Incident response has become faster and on-call teams manage alerts with reduced noise
What is our primary use case?
I use PagerDuty Operations Cloud for notifying engineers of any incidents or issues in our operations or infrastructure. Most of the time on our servers, I receive alerts regarding memory, disk utilization, and CPU, so when any infrastructure-related issues arise, we trigger PagerDuty alerts to the engineers to resolve them.
My main use case with PagerDuty Operations Cloud is for resolving incidents or when I need peer help on an ongoing incident. I page out the correct relevant engineers, and in response, they join the call, which is very useful for us to resolve any incidents.
What is most valuable?
The best features that PagerDuty Operations Cloud offers include paging out as one of the best capabilities. We can respond to incidents through a message, call, mobile app, or website, which is very useful and quick for getting incident notifications.
We rely on the mobile app the most for incident notifications because it is easy to carry wherever we go. PagerDuty Operations Cloud is one of the important aspects in our organization which we use widely for incident response and quick incident resolution. When we need any alert or peer help, PagerDuty assists us and helps in managing who is on call for which team, allowing us to view the dashboard, which is very useful for us.
The alert reduction feature of PagerDuty Operations Cloud helps in reducing incident alerts, allowing similar alerts to be resolved easily. The AI functionality is very useful in reducing alerts, automating workflow, improving on-call efficiency, and enabling faster incident resolution. PagerDuty's generative AI is particularly helpful as it reduces alerts and unnecessary noise.
What needs improvement?
Since using PagerDuty Operations Cloud, it would be helpful to have a phone number that we can use to page out certain people, making it easier for us. If a phone number existed that we could call and it would detect which team we are currently active in, we could then ask the system to page out certain people based on the available options.
Overall, I believe the platform is good, however, I think we could have a phone number that, when someone calls and provides some authentication such as a PIN, could help page out certain people, which would be useful for us. I rate the platform an 8 out of 10 because, as mentioned, there could be better ways of creating incidents or using a phone number to contact someone who is on call. For each team, we could have a temporary email ID which we could use to email and automatically reach the on-call person. Additionally, if we could integrate an AI chatbot feature, such as asking who is on call and having it display the results, it would be beneficial because we have multiple teams and currently need to navigate different dashboards.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using PagerDuty Operations Cloud for around two to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is very good, and it is easy to scale.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for PagerDuty Operations Cloud is very nice, and we receive very good support.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, and it is very useful because without it, we would need multiple people. Our headcount is very low because we are using PagerDuty, as it significantly reduces toil and manual work.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for PagerDuty Operations Cloud is good and easy to understand.
What other advice do I have?
For others looking into using PagerDuty Operations Cloud, my advice is that it is very useful, it is easy to onboard, and the response is very nice. You can manage multiple teams as multiple teams can have on-calls. I think you can integrate machine learning and AI features into PagerDuty and possibly have a chatbot that answers all questions related to PagerDuty, which will be helpful by providing a summary and similar functionalities. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Alert handling has improved and monitoring now supports faster false positive resolution
What is our primary use case?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is used to understand whether there are false positives or false alerts because it is integrated into a system where there would be a phone number, such as anyone from the team's phone number or perhaps the shift supervisor's phone number. Once those triggers are there, it would hit that number until somebody picks it up and acknowledges or escalates the alert or threat.
In a recent incident through PagerDuty Operations Cloud, there was one issue with one appliance that was continuously going wrong. Even if we were acknowledging it and closing it and had denoted it as a false positive and a false trigger or false alarm, it was still continuously hitting us. There was some issue with the appliance or some issue with the server. Once we understood that, we escalated this to the company's SecOps team, and they had to go inside to find out more details. PagerDuty Operations Cloud team was coordinated with them. Once they were coordinated, they could dig in deep and find out what the issue was. A high-priority P1 ticket was raised for that as per ITIL principles.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud was being used inside the office only, and if we enter anybody's number, for example, it would continuously be hitting at any time whenever the alerts are there. Whoever's numbers are added, such as a shift supervisor or shift people, those would keep on hitting back.
What is most valuable?
The best features that PagerDuty Operations Cloud offers are that it is user-friendly, the design is scalable, and it is quite easy to use for a newbie as well. Logging into the alerts as well as logging into any details are easy over PagerDuty Operations Cloud.
It is user-friendly because it does not need any sort of coding or any sort of scripting language to be filled in. It can just operate with mouse clicks. We need to know how to operate it, when to close, when not to close, and how to read green, yellow, red, and blue monitors or markers as per the monitoring.
It is easy to use, and I think the software also comes at a very low budget or low cost, which is very cost-effective and cost-friendly as well, rather than its alternatives. It benefits in every way, in network security, in cybersecurity, and overall company data monitoring and firewall as well.
