
Rate my startup: PagerDuty.com - alexsolo
If you've ever done pager/on-call duty, you're probably familiar with a tool like PagerDuty.  PagerDuty collects email alerts from your monitoring tools and sends out automated phone calls and SMS messages to the person currently on-call.  The app supports many of the usual amenities in an alerting system, such as retry of unanswered alerts, on-call rotations, and automatic escalation of unanswered alarms.<p>Many large tech companies like Google and Amazon have sophisticated in-house on-call management and alerting systems. We have tried to build something similar for small and medium-sized businesses running critical systems.<p>One of the big challenges in building PagerDuty was making it simple and intuitive to use. If you find the setup process (or any other part of the system) confusing please let us know.<p>http://www.pagerduty.com
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antonovka
Looks very nice -- as a feature suggestion, a floating number that
automatically routes to the currently on-call staff would be a great addition.

As an aside, I find the best way to avoid regular failures and decrease the
necessity for a large operations staff is to put the individuals responsible
for building the system on-call for when it fails. Your operations staff is
woken up when a server crashes or a hard drive fails, and your engineers get
woken up when their code crashes in the middle of the night.

If you don't do this, the costs of writing poor production code have to be
levied across departments by management, rather than avoiding externalities
entirely and letting engineers and operations deal with the direct impact of
their implementation choices.

Of course, this is ultimately a wash if you don't also institute development
methodologies to help reduce the number of production-impacting bugs, rather
than simply relying on engineer's reactive fixes to one-off issues.

~~~
alexsolo
Hmm... what do you mean by "floating number"? What we do right now is route
all alarms to the engineer currently on-call. Each person can set up their own
notification sequence so they get alerted using any combination of phone
calls, SMSes, and emails.

~~~
antonovka
A floating phone number that can be handed to, say, 24-hour support staff,
that will automatically direct incoming calls to the on-duty engineer.

The value is that when support staff has real phone numbers available to them,
they tend to dial historically responsive individuals directly in order to get
a problem resolved, thus creating a negative feedback loop -- if you ignore
notifications and phone calls, you get called less by support staff in the
future.

Having a floating number -- especially if we could get statistics on who
answers and who always ignores them, and if the number could "call up the
chain" automatically when nobody answers, would be a useful tool to solve this
issue.

Of course, the preference is that human staff doesn't need to call anyone, but
it still happens.

~~~
agmiklas
Hi, this is Andrew, one of the co-founders of PagerDuty.

That's an interesting idea. We've actually thought a bit about adding phone-
based triggering to PagerDuty (via a 1-800 number + access code). The idea was
to make PagerDuty useful to non-IT businesses like plumbers that also have the
concept of out-of-hours on-call duty. From your comment, though, it sounds
like this kind of feature would be pretty useful even in the IT world.

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arupchak
This is a great tool. I really like the idea of parsing the email address for
what type of alarm to use. That makes this straight-forward while at the same
time making it incredibly easy to integrate with any existing alarming system.

The reply via SMS feature is excellent and something that I always want in any
monitoring system.

I'm curious about the security around the email alerts, can anyone send to the
specific trigger-alarm@mysite.pagerduty.com or can you add at least a 'FROM:'
check?

You probably have this on your road-map, but if a ticketing/worklog system
could be integrated with this, you could add an incredible amount of value for
folks working on the problem in real time.

~~~
alexsolo
We don't have a FROM check at the moment. I'm not sure how helpful this would
be, since it can be arbitrarily spoofed by an attacker.

The email addresses for alarms are editable; if you get spam to one of these
addresses, you can change the address. We were also thinking of adding an
option to obscure the email address by adding a uid to the end. An example
would be trigger-my-alarm-5j3rt@acme.pagerduty.com.

We also offer regex-based filters on both the subject and the body, so you can
configure an alarm to only trigger if a certain keyword appears in the
message.

~~~
arupchak
I like the uid idea or even having a unique passphrase in the subject of the
email.

Granted, I'm thinking of monitoring systems on a much larger scale where even
a single instance of spamming can keep the entire dev team up at night. I do
not see this being a problem for the smaller targeted audience that you are
going after that will initially only set up a handful of alarms.

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scott_s
I think the idea is solid, but since I'm not in your target demographic, the
only useful criticism I can offer is:

Your front page is very busy. There's many different kinds of text and
pictures in so many places, I don't know where to look. Does the "feedback"
link need to be in such an unusual place? I understand that you want to
convince potential customers that your product is a good one, but if you throw
too much information at people, they'll ignore everything you have to say.

~~~
alexsolo
Thanks for the feedback scott_s. I thought the left middle side of the page
was a pretty standard position for the feedback link; I've seen a lot of other
sites that do this.

