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With my VP Eng hat on, PagerDuty is a useful service With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the

With my VP Eng hat on, PagerDuty is a useful service With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere

bsg75 4y ago
Translation?: - PagerDuty is great when my budget is big and I need something ASAP - Buy vs Build. - Home grown alternative is great when the word from Finance is the cost savings to build is now more important than the time it takes.
SCUSKU 4y ago
Could you outline what features you ended up building? In the past I something similar that would call someone's cell phone if "ERROR" appeared in a Slack channel, which was very crude but it worked...
jorts 4y ago
A lot of people say that but then realize it's a bit more complicated if you want the resiliency of PagerDuty and are okay dealing with the maintenance and up-keep required for such a system.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Lots of open source options out there: https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e528310ec4 https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e52... And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.
  - alexpotato 4y ago
    A co-worker at as past job once said: "We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      > That doesn't work with Open Source. If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.
      - jacobr1 4y ago
        But in that case the open-source part is irrelevant. You are paying for the operations/hosting, not more generic dev-support.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - eecc 4y ago
      Respectable business people don’t yell. Your Director wasn’t one
      - alexpotato 4y ago
        You should spend more time around respectable hedge fund/finance folks.
        eecc 4y ago
        Ah no, please spare me. Also recruiters, what a lot! I was once invited to their lair and I couldn’t help notice the leaderboards, the brass bell to be rung when deals were closed, and the smell of Axe deodorant. Quote literally the set of Boiler Room, except on the posh n-th floor of Amsterdam business district
- kqr 4y ago
  This is the main reason I feel stuck with PagerDuty. I have used it a lot over very many years with deployments both small and large, and no part of it has ever failed me in that time. I get that they must work very hard on building that perception because it's easily shattered, but still. It's hard to ignore how reliable it has been.
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Not really. The dramatic increase in price has gone to pay for features that are above and beyond the core offering. The problem is that the additional offerings aren't worth the dramatic price, especially for those with grand fathered pricing.
tarr11 4y ago
Consider wearing a product hat as well; is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources? There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  > is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources? I see this sentiment often, however it's one of the best ways to get profitable business ideas. I start making something, and if in the course of doing so, I find a problem that I can solve (which is not related to the primary product), I turn around and start selling my undifferentiated work as its own product.
paxys 4y ago
I have seen plenty of companies that hand roll their own ops/alerting system, and sure that is a fine strategy if you can put enough resources into it, but that is mostly never the case. Do you host it separately from the rest of your infra? Does it have multi-DC failovers? Does it have a dedicated SRE/on-call team? Do you load test it? Do you test that it can send texts to one of your developers who has bad coverage in the middle of India or Romania or Bali? The problem usually is, when the rest of your systems are down then this one is likely to be down as well, making it useless. People are paying PagerDuty primarily for their uptime and reliability.
- ajoseps 4y ago
  i think these really depends on the requirements of the company. there will always be a long tail of scenarios to support, that doesn't mean every company needs support in all those scenarios. some things can be good enough
  - paxys 4y ago
    All of what I mentioned (except maybe international user support) is table stakes for an alerting system regardless of whether the company size is 1 or 100,000. A system that works 99% of the time is useless because it is only really needed for the other 1%.

bsg75 4y ago

Translation?: - PagerDuty is great when my budget is big and I need something ASAP - Buy vs Build. - Home grown alternative is great when the word from Finance is the cost savings to build is now more important than the time it takes.

SCUSKU 4y ago

Could you outline what features you ended up building? In the past I something similar that would call someone's cell phone if "ERROR" appeared in a Slack channel, which was very crude but it worked...

jorts 4y ago

A lot of people say that but then realize it's a bit more complicated if you want the resiliency of PagerDuty and are okay dealing with the maintenance and up-keep required for such a system.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Lots of open source options out there: https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e528310ec4 https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e52... And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.
- alexpotato 4y ago
  A co-worker at as past job once said: "We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    > That doesn't work with Open Source. If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      But in that case the open-source part is irrelevant. You are paying for the operations/hosting, not more generic dev-support.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - eecc 4y ago
    Respectable business people don’t yell. Your Director wasn’t one
    - alexpotato 4y ago
      You should spend more time around respectable hedge fund/finance folks.
      - eecc 4y ago
        Ah no, please spare me. Also recruiters, what a lot! I was once invited to their lair and I couldn’t help notice the leaderboards, the brass bell to be rung when deals were closed, and the smell of Axe deodorant. Quote literally the set of Boiler Room, except on the posh n-th floor of Amsterdam business district
kqr 4y ago
This is the main reason I feel stuck with PagerDuty. I have used it a lot over very many years with deployments both small and large, and no part of it has ever failed me in that time. I get that they must work very hard on building that perception because it's easily shattered, but still. It's hard to ignore how reliable it has been.
jasonlotito 4y ago
Not really. The dramatic increase in price has gone to pay for features that are above and beyond the core offering. The problem is that the additional offerings aren't worth the dramatic price, especially for those with grand fathered pricing.

tarr11 4y ago

Consider wearing a product hat as well; is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources? There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.

satvikpendem 4y ago
> is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources? I see this sentiment often, however it's one of the best ways to get profitable business ideas. I start making something, and if in the course of doing so, I find a problem that I can solve (which is not related to the primary product), I turn around and start selling my undifferentiated work as its own product.

paxys 4y ago

I have seen plenty of companies that hand roll their own ops/alerting system, and sure that is a fine strategy if you can put enough resources into it, but that is mostly never the case. Do you host it separately from the rest of your infra? Does it have multi-DC failovers? Does it have a dedicated SRE/on-call team? Do you load test it? Do you test that it can send texts to one of your developers who has bad coverage in the middle of India or Romania or Bali? The problem usually is, when the rest of your systems are down then this one is likely to be down as well, making it useless. People are paying PagerDuty primarily for their uptime and reliability.

ajoseps 4y ago
i think these really depends on the requirements of the company. there will always be a long tail of scenarios to support, that doesn't mean every company needs support in all those scenarios. some things can be good enough
- paxys 4y ago
  All of what I mentioned (except maybe international user support) is table stakes for an alerting system regardless of whether the company size is 1 or 100,000. A system that works 99% of the time is useless because it is only really needed for the other 1%.