12 ms·

Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

188 points by mads_quist 3y ago

dyml 3y ago
I like this! Thanks for building it. What’s the biggest differences between PagerDuty?
- mads_quist 3y ago
  Main difference is: - Escalation level management is super easy: drag & drop. No cumbersome management. - All Quiet tries to empower teams trying to strengthen thier self-organization. I believe that great teams have an inert motivation to take responsibilit yon their software. - All Quiet focuses on an App Only notification approach by design
yellow_lead 3y ago
> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings. Recently, I've implemented Android notifications for an app. Even if you set "priority" : "high" (FCM level), some will still not be received right away, depending on battery level and polling frequency at device level. You may ask the user to disable battery optimizations for your app, but a call is still more reliable IMO.
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 3y ago
  I'm also not sure about why multiple notification channels can't be used. If there's an alert I'd like to be notified by all means possible (depending on severity)
  - smachiz 3y ago
    This definitely seems like something that's more about development priority that they're trying to sell as a feature.... Realistically, since they just autoescalate if the incident isn't acknowledged it appears, one would think any/all notification methods would be a positive. Let the user (or their manager...) sort out what method(s) works best for them.
  - throowawaayy 3y ago
    [dead]
- smachiz 3y ago
  I think the design is you use the automatic escalation if the page isn't acknowledged.
  - mads_quist 3y ago
    Yes, it will auto-escalate to your team mates, if you don't acknowledge.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      I think this is a better model than what I've seen setup in PD. Typically there was a fall-back escalation, and then it would go straight up the management chain, which seemed idiotic.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  I cannot ensure that notifications are received. But neither can you with Email or SMS. Technically a Call might be more reliable, but still, your phone could be turned off or might not even have reception for a call.
  - paol 3y ago
    A call is more reliable. Furthermore if a call can't be placed the originating system is aware of this immediately, and can proceed accordingly (e.g. move to the next person in line). This isn't the case for any other notification method, which requires the (absense of) an explicit ack by the user to infer that the notification failed. Pagerduty handles this very well. If you have the app it will first try to notify through the app. If there is no ack within a couple of minutes it calls you. If you persevere with this project you'll quickly realize you need phone calls.
leetrout 3y ago
Thank you for this! There is so much room for more affordable pricing in software.
madmod 3y ago
You should have a status page with alerts to build trust about your uptime as a new company. I love your simple design in the app and the site.
dmattia 3y ago
> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Does this mean that there are no text/call options? I don't have a smartphone to install apps, but haven't had problems with being on on-call rotations with some of the other tools mentioned.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  Yes, it doesn't have SMS / call Options explicitly.
  - BryantD 3y ago
    This a deal breaker for me. I understand your intention here and from a pure alerting perspective you're correct, but I have use cases for other forms of notification.
    - mads_quist 3y ago
      Too bad. :( Would've loved to help you out. Would you mind elaborating on your usecases and why it's axactly a deal breaker?
      - zufallsheld 3y ago
        I for one sometimes are in regions where internet access is spotty, but getting a call works.
        yawaramin 3y ago
        What are you supposed to do exactly when you are in a region with spotty internet and you get a page? Jump on an incident bridge, pull up the logs and dashboards, and start debugging? If are you going to somewhere with spotty internet, presumably it didn't just happen all of a sudden and you knew in advance, and thus could have swapped on-call duty with someone else who would have reliable internet?
steveBK123 3y ago
I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of overrides. I'd imagine some of the common tools like Workday should give you integrations for that. Taking a holiday became like a 12 step program - email boss in advance, put in HR system request, cross check your PagerDuty schedule, negotiate a trade with another teammate for PagerDuty rotation, decline meetings, update your outlook calendar out-of-office, set your slack status & notifications, and re-remind everyone the week before you go. It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off? The other problem with these tools is you only get value out of them depending on the level of systems integration you spend your time on. If even a single system is not integrated & still sends emails/slacks/only updates a dashboard .. then PagerDuty is simply yet-another-tool to monitor, rather than the single pane of glass.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  I tried to make managing the incident escalation policies as simple as possible. It currently works with a simple drag&drop mechanism. The way PagerDuty is doing this also seemed very cumbersome to me. Of course All Quiet is currently missing holiday / off hours features. I'm still figuring out what's the best approach there. Regarding your last paragraph - can you elaborate on this? I tried to make All Quiet be integratable with basically every system by Email and Webhook integrations. Do you see this as a problem? Thanks for your feedback in general!
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    I think the problem with integration is probably a man-hours thing. A lot of shops have a hodgepodge of 3rd party tools which are not necessarily the latest&greatest Cloud/FAANG darlings - Geneos, Jira, ServiceNow, ControlM, Autosys, Tidal. These tools can vary by industry & org size, so maybe finding some traction in a particular slice so that you can really serve that niche can give you more traction, I dunno. It just has to be dead simple to integrate, and it's worth considering some sort of professional services/customer success engineering layer. The problem I've seen is that in every (financial services) org I have worked, the teams responsible for integrations to these types of tools are really operations type teams that do a little development in their spare time. So it never gets done well, or completely. To me, the only benefit of PagerDuty type tool is when it becomes the single point of escalation. If its just one of many, the product will not be sticky within a given org.
