover to the backup systems in the event of a data center outage.
We don't use PagerDuty to do the alerting and schedule the on-call though. We alert everybody in our team via SMS and phone if any of the aforementioned alerts go off.
As for the getting started steps looking godaddy-ish, is that a compliment? :P
For the application site, we started with the open-source Web App Theme (http://github.com/pilu/web-app-theme/tree/master) and changed it to suit our needs.
It is linked off of the FAQ, from the question "How much are you planning to charge for PagerDuty?". We didn't make any links to the pricing page off the main page because we want as many people to try the product out while we are in beta.
As for the pricing plans, we don't plan to bump you to the next plan if you exceed the limits. We have overage prices for each type of message (phone/SMS). So, going slightly over your quota isn't going to cause a really big bump in your fee.
Currently, PagerDuty only integrates with monitoring tools using email. We do have several customers sending their Nagios alerts to us. We are also planning to build a Nagios plugin to better integrate Nagios with our system.
We haven't actually found the email integration to be a big problem so far. What some of our customers do is set up some external network monitoring tool (i.e. Pingdom) to make sure their mail servers are up and running. Those services are in turn hooked up to a PagerDuty alarm so that we can notify the right person if a site's mail server or external connectivity fails.
Phone call alerting is text-to-voice. It tells you which alarm went off, and also reads you the subject of the error. What kind of customization are you thinking of?
We have tried to offer a SaaS solution aimed at small and medium businesses.
The problems I have noticed:
* For pagerduty.com, the "Keyword Targeting" section shows: 1) moved, 2) permanently, 3) nginx. Looks like it does not follow the redirect.
* For the "Incoming Links" section, I get different results for pagerduty.com and for the www. Again, you should combine the 2 resultsets, as some people might link to the www and others to pagerduty.com.
* In the "Search Engine Index Inclusion" section, it says Pages Indexed by Bing: 68. We don't actually have 68 pages, so I don't see how this is possible.