4 ms·

I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?

miked85 4y ago
It's a little more than IFTTT, but not much.
_joel 4y ago
Scheduling, Groups, Escalation. Yea you could probably do something with IFTTT but I'd rather just pay a little bit and not deal with the hastle.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If it was "a little bit", I agree. Their business plan is a few bucks shy of $500/user/year.
  - ativzzz 4y ago
    If you're a business paying software engineer salaries, that 500 / user is basically pennies compared to paying someone to maintain a homegrown system
    - cooperadymas 4y ago
      That's what everyone keeps telling you until you're locked into 30+ services equaling an additional 20% of each employee's salary, plus the time to educate on and maintain those services. And then they don't even communicate with one another.
      - ativzzz 4y ago
        Yup now imagine you built all of those in house and how much more of a nightmare it would be to maintain those services. That's basically a separate software product right there
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
linuxftw 4y ago
Their moat is the same as Jira's. Despite being expensive, and easily replaced by a bevy of alternatives, management are familiar with the name and purchase it.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Their moat is the same as Jira's. At least for JIRA (and SAP), there is another aspect as well: users know how to use it, and it has a halfway decent UI when compared to stuff such as Bugzilla. Avoiding training existing and new employees in bespoke software is a business value on its own.
- realworldperson 4y ago
  [dead]
flappyeagle 4y ago
It's annoying to build. Their moat is they did the annoying work of finding the team that's willing to put up with building it.
briffle 4y ago
for a single person, sort of. for a team, with multiple people, multiple on-call schedules, schedule overrides, etc, its so much nicer.
quartz 4y ago
While not difficult to build a basic version, at-scale incident alert & escalation systems are a mix of all the things that engineers hate building for (timezones, calendars, telephones, human-injected overrides, contact management, and 3rd party notification / acknowledgement tracking) all wrapped into a system that's being watched and scrutinized by everyone from compliance, legal and eng all the way to the CEO when they're at their most emotional during and after an incident. IME for most companies it only takes a homegrown system failing once during a major outage for the budget to open up.
squokko 4y ago
You need to have your own infrastructure monitored by completely different infrastructure, otherwise they will fail at the same time. Instead of having your AWS shop maintain a separate Rackspace-coloed team, etc. it is much simpler to outsource
jmartens 4y ago
I'm guessing you aren't a software engineer on a team that shares oncall responsibility, in an org with other engineering teams and dozens of mircoservices.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

It's a little more than IFTTT, but not much.

Scheduling, Groups, Escalation. Yea you could probably do something with IFTTT but I'd rather just pay a little bit and not deal with the hastle.

sokoloff 4y ago
If it was "a little bit", I agree. Their business plan is a few bucks shy of $500/user/year.
- ativzzz 4y ago
  If you're a business paying software engineer salaries, that 500 / user is basically pennies compared to paying someone to maintain a homegrown system
  - cooperadymas 4y ago
    That's what everyone keeps telling you until you're locked into 30+ services equaling an additional 20% of each employee's salary, plus the time to educate on and maintain those services. And then they don't even communicate with one another.
    - ativzzz 4y ago
      Yup now imagine you built all of those in house and how much more of a nightmare it would be to maintain those services. That's basically a separate software product right there

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

linuxftw 4y ago

Their moat is the same as Jira's. Despite being expensive, and easily replaced by a bevy of alternatives, management are familiar with the name and purchase it.

mschuster91 4y ago
> Their moat is the same as Jira's. At least for JIRA (and SAP), there is another aspect as well: users know how to use it, and it has a halfway decent UI when compared to stuff such as Bugzilla. Avoiding training existing and new employees in bespoke software is a business value on its own.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]

flappyeagle 4y ago

It's annoying to build. Their moat is they did the annoying work of finding the team that's willing to put up with building it.

briffle 4y ago

for a single person, sort of. for a team, with multiple people, multiple on-call schedules, schedule overrides, etc, its so much nicer.

quartz 4y ago

While not difficult to build a basic version, at-scale incident alert & escalation systems are a mix of all the things that engineers hate building for (timezones, calendars, telephones, human-injected overrides, contact management, and 3rd party notification / acknowledgement tracking) all wrapped into a system that's being watched and scrutinized by everyone from compliance, legal and eng all the way to the CEO when they're at their most emotional during and after an incident. IME for most companies it only takes a homegrown system failing once during a major outage for the budget to open up.

squokko 4y ago

You need to have your own infrastructure monitored by completely different infrastructure, otherwise they will fail at the same time. Instead of having your AWS shop maintain a separate Rackspace-coloed team, etc. it is much simpler to outsource

jmartens 4y ago

I'm guessing you aren't a software engineer on a team that shares oncall responsibility, in an org with other engineering teams and dozens of mircoservices.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]