mLuby 3y ago
Why is the pricing per user? Is that what your costs are most dependent on? I bet not. I'd argue $5/user is just teaser pricing on its way to PagerDuty's $21+/user. Regardless, cool project—happy to see more competition.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  On the pricing page I'm explaining that I think it's the fairest option. If you have a small team, you probably have "less money" than a huge team.
- smachiz 3y ago
  Since when does anyone set or scale their price on their costs?
  - LadyCailin 3y ago
    Presumably when someone says that such a model frustrates them. But perhaps not.
    - smachiz 3y ago
      There’s a big gap between $5 and $21… for now. That I have no doubt they’ll spend all their time building features so they can increase prices to close that gap.
  - iso1631 3y ago
    A big argument against LVT that people (often landlords, but many "socialists" too) is that rents will simply rise to reflect the extra cost to the landlord Same with increase interest rates It's certainly widely believed that "price = cost + %profit" rather than "price = level at which maximum profit will be achieved after factoring in market segregation"
    - smachiz 3y ago
      I mean, LVT or not, that is probably true. If the price increase affects the entire market, landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored (or renters will increase their willingness to pay a higher rate). If market price < cost + desired margin, some sellers will exit, reducing supply and increasing market price. LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. This is prone to loss. I've struggled with notification delivery reliability on Android for years. If I don't touch my phone for a few hours and then wake the screen, I get a flurry of notifications all at once from the last few hours. But I need to be aware of pages in real-time. There should really be a call and text notification channel else I don't see this getting much traction over PD.
- oigursh 3y ago
  I ended up hiring a US emergency dispatcher team and repurposing them - they would literally phone you up as second line - no robots.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- karussell 3y ago
  I did not yet had a problem with notifications in Android but I also see app-only as a disadvantage. What if I have no internet but could be reachable via SMS/phone? (still not that rare in Germany ;)) btw: there is an helpful Android app "missed notifications reminder" in fdroid store that re-triggers app-specific notifications if you do not view them within a minute.
blantonl 3y ago
I'm frustrated with the pricing of Pager Duty, so I'm developing my own solution and making it available here What about a? It won't do b, c, d, x, and y, that's a deal breaker for me. Can I do d, f, t, m - no? Ugh, nice try good luck on your project.
- biohax2015 3y ago
  What does this add to the conversation? You didn’t even put in enough effort to complain about actual things…
mdaniel 3y ago
I'm surprised to see you used Mongo (https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabbitmq-zeromq-kafka-etc https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabb...) after all the replies in this thread citing "delivery reliability" What did you find that made NoSQL a good fit for tracking incidents and escalations?
- mads_quist 3y ago
  Good Point, MongoDB supports multi document ACID transactions for more than 5 years now.
mcsniff 3y ago
I would recommend running through your docs with a native english speaker. Congratulations on the launch! Be proud of what you've put together here, and looks to be all by yourself too? The infra for a site, backend, and polished mobile apps for both platforms on your own. From another "I'm doing it all myself" dude, very well done!
- mads_quist 3y ago
  Thanks for pointing out to go through the docs section. Appreciate it.
mbaris 3y ago
I used to work at Opsgenie, which is one of the main competitors of Pagerduty, wish you good luck Sms is a very good fallback channel for push notifications, especially when you don't have good internet coverage for an unexpected reason. I also personally hate phone calls, but I find it more effective to wake people up at night.
matrix12 3y ago
Ever since their IPO they've been charging minibar rates for metric data storage.
29athrowaway 3y ago
You can build your own Pagerduty, feature-wise. But a system like that requires higher high availability than your app. Pagerduty's SLA for availability is 99.9% (3 nines) which is up to 43.8 minutes per month. If you build your Pagerduty clone on AWS, your theoretical maximum availability is 99.99%.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  "...requires higher high availability than your app." How do you know the availability of All Quiet? :)
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    If it's not published or part of contract negotiation, it could be zero and it would not be a problem.
bink 3y ago
Will you be using PagerDuty or another competitor to monitor your own service? I always wonder what these companies use... or if they rely on their own service. And if so, then if their service breaks how would they know?
- yawaramin 3y ago
  Who do PagerDuty or OpsGenie use to monitor their services?
  - akavi 3y ago
    In the "old days" (2015 and before), PD used Wormly to mass-blast all engineers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ChrisInEdmonton 3y ago
I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used. I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want to make very sure you are aware why people still pay for Pagerduty. To compete, you need to be looking at 99.99% uptime or better (ideally 99.999%, 5 minutes of downtime a year) where 'uptime' is defined as the ability to exercise the entire notification stack. The moment someone's site has an outage and you aren't able to deliver the notification, you lose the customer and everyone they talk to. I also worry about in-app notifications, but that's well-covered by everyone else's comments. Pagerduty is vulnerable. Their UI is garbage. But you need to have bullet-proof uptime to take them down. It's a tough challenge and I wish you luck!