I do not have any specific numbers because those will not be shared with us. This is confidential information. The response time is great, and after using PagerDuty Operations Cloud, false positives and false alarms, as well as security monitoring, were very strongly done.
What needs improvement?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by adding more features. Whatever manual work is there could be automated using scripting. Then it would be more efficient.
When we receive a call, it has to be entered all the way. If one thing had been entered, then multiple things need not have to be entered multiple times. It does not need to be entered repeatedly. It could be automated in that way.
For how long have I used the solution?
In my current field, I have been working almost eight to nine years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No other options were evaluated because this is the only thing we started our work with. I am not aware of what other companies use.
What was our ROI?
Money would be saved because it is a tool that, if automated, can do a lot of work for the employees that would otherwise be manual tasking. Thereby, it would save both money and time.
What other advice do I have?
I can give the advice that anyone can surely go ahead with this product because it would be a win-win situation for both PagerDuty Operations Cloud as well as the company that is using it. I have rated this product a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Reliable Scheduling and App, but Needs More Integration Flexibility
What do you like best about the product?
The on-call scheduling and the mobile app are the standout features. The scheduling engine is incredibly robust—handling complex rotations, follow-the-sun models, and last-minute overrides is seamless once the logic is set up. The mobile app is equally impressive; it’s intuitive, reliable, and allows for quick triage or acknowledgement of incidents without needing to open a laptop. It really nails the "responder experience" by putting critical actions front and center.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find the API and Slack integrations to be too rigid. While the Slack integration works well for basic "ack/resolve" actions, it lacks the flexibility to customize the actual alert content or the wording of messages sent to channels. Similarly, the API often feels restricted when trying to build more complex, automated workflows or custom internal tooling. I’d like to see more "hooks" for customization so the integrations can better fit our specific team processes rather than forcing us into a standardized format.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
PagerDuty solves the problem of "alert noise" and accountability. Before using it, critical alerts would often get buried in a Slack channel or a shared inbox, leading to slow response times. By centralizing our alerting and using escalation policies, it ensures the right person is notified via the right channel (push, SMS, or call) until the issue is acknowledged.
Automated incident workflows have transformed on-call operations and improved response times
What is our primary use case?
I have been working in my current field for over seven years as a DevOps and site reliability engineer, and my primary experience involves managing the reliability of infrastructure platforms hosted in multi-cloud and on-premises environments. I have predominantly worked with systems hosted in AWS services, setting up infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and completely establishing the release process where I utilize PagerDuty Operations Cloud for triage and other SRE operations.
I have been using PagerDuty Operations Cloud for over four years, and I have utilized it in multiple ways. One involves using PagerDuty Operations Cloud through enterprise services via a subscription model, and I have also used it in a project at Intel where I utilized PagerDuty Operations Cloud from AWS for approximately one to one and a half years. After that period, I have been using it as a subscription currently at IBM.
One of the main use cases for PagerDuty Operations Cloud involves handling the operation center, particularly concerning incident resolutions and triaging different incidents as part of the score platform engineering team within a central IBM cloud where various IBM cloud services are hosted. To ensure continuous reliability, automated incidents are created in PagerDuty Operations Cloud and incident management automation is heavily utilized as part of the project. Previously, I worked on integrating PagerDuty Operations Cloud with default AWS services to create incidents for different AWS services as part of the host infrastructure at Intel. Currently, I am creating different incident workflows within IBM internal cloud operations to ensure an effective incident management process, utilizing integrations with different LLMs as part of incident management, along with agentic SRE tasks that have arisen in the project.
Since I am part of a larger platform engineering team and SRE operations team, there are many incidents and services that my team handles. I handle over 26 IBM cloud score services hosted in our internal platform, where there have been many incidents related to service downtime, reliability issues, and update issues. A dedicated SRE team handles end-to-end incident management, and we wanted to automate the incident management process, especially since we receive hundreds of incidents per day, up to thousands of incidents during critical release times of different services. Thus, the manual on-call process has been automated through utilizing PagerDuty Operations Cloud.
What is most valuable?
One of the features I find valuable in PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which is part of our current migration activities, involves automating the entire incident management process by integrating all service incidents into a single incident management page. In IBM cloud, since many services and incidents occur, I utilize the runbook automation feature where I create runbooks for each service and common issues that facilitate incident management for common incidents.
