Previously, people used to use pagers. Nowadays, nobody wants to carry another device. PagerDuty has replaced that ability to contact somebody in case of emergency without fail. That's how I would characterize it in improving our organization. 

PagerDuty integrates well with many other monitoring applications, it provides us with a centralized view of what can be configured in terms of escalations, and who's on call. 

We can control who is going to be notified through PagerDuty. If one team needs to contact another team, we can contact them through PagerDuty to get other teams involved in different incidents.

It has been fantastic. I've used PagerDuty across multiple companies throughout my career. I brought it with me through several companies. It is one of the most affordable solutions. It is highly API driven.

Over time, they went from just being a really simple solution for sending you a text or an email to being something that can send you alerts, push notifications, and all types of things that guarantee that the people you're trying to reach can be reached. The multi-way messaging, as well as everything else, has really helped make it reliable and consistent. That's something that we necessarily need for on-call operations and those types of activities.

One of the things with our incident flow is that it generates Jira tickets for us. So, its JIRA integration is a critical thing because we need to have that logged for compliance in a separate ticketing system. Having it go into Jira is great, where we can generate hard copies of the alerts and all the events around it. Also, it has the visibility to be able to update one particular location, so you can update Jira and that information goes across to PagerDuty, or you can update PagerDuty and it goes back to Jira. The integration that they have now is great. For example, if you are in the middle of a major event, where you have multiple incidents coming at you, the way it correlates events into a single incident is great.

It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise.

When my team is needed immediately, instead of people trying to catch someone on the phone or by email during off-hours, it's easier to use this kind of service. People can just fire an email to an on-call email address and it will catch the current on-call who knows he has to be available at that time.

Also, because we are not a large group and we do not have our eyes on glass 24/7, we need to have one on-call available for several projects. The current on-call may not always understand why a project is firing an alert, but he will know how to easily reach the person who is the focal point for the project in question.

Also, most of the time, the teams that want to engage my team are not so fluent in English and it's easier to understand someone via email. But my team is not always in front of their emails. PagerDuty is doing the bridging between the email being sent that asks for help and those who can provide the help. PagerDuty calls our on-call and he answers the phone and understands that there is a real issue. After that, he reads the email or looks in the body of the pager message and gets an understanding of what the issue is, and engages the focal point.

PagerDuty has allowed us to identify issues and incidents within the infrastructure that we wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

PagerDuty enables us to implement well-known techniques for on-call. It helps with managing schedules, being able to escalate issues, and being able to add people to an instance. It enables us to have multiple levels of people on-call, in a simple way. Otherwise, managing those schedules, offline, would be quite hard. Having a tool like PagerDuty to support us from that standpoint is really key, so that we can perform well when we have issues.

The fact that it doesn't have maintenance windows is definitely something that is really key. It was a key element in our choice. Having maintenance windows for a monitoring system is just not acceptable. The impact is that we really trust PagerDuty. There were situations where a specific alert didn't reach PagerDuty. We looked into finding the reason elsewhere, and not in PagerDuty, because we really trust that PagerDuty, when it catches an alert, will actually deliver it.

We are a transportation company and run 24/7. Communication with our drivers is of the upmost importance. All of our tractors are equipped with on-board computers that drivers use to send and receive messages along with reporting of information at pick up and delivery locations. Receiving this information as close to real-time as we can get is vital. We have developed processes that receive this information and update back office systems. We have also created procedures that monitor when new information is added. If a predefined time elapses with no updates, then it is safe to make the assumption that there may be an issue stopping the process. When this occurs, an event is triggered in PagerDuty and notices are sent out. If there is no response to the triggered event in PagerDuty within a certain time frame, the notification is escalated to the next person.

Drivers also use the on board computers to report certain events, such as an accident. When these types of messages are received, PagerDuty is used to immediately send notifications to our safety department. This allows us to react faster and get safety personnel out to the location if needed.

We never found out about the problems with the server unless we had the developers that would call us up saying, "Server's down. Bring it back up." Now we get the phone calls. If we don't answer a text message or an email right away, they'll even call our house phone, the computer will, and tell us the server is down and what server it is. It's helped out a great deal because then we can bring it up right away and then figure out what the problem is after we bring it up.

It allows us to reduce the knock, as in how the centralized automated workflow manages urgencies and alerts. This is a big benefit to any company using the product.

The immediacy of the alerts allows us to provide a good user experience to our customers.

Faster reaction times to respond to a set alert that we have designed to be classed as a Wake Up call.

It has increased the availability of networks to users and therefore decreased operational costs.

We're able to respond to problems within the environment a lot quicker, because we get the notifications regularly, or when there is an issue, we're able to respond and get it resolved quickly.

We significantly reduce our first response and platform issue resolution times thanks to full 24x7 resource coverage for the whole gooddata.com product (not just operations support functions but also security, services and other areas).

It governs our "on call" system, picking up custom-made emails from our alert system and forwarding the alert to the relevant on-call technician using his custom set notification rules. As a System Administrator, PagerDuty reliably notifies me via email, SMS, and phone call at the creation of an incident with custom-set rules controlling who is responsible per issue and at what time those responsibilities kick in. PagerDuty is of central importance to the continued smooth function of my company and it's IT-related infrastructure and applications.

The critical tickets and the critical outages get handled faster, even though there's less people who get paged.

Previously, everyone would get the page with the thinking that tasks will get done faster. But in reality, the process was inefficient because there was indecision and and constant emails determining who was going to take the page. But with PagerDuty, everyone knows what tasks they've been paged specifically for.

It's improved our organization by making the on-call lifestyle less stressful. It also improved the response time.

We use this in conjunction with SolarWinds so that the on call and backup get paged if something is down. Before with just SolarWinds native alerts, we missed some critical alerts.

• Because of the alert mechanism, our support technicians are prompted about support cases at risk.
• The escalation policies make it possible for managers to catch issues before missing SLA targets.
• We are able to better manage the 24/7 offering with a smaller support team.

It allows us to provide better customer support.

All of our on-call hand-offs are now fully automated with the scheduling system inside PagerDuty. All we need to do is define the rotation and it takes care of everything else.