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Ah, but as always, the million dollar question is ..... What does the PagerDuty small print say ? My guess is the small print is not "bulletproof reliability" or five-nines. I betcha their contract is full of exclusions and get-outs. It's a bit like the famous Verizon 100% SLA. Any idiot knows its not technically feasible, but the reason you pay the Verizon-tax is so the've got some cash to pay you the inevitable SLA claims.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    Sure, but contracts just establish the formal baselines for "when we have to talk". You still want reliability that's far higher than your contract baselines.
  - folmar 3y ago
    The small print is irrelevant as the amount of money you get for SLA breach is usually less or equal to what you pay. What matters is the execution and word of mouth. And PagerDuty is widely known to be rock solid.
mlhpdx 3y ago
Is there a notification system that tries to be a little smarter about escalations? That seems a difficult area. A developer doesn’t know - should this be escalated, or should it not? Is it sufficiently impactful, or not? The same questions arise in customer success who generally error on the side of raising the escalation level at the expense of rest. This seems like an area that could be vastly improved with statistics (something like Robust Decisions) or machine learning. I haven’t seen that, and wonder if others have?
amluto 3y ago
Can it have a calmer way to deliver notifications? The PagerDuty app goes directly from zero to klaxon, and the klaxons are horrible sounds from a bizarrely limited menu. Ideally there would be a configurable escalation-to-the-same-user policy. I might want: vibrate-only notification, then normal notification, then critical notification, then phone call, in that order, with configurable delays. Ideally this would interact well with focus/sleep mode, so I could get a calm critical notification before full klaxons. Other feature request: a way to tell the app to shut up already. I’ve occasionally dealt with an issue causing notifications every minute or so. The last thing I need while fixing it is more notifications to ack or silence.
- dmlittle 3y ago
  It might be plan dependent(?) but everything you’re describing is configurable on your PagerDuty profile. I have it configured to send me a notification immediately followed by a call if I don’t acknowledge it within a minute (yes, this is aggressive but I’m in a high urgency, quick response time SLA rotation)
  - amluto 3y ago
    Sure, but this doesn’t help. The “Push” notification type goes straight to Klaxons. I have hacked around it by delaying Push until after SMS, but that’s, at best, a kludge. There should be multiple classes of push.
- jq-r 3y ago
  I have absolutely no idea why PD doesn't have a big button which stops all PD notifications the moment you press it. There are very few events in life more stressful then dealing with an incident, people on the call and having your phone alerting and ringing all the frigging time. I was once told to mute myself on incident bridge because all that alerting was not only super iritating for me, but for others too. I was supposed to fix the problem but I was so distracted with alerts I wanted to snap the phone in two and punch a random PD manager in the face. "Yes PagerDuty, I now our infra is melting, please shut the fuck up and let me do my job." PD does have a feature IIRC "intelligent alert grouping" which will group new alerts and not display more of those. So it makes it relatively easy to snooze group of alerts for X period of time so it makes it much quieter. Unfortunately, this is locked as a feature paid extra. But still, they need a way to tell PD to stop alerting.
ginkgotree 3y ago
Bravo. PagerDuty is long overdue to be replaced by a better service. Their pricing is exorbitant, and their sales / account team forces you into year long contracts to buy seats you don't need. We are currently being threatened with an $8k bill because they claim we didn't "cancel renewal" in time.
animitronix 3y ago
So cool to see someone took this up, PD is hot garbage. We'll be taking a look!!
jedberg 3y ago
The main problem that Pagerduty solved at the time was deliverability of alerts. It was hard, and still is, to solve the problem of making sure the right people actually get the alerts. It was so expensive because they have redundant hardware all over the place with different providers, and they ran it all themselves, including SMS and phone gateways. One of their key differentiators was that they were not built on AWS, so when AWS had an outage, you still knew about it. That also made it expensive. With Pagerduty, you're mostly paying for reliability. The peace of mind knowing that someone will get notified when there is an outage. This looks interesting, but from your page I'm not sure how you're better than Pagerduty. App only notifications looks like a disadvantage to me. What if push notifications are down? What if I'm on DND? Where is your infrastructure built? Is it on a cloud provider? What happens if that provider has an outage? If you want to build a PD competitor you have to build it on your own hardware in multiple datacenters owned by different people with different interconnects. If you haven't done that how will you stay up when your customer's provider goes down so that they know about it?
- cylix 3y ago
  FYI, PagerDuty is built on top of AWS. They used to do some multi-cloud stuff, but no longer the case (too expensive, too complex, causing more issues than it solved). Source: worked there for 2 years.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Alerting or control plane or both? If alerting is AWS only, I'm very sad. What happens if there is a global AWS outage? Never been one yet, but never say never.
    - icco 3y ago
      If your service needs to survive a global aws outage, you just can't run with any saas. So many of these companies are single regioned in AWS. Auth0, Okta, Datadog, many others put customers in a regional box, and if that region goes down, all of those customers go down.
- 3y ago
siliconc0w 3y ago
At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there. Ideally you to optimize around a number of factors - vacations (which can be auto populated) for one but also fairness, shift closeness (some labor laws here), holidays, or individual preferences (e.g I like to hike on the weekends). You then also need a tool for short-term trades/overrides to basically poll the team to see who can take/trade the shift to avoid the diffusion of responsibility of yelling into a slack chennel and complexity of negotiating trades. What is nice about this is that we can setup a daily oncall so if you have a re-occuring weekly obligation that is incompatible with being oncall we can set it up so you never get scheduled for that day (provided there is enough slack for vacations and so on).