The runbook automation positively impacts my team's workflow by significantly speeding up the incident resolution process. In IBM cloud, we have different services hosted such as IBM Schematics and IBM Kubernetes Service, with thousands of concurrent global users. We face several issues during multiple incidents, particularly in reliability and infrastructure side issues. Basic level zero incidents often require simple commands run in kubectl. Therefore, I created runbooks to address these common issues, allowing SRE team members to refer to the runbook and manually fix the issues. However, before using PagerDuty Operations Cloud's runbook automation, it took over 20 minutes to resolve these issues. After implementing PagerDuty Operations Cloud's runbook automation, I have reduced the response time from over 20 minutes to less than two minutes, saving approximately 80 to 90 percent of the time and making mean time to resolve significantly faster. I review the runbooks quarterly to update them with any new steps necessary.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud has greatly improved our productivity. Previously, I handled many incidents with manual automation runbooks, leading to substantial toil for the SRE teams in resolving even minor incidents and complicating our on-call schedule. Once I adopted PagerDuty Operations Cloud and heavily utilized the runbook automation, I provided a list of common incidents to PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which then did the heavy lifting in fixing basic incidents automatically. This allowed my team to focus more on development activities related to platform engineering. Overall, it has reduced our toil by at least 50 to 60 percent and improved our efficiency, enabling us to onboard more services. We increased from onboarding seven core IBM cloud services to over 28 services now hosted.
The expansion of services impacts our organization's goals and customer experience by allowing all IBM cloud internal services to be hosted on a dedicated platform engineering service called Rednote. Before using PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I utilized Nagios and Sysdig, and after migrating to PagerDuty Operations Cloud last year, I prepared a set of runbooks, automating on-call schedules and incident management. This automation has led to a significant increase in incident closure rates from around 40 to 45 percent, improving efficiency and reducing manual toil for basic incidents by about 60 percent. This enables my team to focus more on development activities as basic incidents that can be managed through simpler runbooks are now handled automatically by PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Additionally, incorporating AIOps into our on-call scheduling and notifications helps it learn from previous incidents and proactively address issues. This scalability has allowed me to grow from handling four cloud services to 28 services, increasing from 200 to 300 customers to over 1800 plus customers, thanks to PagerDuty Operations Cloud.
What needs improvement?
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case.
The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning curve to understand the platform. With many new members, they need training to set up runbook workflows, event orchestration, and manage complex on-call schedules across 23 services, making it a challenge for new users. Additionally, I feel the web interface requires improvements.
I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows.
The primary reasons for rating it an eight include the complex configuration which makes it challenging for new users, as well as their difficulty in setting up advanced runbook workflows and managing complex on-call setups. The web user interface also requires improvement. Although I receive alerts via the mobile app, which is beneficial for handling schedule maintenance, the same features should be added to the web interface. Customization issues persist, such as the inability to clone entire schedules as part of the workflows, and I want to keep incidents open for a specified duration, neither of which I can currently customize. Thus, I raised a ticket with PagerDuty Operations Cloud to address these concerns. Furthermore, the cost is high, making it one of the more expensive incident management solutions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using PagerDuty Operations Cloud for over four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is definitely stable, providing faster incident management and making managing our on-call roster easy along with effective escalation and notification channels.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding scalability, I do not find many issues. PagerDuty Operations Cloud effectively handles concurrent incidents, and incidents are fixed properly and on time.
How are customer service and support?
My interaction with PagerDuty Operations Cloud's customer support mainly focused on customizing our workflows. They understand our concerns and are willing to implement solutions that integrate into PagerDuty Operations Cloud effectively. From a reliability perspective, I have not faced any issues, and their support provides timely assistance for custom integration and workflows.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I used RunDeck automation, which is why I switched to PagerDuty Operations Cloud after PagerDuty Operations Cloud acquired RunDeck.
How was the initial setup?
Before using PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I utilized Nagios and Sysdig, and after migrating to PagerDuty Operations Cloud last year, I prepared a set of runbooks, automating on-call schedules and incident management. This automation led to a significant increase in incident closure rates from around 40 to 45 percent, improving efficiency and reducing manual toil for basic incidents by about 60 percent.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I purchased PagerDuty Operations Cloud through AWS Marketplace while at Intel, and my experience has been positive regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing. I had around seven users part of it for a base pricing of around $450 per user, primarily for custom workflows and the ITSM part. Currently, I am utilizing the runbook automation part, which costs around $2000 per year, and in the last three months, I have also used the AIOps feature for approximately $700 to $800 per month, resulting in a cumulative cost of around $3000 per month.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I evaluated other options, particularly competitors such as ZenDuty due to cost effectiveness, but I favored PagerDuty Operations Cloud for its RunDeck features and automation capabilities for incident workflows, despite the required migration.
What other advice do I have?
Utilizing PagerDuty Operations Cloud allows me to save a significant amount of time, not only on routine incidents but also in focusing on onboarding additional services. This significantly aids me in spending less time on routine operational activities, quantified by the reduced personnel needed to manage routine tasks.
