5 ms·

I use it I am pretty happy with its. Of course in theory no company need to exist, but what do you propose people use instead?

toomuchtodo 4y ago
It’s sort of surprising this isn’t a product in various cloud providers; there are open source options of course (which cost engineering time), but this could also be as straightforward as a scheduler using existing IAM (user list) and messaging (voice, email, sms, webhooks) interfaces. You’d of course still be able to use this with non cloud infra based on telemetry or other signals to trigger the initial incident. I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs. (Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc. I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I was in a pagerduty rotation for ~3 years at a profitable SaaS software firm and am fluent with the product as a stakeholder in my current role (we are in the process of replacing it for cost savings reasons). I am aware that it isn’t as easy as writing comments, but lets not kids ourselves this is going to space. Software is work, but it isn’t magic. It’s not a weekend project, and I never said it was. It’s likely 20-30 people and 6-12 months to start (which is what a lot of teams at cloud providers looks like, I’m more familiar with AWS internals vs Azure) and likely a profitable endeavor. You don’t have to do everything PagerDuty does, just what the largest cohort of customer needs. Open source for some, reasonable alternatives of a commodity product for others.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      >but lets not kids ourselves this is going to space. Software is work, but it isn’t magic. Putting strawmen in people's mouths doesn't make for a good argument.
  - a4isms 4y ago
    > Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 That is HN's version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
  - schrodinger 4y ago
    I think Datadog should kill PD. They're software is great and the majority of our pages are based on a Datadog alert.
- a4isms 4y ago
  PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, and with some elegant baling wire and duct tape, anyone can put together something that looks like a notification service. But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss." PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on. That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core. I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition. If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    And this is exactly why we don't have flying cars yet. What a racket.
    - schrodinger 4y ago
      We could easily have flying cars now but they're incredibly less efficient and roads work pretty well so where's the demand? Would you honestly buy one?
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
  Your reply is like saying anyone can implement Twitter in a weekend, it's just a react ui on top of a Postgres database. It's basically nonsense.
hamandcheese 4y ago
Pagerduty's web UX makes the AWS console look good. I hate it. Example: Go to the homepage and see how many clicks it takes to find out the simle question of "When am I on call next?"
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
  I'm also no fan of the UX but I don't see how your comment answers my question.
aloknnikhil 4y ago
Try setting up a multi-people intra-day rotation (like you would for follow the sun models across time zones). It’ll make you cry.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
  The guy said thar the service doesn't need to exist. I just don't get what that mean. I don't think "it is hard to config follow the sun model" is enough reason to claim that the service serves no purpose. Their examples of follow the sun model seems pretty straight forward to me. https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/schedule-examples#:~:text=The%20%22follow%2Dthe%2Dsun,of%20the%20day%20and%20week https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/schedule-examples#:~:text....

toomuchtodo 4y ago

It’s sort of surprising this isn’t a product in various cloud providers; there are open source options of course (which cost engineering time), but this could also be as straightforward as a scheduler using existing IAM (user list) and messaging (voice, email, sms, webhooks) interfaces. You’d of course still be able to use this with non cloud infra based on telemetry or other signals to trigger the initial incident. I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs. (Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)

deathanatos 4y ago
Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc. I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  I was in a pagerduty rotation for ~3 years at a profitable SaaS software firm and am fluent with the product as a stakeholder in my current role (we are in the process of replacing it for cost savings reasons). I am aware that it isn’t as easy as writing comments, but lets not kids ourselves this is going to space. Software is work, but it isn’t magic. It’s not a weekend project, and I never said it was. It’s likely 20-30 people and 6-12 months to start (which is what a lot of teams at cloud providers looks like, I’m more familiar with AWS internals vs Azure) and likely a profitable endeavor. You don’t have to do everything PagerDuty does, just what the largest cohort of customer needs. Open source for some, reasonable alternatives of a commodity product for others.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    >but lets not kids ourselves this is going to space. Software is work, but it isn’t magic. Putting strawmen in people's mouths doesn't make for a good argument.
- a4isms 4y ago
  > Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 That is HN's version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
- schrodinger 4y ago
  I think Datadog should kill PD. They're software is great and the majority of our pages are based on a Datadog alert.
a4isms 4y ago
PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, and with some elegant baling wire and duct tape, anyone can put together something that looks like a notification service. But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss." PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on. That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core. I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition. If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  And this is exactly why we don't have flying cars yet. What a racket.
  - schrodinger 4y ago
    We could easily have flying cars now but they're incredibly less efficient and roads work pretty well so where's the demand? Would you honestly buy one?
tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
Your reply is like saying anyone can implement Twitter in a weekend, it's just a react ui on top of a Postgres database. It's basically nonsense.

hamandcheese 4y ago

Pagerduty's web UX makes the AWS console look good. I hate it. Example: Go to the homepage and see how many clicks it takes to find out the simle question of "When am I on call next?"

tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
I'm also no fan of the UX but I don't see how your comment answers my question.

aloknnikhil 4y ago

Try setting up a multi-people intra-day rotation (like you would for follow the sun models across time zones). It’ll make you cry.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
The guy said thar the service doesn't need to exist. I just don't get what that mean. I don't think "it is hard to config follow the sun model" is enough reason to claim that the service serves no purpose. Their examples of follow the sun model seems pretty straight forward to me. https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/schedule-examples#:~:text=The%20%22follow%2Dthe%2Dsun,of%20the%20day%20and%20week https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/schedule-examples#:~:text....