- OJFord 3y ago
  When I used one of these (we used VictorOps^) what it was really missing was 'fairness' as you say in the 'takes/trades'. We were rarely called and paid handsomely for it, so although nobody vocalised it, there was definitely a rush to grab it (because that was the 'system') if someone announced they had to put one up for grabs (due to holiday clash or whatever). Really I think that should have automatically de-allocated some future rotation of the taker's, and definitely would've helped if it hooked into the holiday calendaring system, so anything booked far enough in advance was already avoided. (^Not to slam VictorOps specifically, for all I know we just didn't have it configured well and it is capable of all that.)
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  What is FANNG? Facebook, Amazon, Neural Nets & Google?
snird 3y ago
Seeing this post, I went over to check how much I pay PagerDuty. 49$ per user per month!!! And I don't need the features! I wanted to downgrade to the 29$ immediately, at least. And then I saw this: https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments I have to contact their sales to downgrade. I'm furious. I won't downgrade. I'll cancel completely and move to your app.
- tky 3y ago
  They’ve adopted terrible dark patterns with account management and even their service tiers. Prices keep going up; this is an excellent time for competition.
  - akhayam 3y ago
    +1. I am really upset about the pricing for the value. Great that we have alternatives now
- atonse 3y ago
  Yup I went from being ambivalent about PagerDuty to actively hating them. They swindle you, make it hard to cancel or downgrade, and that seems to be their way of doing business. I’ll ditch them as soon as I can.
aserafini 3y ago
For the OP, you've got a typo in your docs. https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet > by explicit excalation should be 'escalation'. Ps. I'm also in Berlin, and would be interested to have a chat: this product looks interesting. Email in my profile!
madmax108 3y ago
Grafana OnCall is an OSS alternative (with a cloud offering) that works great out of the box if you are using Grafana/Grafana Alerting for monitoring your systems and want to have a pager-like system with phone/SMS/telegram integrations + it's own app. Best of all, it's self-hostable as well, which keeps me completely in control of my infra. https://grafana.com/products/oncall/ https://grafana.com/products/oncall/ https://github.com/grafana/oncall https://github.com/grafana/oncall
- motakuk 3y ago
  It also works with other alert sources like DataDog or Zabbix.
oezi 3y ago
You mention price as a motivation to build allquiet. I have been happy the last couple of years with https://simplepush.io/ https://simplepush.io/ which is 12.49$ per year (and similarly app only).
phendrenad2 3y ago
I worked for a company that used PagerDuty, but eventually moved to a service that provided actual physical pagers. Well, they looked like 1990s pagers, but connected to Wifi. Really cool. Not sure why more don't do this.
justinmayer 3y ago
Frustrated by expensive per-seat pricing and unfriendly contract terms, we looked for PagerDuty alternatives and found a fantastic open-source project called Uptime Kuma: https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma Uptime Kuma is one of the few open-source projects that feels like a commercial product: polished user experience, frequent release cadence, and a rich set of features including monitoring PostgreSQL servers, Docker containers, and so much more. Its list of supported notification services is so long that I don't even recognize half of the options available. Truly impressive. Side note and shameless plug… We love Uptime Kuma so much that we made it one of the cornerstone applications provided by Fortressa, which we think of as the “App Store for Open Source”: https://fortressa.com/ https://fortressa.com/
seangransee 3y ago
https://pagerduty.life https://pagerduty.life
tymm 3y ago
Cool product. Feel free to reach out at contact@simplepush.io, if you want to chat about push notifications :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gmjosack 3y ago
Would love to see more disruption in this space. Like others have said it's actually amazing how bad the calendar/scheduling portion of PagerDuty is. Multiple places I've worked we ended up making our own interface to managing schedules because the UI at PagerDuty is so bad. Also, people mentioning the rock solid reliability of PagerDuty likely don't have good monitoring of PagerDuty. When I worked on monitoring in the past we regularly encountered delayed notifications and ingestion failures. Pulling up their status page right now confirms they still have multiple issues a month. At a past employer we had our notification system actually check outstanding alert status and fall back to direct SMS when the ingestion latency was too high. I worked on pygerduty, a python client library for PagerDuty, at a past job so I spent a lot of time talking to people at PagerDuty but I think they stopped inviting me to their "Founder's Club" meetings when I told them I didn't care about AI Alerts and wanted better UIs for scheduling and better reliability.
rco8786 3y ago
I am so glad someone is doing this. I’ve been using PD for 10 years and still can’t figure out the UI. Things that should be dead simple (IMO) like adjusting schedules requires a separate spreadsheet to figure out.
JimXugle 3y ago
I can recommend GoAlert for this... It works really well! https://github.com/target/goalert https://github.com/target/goalert
mleonhard 3y ago
Feature request: "Quiet wakeup mode" that vibrates the user's Apple Watch for a minute before making any sound. Then start the sound at the lowest volume (inaudible) and slowly increase it over 1 minute. This would be supremely useful for being oncall while sleeping near another person. Feature request 2: "Earplug mode" that slowly increases volume and vibration from zero to max, and stays at max for 1 minute. Support alternating various tones, sounds, and voices.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  Nice idea!!
winterec 3y ago
(This is my first post after lurking with an account for several years) Congrats on the launch, you've done a great job. The app looks good and you've clearly and persuasively differentiated it from the competition.
armiiller 3y ago
PagerTree (https://pagertree.com https://pagertree.com) is a great alternative to PD. - Super simple interface, with a drag n' drop on-call scheduler. - Supports escalations, calendar overrides, and SSO - Half the price

