We were exploring ManageEngine ServiceDesk. So, we need a feature where we can, like, when an alert triggers, we should alert the recipient by on-call. So, when an alert is detected, a ticket is generated in the management team, and we want to notify them on-call. Like, this ticket has been generated and stuff. So, I would like to see a similar feature in this solution.

This is why we want an alternative to PagerDuty. We want an alternative to PagerDuty. So we are getting on-call notifications using PagerDuty, but now we want to replace PagerDuty with ManageEngine ServiceDesk.  

So whenever some incident happens in the cloud infrastructure, we get data alerts from cloud security. We want to integrate a service that will provide us with notifications on-call. That this server is down, or this website is down, or this thing is going wrong.

Another area of improvement is integration. It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system. That's why we are dropping PagerDuty. We won't continue using it due to integration issues.

I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense.

PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually. 

Every month, someone needs to create those rosters and publish them. It would be great if PagerDuty could pull the rosters from Excel or another tool. We had to maintain rosters at multiple places, which was a duplication of effort. The point of PagerDuty is to automate our systems so that the calls are not missed and all, so it isn't ideal to manually intervene in one aspect each month.

PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform.

The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that. 

The user interface could be more intuitive. Initially, when we started using it, we had issues viewing some options because we had information issues in my role as an observer, not the responder. Therefore, I couldn't view buttons like acknowledgements because they were not showing up.

Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it.

We have an on-call phone number. However, at the moment, it is routed to a static voicemail. We would actually like to be able to have that phone follow whoever is on-call.

There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule. Due to that, I need to do extra work to adjust it, due to specific team needs or how I'm staffing my team. It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process. I find myself redoing the schedule often. Every month I need to make another schedule. It's not so bad but it could be improved.

The product can be improved by including out-of-the-box integration with other standard tools used in our fields such as Confluence and Jira.

It is a very non-customizable product, so you cannot add things like root cause analysis or the classification of incidents based on the area where you are getting more incidents. For example, if you're getting a lot of database issues, that may be an are you want to probe.

There aren't any capabilities to integrate with any problem management issues, like repetitive or high impact issues to deep dive and track them in the PagerDuty system. That is, I would like to see integration of problem management with incident management. That would be one nice feature to have.

The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue. 

More adaptive machine-learning logic would help to correlate incidents. 

PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration.

I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions.

PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement. In the next release, PagerDuty should include the ability to get raw data about usage and put it on a dashboard.

The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident.

PagerDuty can introduce machine-learning concepts for detecting incidents earlier. They haven't implemented that, but that might be on the roadmap.

It’s quite hard to reach the support team.

The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this. The solution has not enabled us to go beyond responding to incidents and to start predicting or preventing them.

It would help if they simplified the way you try to get insights or information about instances and to improve your situation regarding the groupings of alerts. 

Even if there are a lot of different functionalities, a lot of prediction abilities in place, it's not really clear what the best practices are for using PagerDuty to get the best out of the platform. The concepts are quite complex, at times, for people to understand. They need a more straightforward way to use the product and get the best out of it. With all the concepts of escalation, services, and the schedule, it gets confusing.

PagerDuty currently has an app that can be used on a smart phone or tablet that allows you to respond and view stats of the incidents. It would be nice if the app could somehow receive the notification of an incident and allow you to customize the warning method on the device end. Currently, the user can be alerted of an incident through email, text message, and phone call. It would be handy to have the capability to configure the app such that if an incident happens between the hours of 10 PM and 5 AM, it uses a much louder, alarm-sounding noise rather than just a text message and phone call noises.

I have been very satisfied with all functions of the product that I have used. However, I have not used all the functions so there may be some other short comings that I am not aware of.

It handles everything that we do now so if I can avoid the 2 AM phone calls that would be perfect but I know that's not possible. Other than that, nothing else.

They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product. It would be efficient for businesses or professional clients to manage multiple incidents instead of notifying all the users.

Something that needs to be improved is adding multilingual support.

I’d like to see some kind of supervising element, the functionality to resolve and allow people to be alerted for supervisors. I don’t think that they are going to address this.

This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations.

They need to sort out the date / time function when the time zones switch over from Normal to Daylight savings, and vise versa.

NOT all countries swap at the same time, thus everything is off by 1 hour until everyone is back in the correct zone.

I did make them aware of this, but they simply did not understand, and after a week everything auto corrected when everyone was back in the correct zone.

It always needs more integrated applications, especially if you are not a software developer. It's mostly geared towards application providers.

I'm not really sure. The one that was big on our list was the ability to tune the alerts, but they've done that now with the non-critical. At this time, everything is pretty good with how we're using it, and what they provide.

We're fully satisfied with the type of service they offer. I think it might be cheaper for enterprise organizations.

Open alerts should properly respond to SMS resolution beyond the initial alert. To explain, when an alert first comes through SMS, it'll prompt for a response: 4 to acknowledge, 6 to resolve, 8 to escalate. If a ticket is acknowledged with a 4, and then the matter is dealt with, responding again to the SMS with a 6 then will not resolve the ticket. It's a minor issue, and one largely mitigated by the mobile app.

I can only suggest cosmetic improvements to the recorded voice when responding to a page. It should be less angry.

Smartphone App can be flaky sometimes. Feature request: it would be nice to see an alert history by clicking on a host or some means to make it very easy to view alert history.

I would like to see them increase the content base and add integrations with different systems, for example, with ZenDesk or Slack; if it could integrate more with those types of systems. We use ZenDesk; I’d like to link this to ZenDesk. I’d like more integration points.

I would defiantly like to see more integration with other systems. This would really add some value for us.

The assigning and editing of the escalation policies could be improved. It works, but it's just a bit confusing at times.

I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end.

Some of the UX needs some help for better flow of actions - however I can understand the reasoning behind how some of the UI is laid and how you need to go an extra step to trigger actions.