PagerDuty

PagerDuty is incredibly easy to setup and use. Creating new teams, on-call schedules, and escalation policies can be done in a matter of minutes. You can go from manually looking up people via a google calendar or an excel sheet, to engaging an on-call resource in 2 minutes or less from the great app while you are on the beach.

The integration with Slack is great, no other way to say it. Very useful for incident notifications for those teams that rely heavily on Slack.

The reporting functionality of PagerDuty needs some further enhancements. Obtaining certain data such as "what users are using which contact methods" for example still needs to be provided by contacting their Support team. The filtering of the Visibility console needs work and is currently limited to "All Teams" or a single team.

Integration with CloudWatch, webhooks, Jira is outstanding, functional, and reliable. The application has gotten better over the years I have used it.

Handles real issues in real time with everything you need

Allows on-call individuals to customize their notification scheme to fit their life. Having full control over when, where and how you are "dinged" is just awesome.

It's a little expensive per user if you need simple API things. The rule set for routing isn't as good as VictorOps for the same price point.

PagerDuty is missing a "default route" option like VictorOps has. This is minor, because it's rather trivial to setup an extra account and use that "extra dummy account" as the "Default". I'm counting this as a "con" since we have had to do this for every single deployment of PagerDuty I've worked on where we wish to have alerts go to a team, but not actually notify anyone.

Lastly, business-hours-only alerting is a little weak. (Maybe it has gotten better.) Every implementation I've found, we need to have some sort of queued' alerts which we don't want to wake us up in the middle of the night but we want to or need to know about next business day situation we have had to work hard to implement in PagerDuty.

PagerDuty is very important in projects that deal with tickets, incidents, and tasks that are bound by service level agreements. This is the case in all the 24*7 projects. The PagerDuty administrator can allot different severity tickets to the PagerDuty and specify the method by which the users can be notified about the same. The PagerDuty provides different ways of notifying the user: Via email, SMS, or call. The best thing about this software is that if the user does not respond to the ticket on the PagerDuty portal within a specified time, it will send the user an SMS. Then, if the user still is unresponsive to the ticket, a call will alert the user to work on it. This process ensures that high criticality tickets are not missed. In this way, SLA breaches are avoided and so are escalations.

There are no major drawbacks to using PagerDuty since it is very useful software. But, at times when there are multiple administrators handling the software, if one administrator makes changes to the setting of the software, the other administrators might not be notified of the changes. This might cause a confusion between the users and the alerting process.

PagerDuty very easy to configure and use, I've given access to team leads with no instructions and they've been up and running that day.

It'd be great if PagerDuty could integrate with all versions of Jira natively without a 3rd party plugin.