188 points by mads_quist 3y ago

dyml 3y ago

I like this! Thanks for building it. What’s the biggest differences between PagerDuty?

mads_quist 3y ago
Main difference is: - Escalation level management is super easy: drag & drop. No cumbersome management. - All Quiet tries to empower teams trying to strengthen thier self-organization. I believe that great teams have an inert motivation to take responsibilit yon their software. - All Quiet focuses on an App Only notification approach by design

yellow_lead 3y ago

> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings. Recently, I've implemented Android notifications for an app. Even if you set "priority" : "high" (FCM level), some will still not be received right away, depending on battery level and polling frequency at device level. You may ask the user to disable battery optimizations for your app, but a call is still more reliable IMO.

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 3y ago
I'm also not sure about why multiple notification channels can't be used. If there's an alert I'd like to be notified by all means possible (depending on severity)
- smachiz 3y ago
  This definitely seems like something that's more about development priority that they're trying to sell as a feature.... Realistically, since they just autoescalate if the incident isn't acknowledged it appears, one would think any/all notification methods would be a positive. Let the user (or their manager...) sort out what method(s) works best for them.
- throowawaayy 3y ago
  [dead]
smachiz 3y ago
I think the design is you use the automatic escalation if the page isn't acknowledged.
- mads_quist 3y ago
  Yes, it will auto-escalate to your team mates, if you don't acknowledge.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    I think this is a better model than what I've seen setup in PD. Typically there was a fall-back escalation, and then it would go straight up the management chain, which seemed idiotic.
mads_quist 3y ago
I cannot ensure that notifications are received. But neither can you with Email or SMS. Technically a Call might be more reliable, but still, your phone could be turned off or might not even have reception for a call.
- paol 3y ago
  A call is more reliable. Furthermore if a call can't be placed the originating system is aware of this immediately, and can proceed accordingly (e.g. move to the next person in line). This isn't the case for any other notification method, which requires the (absense of) an explicit ack by the user to infer that the notification failed. Pagerduty handles this very well. If you have the app it will first try to notify through the app. If there is no ack within a couple of minutes it calls you. If you persevere with this project you'll quickly realize you need phone calls.

leetrout 3y ago

Thank you for this! There is so much room for more affordable pricing in software.

madmod 3y ago

You should have a status page with alerts to build trust about your uptime as a new company. I love your simple design in the app and the site.

dmattia 3y ago

> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Does this mean that there are no text/call options? I don't have a smartphone to install apps, but haven't had problems with being on on-call rotations with some of the other tools mentioned.

mads_quist 3y ago
Yes, it doesn't have SMS / call Options explicitly.
- BryantD 3y ago
  This a deal breaker for me. I understand your intention here and from a pure alerting perspective you're correct, but I have use cases for other forms of notification.
  - mads_quist 3y ago
    Too bad. :( Would've loved to help you out. Would you mind elaborating on your usecases and why it's axactly a deal breaker?
    - zufallsheld 3y ago
      I for one sometimes are in regions where internet access is spotty, but getting a call works.
      - yawaramin 3y ago
        What are you supposed to do exactly when you are in a region with spotty internet and you get a page? Jump on an incident bridge, pull up the logs and dashboards, and start debugging? If are you going to somewhere with spotty internet, presumably it didn't just happen all of a sudden and you knew in advance, and thus could have swapped on-call duty with someone else who would have reliable internet?

steveBK123 3y ago

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of overrides. I'd imagine some of the common tools like Workday should give you integrations for that. Taking a holiday became like a 12 step program - email boss in advance, put in HR system request, cross check your PagerDuty schedule, negotiate a trade with another teammate for PagerDuty rotation, decline meetings, update your outlook calendar out-of-office, set your slack status & notifications, and re-remind everyone the week before you go. It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off? The other problem with these tools is you only get value out of them depending on the level of systems integration you spend your time on. If even a single system is not integrated & still sends emails/slacks/only updates a dashboard .. then PagerDuty is simply yet-another-tool to monitor, rather than the single pane of glass.

mads_quist 3y ago
I tried to make managing the incident escalation policies as simple as possible. It currently works with a simple drag&drop mechanism. The way PagerDuty is doing this also seemed very cumbersome to me. Of course All Quiet is currently missing holiday / off hours features. I'm still figuring out what's the best approach there. Regarding your last paragraph - can you elaborate on this? I tried to make All Quiet be integratable with basically every system by Email and Webhook integrations. Do you see this as a problem? Thanks for your feedback in general!
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I think the problem with integration is probably a man-hours thing. A lot of shops have a hodgepodge of 3rd party tools which are not necessarily the latest&greatest Cloud/FAANG darlings - Geneos, Jira, ServiceNow, ControlM, Autosys, Tidal. These tools can vary by industry & org size, so maybe finding some traction in a particular slice so that you can really serve that niche can give you more traction, I dunno. It just has to be dead simple to integrate, and it's worth considering some sort of professional services/customer success engineering layer. The problem I've seen is that in every (financial services) org I have worked, the teams responsible for integrations to these types of tools are really operations type teams that do a little development in their spare time. So it never gets done well, or completely. To me, the only benefit of PagerDuty type tool is when it becomes the single point of escalation. If its just one of many, the product will not be sticky within a given org.