I highly recommend using PagerDuty Operations Cloud if you have numerous operational incidents to handle daily, especially if you prioritize reliability, particularly in critical projects such as IBM's core cloud services where outages must be avoided to ensure compliance and reliability.
I urge potential users to adopt PagerDuty Operations Cloud if reliability is a priority and they have a sufficient budget, as it is suited for larger infrastructures and effectively manages redundant incidents, standing out as the number one option in its market segment. I have rated PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten overall.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
PagerDuty: Powering Global Incident Response and Business Continuity at Scale
What do you like best about the product?
1.Our infrastructure foor print caters across AWS, Datadog, New Relic, and other tools. We used to have trouble monitoring all the application under different dashboards and with teams across th globe, this used to be very challenging.
2.PagerDuty has seamless integration with all the above services including Teams and Slack channels, enabled us a single point of source monitoring(dashboards) and response(its auomtaion capabilities) across 40+ accounts and 50+ microservices.
3.Its automated and priority-based notifications (emails, calls, messages) and dynamic on-call scheduling capabilities giving the option to notify the the right teams based on the service and ensure response instantly (Acknowledging via Phone call, message & email), reducing MTTR for critical services. All this can be done via Mobile App is an added advantage.
4.Its Built-in options for conference bridges for each service, configuring issue resolution guides, automation (Rundeck) to run primary health checks, service graphs enable global teams to troubleshoot together in real time, ensuring business continuity 24/7 which is priority for our business every single day.
5.Dashboards provide leadership with a clear view of service health, issue trends, and performance metrics, driving informed decisions and proactive improvements.
6. Learnign wise, Pagerduty university has lof of content to learn and certify. I have done Pagerduty Incident Responder course a7 certification for free.
What do you dislike about the product?
Automation tasks can be challenging sometimes, since we need to provide some manual input for certain services and thats how our design is.
While alerting is highly commendable, it often triggers too many notifications based on false alerts. We should have some solution in place to limit in certain amount of time. It all needs to be closed manually more often.
I really miss "Quick templates" feature where most of the toold provide. Since we need to configure everything from scratch, it does took us a lot of time (for new teams it will be challending). We should have something like starter kit to get going from Day-1.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
PagerDuty serves as a single platform that integrates seamlessly with our tech stack—including AWS, New Relic, and Datadog—and delivers alerts through multiple channels such as the PagerDuty app, email, phone calls, SMS, Slack, and Teams. With teams distributed across globally (24/7), PagerDuty takes on the heavy lifting of managing these services & infrastructure under one hood and ensures the right teams are notified in real time seamlessly which is very crucial for our business.
Escalation policies have been instrumental in ensuring accountability from the responsible teams, helping us maintain high SLAs and ultimately driving overall customer satisfaction over the years. Its realy easy to configure bridges per service and manage on call schedules enable us give information about who to enagage.
Rather than having data from different dashboards from each platform, PD made it easy for us to present a single dashboard that covers overall impact, system health and issu patterns to higher management.
Real-time monitoring has reduced downtime and ensures failed jobs are resolved quickly
What is our primary use case?
We receive a notification if there are any failed jobs or operations. We have some Bamboo agents working, so if one of the jobs fails on one of these servers, PagerDuty Operations Cloud creates an incident and notifies us. We use PagerDuty Operations Cloud for monitoring purposes, and it works great for our current needs.
What is most valuable?
The best features PagerDuty Operations Cloud offers include quick access to failed jobs and the ability to add descriptions about the failed job. The quick access allows us to rapidly identify which job or operation has failed because it sends the job name or the operation name that has failed.
I have heard that integration between our systems and PagerDuty Operations Cloud was easy to implement. For efficiency, we can monitor our deployment process in real time. For incident response, PagerDuty Operations Cloud creates alarms that make calls to the specific person who can handle these issues.
We have fewer missed incidents because it keeps calling regarding the incidents until they are resolved. We have also reduced downtime because we notice errors and failed jobs, and we work to fix them.
What needs improvement?
The system is very smooth right now.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using the solution for about one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have not experienced any stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have not experienced any scalability issues.
How are customer service and support?
We did not try to reach out to customer service because we did not face any issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I prefer not to use previous solutions.
How was the initial setup?
I joined the team after they had already purchased and configured PagerDuty Operations Cloud, so I did not have knowledge about the setup process.
What about the implementation team?
I do not have any experience with the implementation team.
What was our ROI?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There was no relationship between setup cost and other factors.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not consider alternate solutions.
What other advice do I have?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is a great tool that saves time and is worth starting to use. I would rate this product nine out of ten because nothing is fully perfect. My overall review rating for this product is nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?