mLuby 3y ago

Why is the pricing per user? Is that what your costs are most dependent on? I bet not. I'd argue $5/user is just teaser pricing on its way to PagerDuty's $21+/user. Regardless, cool project—happy to see more competition.

mads_quist 3y ago
On the pricing page I'm explaining that I think it's the fairest option. If you have a small team, you probably have "less money" than a huge team.
smachiz 3y ago
Since when does anyone set or scale their price on their costs?
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  Presumably when someone says that such a model frustrates them. But perhaps not.
  - smachiz 3y ago
    There’s a big gap between $5 and $21… for now. That I have no doubt they’ll spend all their time building features so they can increase prices to close that gap.
- iso1631 3y ago
  A big argument against LVT that people (often landlords, but many "socialists" too) is that rents will simply rise to reflect the extra cost to the landlord Same with increase interest rates It's certainly widely believed that "price = cost + %profit" rather than "price = level at which maximum profit will be achieved after factoring in market segregation"
  - smachiz 3y ago
    I mean, LVT or not, that is probably true. If the price increase affects the entire market, landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored (or renters will increase their willingness to pay a higher rate). If market price < cost + desired margin, some sellers will exit, reducing supply and increasing market price. LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. This is prone to loss. I've struggled with notification delivery reliability on Android for years. If I don't touch my phone for a few hours and then wake the screen, I get a flurry of notifications all at once from the last few hours. But I need to be aware of pages in real-time. There should really be a call and text notification channel else I don't see this getting much traction over PD.

oigursh 3y ago
I ended up hiring a US emergency dispatcher team and repurposing them - they would literally phone you up as second line - no robots.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
karussell 3y ago
I did not yet had a problem with notifications in Android but I also see app-only as a disadvantage. What if I have no internet but could be reachable via SMS/phone? (still not that rare in Germany ;)) btw: there is an helpful Android app "missed notifications reminder" in fdroid store that re-triggers app-specific notifications if you do not view them within a minute.

blantonl 3y ago

I'm frustrated with the pricing of Pager Duty, so I'm developing my own solution and making it available here What about a? It won't do b, c, d, x, and y, that's a deal breaker for me. Can I do d, f, t, m - no? Ugh, nice try good luck on your project.

biohax2015 3y ago
What does this add to the conversation? You didn’t even put in enough effort to complain about actual things…

mdaniel 3y ago

I'm surprised to see you used Mongo (https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabbitmq-zeromq-kafka-etc https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabb...) after all the replies in this thread citing "delivery reliability" What did you find that made NoSQL a good fit for tracking incidents and escalations?

mads_quist 3y ago
Good Point, MongoDB supports multi document ACID transactions for more than 5 years now.

mcsniff 3y ago

I would recommend running through your docs with a native english speaker. Congratulations on the launch! Be proud of what you've put together here, and looks to be all by yourself too? The infra for a site, backend, and polished mobile apps for both platforms on your own. From another "I'm doing it all myself" dude, very well done!

mads_quist 3y ago
Thanks for pointing out to go through the docs section. Appreciate it.

mbaris 3y ago

I used to work at Opsgenie, which is one of the main competitors of Pagerduty, wish you good luck Sms is a very good fallback channel for push notifications, especially when you don't have good internet coverage for an unexpected reason. I also personally hate phone calls, but I find it more effective to wake people up at night.

matrix12 3y ago

Ever since their IPO they've been charging minibar rates for metric data storage.

29athrowaway 3y ago

You can build your own Pagerduty, feature-wise. But a system like that requires higher high availability than your app. Pagerduty's SLA for availability is 99.9% (3 nines) which is up to 43.8 minutes per month. If you build your Pagerduty clone on AWS, your theoretical maximum availability is 99.99%.

mads_quist 3y ago
"...requires higher high availability than your app." How do you know the availability of All Quiet? :)
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  If it's not published or part of contract negotiation, it could be zero and it would not be a problem.

bink 3y ago

Will you be using PagerDuty or another competitor to monitor your own service? I always wonder what these companies use... or if they rely on their own service. And if so, then if their service breaks how would they know?

yawaramin 3y ago
Who do PagerDuty or OpsGenie use to monitor their services?
- akavi 3y ago
  In the "old days" (2015 and before), PD used Wormly to mass-blast all engineers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ChrisInEdmonton 3y ago

I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used. I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want to make very sure you are aware why people still pay for Pagerduty. To compete, you need to be looking at 99.99% uptime or better (ideally 99.999%, 5 minutes of downtime a year) where 'uptime' is defined as the ability to exercise the entire notification stack. The moment someone's site has an outage and you aren't able to deliver the notification, you lose the customer and everyone they talk to. I also worry about in-app notifications, but that's well-covered by everyone else's comments. Pagerduty is vulnerable. Their UI is garbage. But you need to have bullet-proof uptime to take them down. It's a tough challenge and I wish you luck!

traceroute66 3y ago
> But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Ah, but as always, the million dollar question is ..... What does the PagerDuty small print say ? My guess is the small print is not "bulletproof reliability" or five-nines. I betcha their contract is full of exclusions and get-outs. It's a bit like the famous Verizon 100% SLA. Any idiot knows its not technically feasible, but the reason you pay the Verizon-tax is so the've got some cash to pay you the inevitable SLA claims.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  Sure, but contracts just establish the formal baselines for "when we have to talk". You still want reliability that's far higher than your contract baselines.
- folmar 3y ago
  The small print is irrelevant as the amount of money you get for SLA breach is usually less or equal to what you pay. What matters is the execution and word of mouth. And PagerDuty is widely known to be rock solid.

mlhpdx 3y ago

Is there a notification system that tries to be a little smarter about escalations? That seems a difficult area. A developer doesn’t know - should this be escalated, or should it not? Is it sufficiently impactful, or not? The same questions arise in customer success who generally error on the side of raising the escalation level at the expense of rest. This seems like an area that could be vastly improved with statistics (something like Robust Decisions) or machine learning. I haven’t seen that, and wonder if others have?

amluto 3y ago

Can it have a calmer way to deliver notifications? The PagerDuty app goes directly from zero to klaxon, and the klaxons are horrible sounds from a bizarrely limited menu. Ideally there would be a configurable escalation-to-the-same-user policy. I might want: vibrate-only notification, then normal notification, then critical notification, then phone call, in that order, with configurable delays. Ideally this would interact well with focus/sleep mode, so I could get a calm critical notification before full klaxons. Other feature request: a way to tell the app to shut up already. I’ve occasionally dealt with an issue causing notifications every minute or so. The last thing I need while fixing it is more notifications to ack or silence.

dmlittle 3y ago
It might be plan dependent(?) but everything you’re describing is configurable on your PagerDuty profile. I have it configured to send me a notification immediately followed by a call if I don’t acknowledge it within a minute (yes, this is aggressive but I’m in a high urgency, quick response time SLA rotation)
- amluto 3y ago
  Sure, but this doesn’t help. The “Push” notification type goes straight to Klaxons. I have hacked around it by delaying Push until after SMS, but that’s, at best, a kludge. There should be multiple classes of push.
jq-r 3y ago
I have absolutely no idea why PD doesn't have a big button which stops all PD notifications the moment you press it. There are very few events in life more stressful then dealing with an incident, people on the call and having your phone alerting and ringing all the frigging time. I was once told to mute myself on incident bridge because all that alerting was not only super iritating for me, but for others too. I was supposed to fix the problem but I was so distracted with alerts I wanted to snap the phone in two and punch a random PD manager in the face. "Yes PagerDuty, I now our infra is melting, please shut the fuck up and let me do my job." PD does have a feature IIRC "intelligent alert grouping" which will group new alerts and not display more of those. So it makes it relatively easy to snooze group of alerts for X period of time so it makes it much quieter. Unfortunately, this is locked as a feature paid extra. But still, they need a way to tell PD to stop alerting.

ginkgotree 3y ago

Bravo. PagerDuty is long overdue to be replaced by a better service. Their pricing is exorbitant, and their sales / account team forces you into year long contracts to buy seats you don't need. We are currently being threatened with an $8k bill because they claim we didn't "cancel renewal" in time.

animitronix 3y ago

So cool to see someone took this up, PD is hot garbage. We'll be taking a look!!

jedberg 3y ago

The main problem that Pagerduty solved at the time was deliverability of alerts. It was hard, and still is, to solve the problem of making sure the right people actually get the alerts. It was so expensive because they have redundant hardware all over the place with different providers, and they ran it all themselves, including SMS and phone gateways. One of their key differentiators was that they were not built on AWS, so when AWS had an outage, you still knew about it. That also made it expensive. With Pagerduty, you're mostly paying for reliability. The peace of mind knowing that someone will get notified when there is an outage. This looks interesting, but from your page I'm not sure how you're better than Pagerduty. App only notifications looks like a disadvantage to me. What if push notifications are down? What if I'm on DND? Where is your infrastructure built? Is it on a cloud provider? What happens if that provider has an outage? If you want to build a PD competitor you have to build it on your own hardware in multiple datacenters owned by different people with different interconnects. If you haven't done that how will you stay up when your customer's provider goes down so that they know about it?

cylix 3y ago
FYI, PagerDuty is built on top of AWS. They used to do some multi-cloud stuff, but no longer the case (too expensive, too complex, causing more issues than it solved). Source: worked there for 2 years.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Alerting or control plane or both? If alerting is AWS only, I'm very sad. What happens if there is a global AWS outage? Never been one yet, but never say never.
  - icco 3y ago
    If your service needs to survive a global aws outage, you just can't run with any saas. So many of these companies are single regioned in AWS. Auth0, Okta, Datadog, many others put customers in a regional box, and if that region goes down, all of those customers go down.
3y ago

siliconc0w 3y ago

At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there. Ideally you to optimize around a number of factors - vacations (which can be auto populated) for one but also fairness, shift closeness (some labor laws here), holidays, or individual preferences (e.g I like to hike on the weekends). You then also need a tool for short-term trades/overrides to basically poll the team to see who can take/trade the shift to avoid the diffusion of responsibility of yelling into a slack chennel and complexity of negotiating trades. What is nice about this is that we can setup a daily oncall so if you have a re-occuring weekly obligation that is incompatible with being oncall we can set it up so you never get scheduled for that day (provided there is enough slack for vacations and so on).

OJFord 3y ago
When I used one of these (we used VictorOps^) what it was really missing was 'fairness' as you say in the 'takes/trades'. We were rarely called and paid handsomely for it, so although nobody vocalised it, there was definitely a rush to grab it (because that was the 'system') if someone announced they had to put one up for grabs (due to holiday clash or whatever). Really I think that should have automatically de-allocated some future rotation of the taker's, and definitely would've helped if it hooked into the holiday calendaring system, so anything booked far enough in advance was already avoided. (^Not to slam VictorOps specifically, for all I know we just didn't have it configured well and it is capable of all that.)
quickthrower2 3y ago
What is FANNG? Facebook, Amazon, Neural Nets & Google?

snird 3y ago

Seeing this post, I went over to check how much I pay PagerDuty. 49$ per user per month!!! And I don't need the features! I wanted to downgrade to the 29$ immediately, at least. And then I saw this: https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments I have to contact their sales to downgrade. I'm furious. I won't downgrade. I'll cancel completely and move to your app.

tky 3y ago
They’ve adopted terrible dark patterns with account management and even their service tiers. Prices keep going up; this is an excellent time for competition.
- akhayam 3y ago
  +1. I am really upset about the pricing for the value. Great that we have alternatives now
atonse 3y ago
Yup I went from being ambivalent about PagerDuty to actively hating them. They swindle you, make it hard to cancel or downgrade, and that seems to be their way of doing business. I’ll ditch them as soon as I can.

aserafini 3y ago

For the OP, you've got a typo in your docs. https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet > by explicit excalation should be 'escalation'. Ps. I'm also in Berlin, and would be interested to have a chat: this product looks interesting. Email in my profile!

madmax108 3y ago

Grafana OnCall is an OSS alternative (with a cloud offering) that works great out of the box if you are using Grafana/Grafana Alerting for monitoring your systems and want to have a pager-like system with phone/SMS/telegram integrations + it's own app. Best of all, it's self-hostable as well, which keeps me completely in control of my infra. https://grafana.com/products/oncall/ https://grafana.com/products/oncall/ https://github.com/grafana/oncall https://github.com/grafana/oncall

motakuk 3y ago
It also works with other alert sources like DataDog or Zabbix.

oezi 3y ago

You mention price as a motivation to build allquiet. I have been happy the last couple of years with https://simplepush.io/ https://simplepush.io/ which is 12.49$ per year (and similarly app only).

phendrenad2 3y ago

I worked for a company that used PagerDuty, but eventually moved to a service that provided actual physical pagers. Well, they looked like 1990s pagers, but connected to Wifi. Really cool. Not sure why more don't do this.

justinmayer 3y ago

Frustrated by expensive per-seat pricing and unfriendly contract terms, we looked for PagerDuty alternatives and found a fantastic open-source project called Uptime Kuma: https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma Uptime Kuma is one of the few open-source projects that feels like a commercial product: polished user experience, frequent release cadence, and a rich set of features including monitoring PostgreSQL servers, Docker containers, and so much more. Its list of supported notification services is so long that I don't even recognize half of the options available. Truly impressive. Side note and shameless plug… We love Uptime Kuma so much that we made it one of the cornerstone applications provided by Fortressa, which we think of as the “App Store for Open Source”: https://fortressa.com/ https://fortressa.com/

seangransee 3y ago

https://pagerduty.life https://pagerduty.life

tymm 3y ago

Cool product. Feel free to reach out at contact@simplepush.io, if you want to chat about push notifications :)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gmjosack 3y ago

Would love to see more disruption in this space. Like others have said it's actually amazing how bad the calendar/scheduling portion of PagerDuty is. Multiple places I've worked we ended up making our own interface to managing schedules because the UI at PagerDuty is so bad. Also, people mentioning the rock solid reliability of PagerDuty likely don't have good monitoring of PagerDuty. When I worked on monitoring in the past we regularly encountered delayed notifications and ingestion failures. Pulling up their status page right now confirms they still have multiple issues a month. At a past employer we had our notification system actually check outstanding alert status and fall back to direct SMS when the ingestion latency was too high. I worked on pygerduty, a python client library for PagerDuty, at a past job so I spent a lot of time talking to people at PagerDuty but I think they stopped inviting me to their "Founder's Club" meetings when I told them I didn't care about AI Alerts and wanted better UIs for scheduling and better reliability.

rco8786 3y ago

I am so glad someone is doing this. I’ve been using PD for 10 years and still can’t figure out the UI. Things that should be dead simple (IMO) like adjusting schedules requires a separate spreadsheet to figure out.

JimXugle 3y ago

I can recommend GoAlert for this... It works really well! https://github.com/target/goalert https://github.com/target/goalert

mleonhard 3y ago

Feature request: "Quiet wakeup mode" that vibrates the user's Apple Watch for a minute before making any sound. Then start the sound at the lowest volume (inaudible) and slowly increase it over 1 minute. This would be supremely useful for being oncall while sleeping near another person. Feature request 2: "Earplug mode" that slowly increases volume and vibration from zero to max, and stays at max for 1 minute. Support alternating various tones, sounds, and voices.

mads_quist 3y ago
Nice idea!!

winterec 3y ago

(This is my first post after lurking with an account for several years) Congrats on the launch, you've done a great job. The app looks good and you've clearly and persuasively differentiated it from the competition.

armiiller 3y ago

PagerTree (https://pagertree.com https://pagertree.com) is a great alternative to PD. - Super simple interface, with a drag n' drop on-call scheduler. - Supports escalations, calendar overrides, and SSO - Half the price