I do like the idea of making the design more minimal. I guess we are somewhat
worried about the possibility of not explaining well enough what our product
does.

~~~
scott_s
I don't like floating elements like that; it's distracting. When I first load
the page, it's _just_ lined up with the 'H', 'w' and the sign-up graphic. That
feels out of place. Personally, I don't like floating elements like that
because it violates what a website is, to me. I want to navigate through
information, and I bristle when information is forced on me like that.

Consider the amount of "special" things you have:

\- Floating feedback link on the left

\- "Sign Up" link/tab is highlighted red. (This also means I have to use some
small cognitive effort to realize "Home" is black because I'm there, "Sign Up"
is highlighted, and the rest are normal links.)

\- "call you" in the blue banner is both bold and italic

\- Lead-in text is bold

\- "calls you" in lead paragraph is bold, italic and green

\- green check marks for the features list

\- Play button on your UI graphic

There's nothing inherently wrong with any one of these things, but they're all
design elements that say "I'm important! Look at me!" But when I see seven
competing things evenly spread out over the page saying "Look at me!" my first
reaction is to give up and look at nothing.

I think it's possible to include the same amount of information, just
presented in a clearer way. Personally, I think the star of your show are your
UI pictures.

Of course, keep in mind I am, like you, a hacker, not a designer. But I'm
taking the time to explain what I see because I think you've come up with a
neat idea for what sounds like an untapped market, and I'd hate to see you run
into problems because of simple presentation issues.

~~~
apsurd
I agree with the positioning of the feedback tab. It's not so much that it is
"out of place" but rather its just in a bad place at the moment. It's right
between "stop sleeping through outages" and the big green sign up button. This
is your headliner content, there should not be some flat rogue turned-sideways
feedback tag conspicuously thrown over it.

As for the other points. Well this is clearly a 37 signals approach. If
nothing else, it is good for SEO. I think most users will click on the video
first anyway. So all the content acts to complement the video, which is a good
thing.

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stuff4ben
This is awesome! I wish I had something like this back in 2003-2005 when I was
one of four people on shared pager duty. Nowadays I just write perfect code ;)
(and we have a dedicated and awesome ops team).

A couple suggestions...looking at your prelim pricing page, the prices look
good, but I can foresee a problem with the notification system that
accidentally sends way too many alerts. How will you accommodate that? It
would be nice to have a grace period or some way of saying, ok we realize it
was a mistake, we'll let this one slide but the next time you will be bumped
up automagically to the appropriate pricing plan.

Also how easy is it to integrate with existing notification tools like Nagios
or Cacti? Or is it just tied to email notificatons from those systems? That
would be a downside if it's the latter. I've worked at orgs with truly crappy
email systems that are down more often than not. Sending an email blast for a
production system outage is likely to get it canned by the sysadmins.

Finally how does the phone call alerting work? Is it text-to-voice? Or pre-
recorded messages? Is it customizable?

~~~
alexsolo
We tried to design PagerDuty to minimize the possibility of message storms. We
did this by decoupling the sending of alerts from the reception of triggering
emails. Specifically, we don't generate new phone calls or SMSes if an already
triggered alarm receives a new triggering email.

As for the pricing plans, we don't plan to bump you to the next plan if you
exceed the limits. We have overage prices for each type of message
(phone/SMS). So, going slightly over your quota isn't going to cause a really
big bump in your fee.

Currently, PagerDuty only integrates with monitoring tools using email. We do
have several customers sending their Nagios alerts to us. We are also planning
to build a Nagios plugin to better integrate Nagios with our system.

We haven't actually found the email integration to be a big problem so far.
What some of our customers do is set up some external network monitoring tool
(i.e. Pingdom) to make sure their mail servers are up and running. Those
services are in turn hooked up to a PagerDuty alarm so that we can notify the
right person if a site's mail server or external connectivity fails.

Phone call alerting is text-to-voice. It tells you which alarm went off, and
also reads you the subject of the error. What kind of customization are you
thinking of?

~~~
sokoloff
I understand the desire to stop message storms, but in my 5 minute use case, I
hit that and perceived it as a limitation and it makes it probably not usable
for me, as I already have a good monitoring/notification/paging system that I
was trying yours out as an additional notification vector. (That might place
me squarely out of your target market, in which case you should ignore this
feedback. :) )

Let's say I already have an existing monitoring service that sends emails on
network events. I might decide to hook in your service and send my network
faults there.

I get "port XX on switch YY link state down" and that gets routed through the
system. One minute later I get "office of the CEO video conference network
down" but pagerduty never sends that to my mobile device because I'm busy
looking at the one port down alert.

Yes, I realize there's a technical solution to create multiple pagerduty
trigger email addresses, but at a minimum, I'd encourage you to be more clear
about that feature/limitation.

Overall comments: several UI elements were "not pretty" looking on IE7, and
some of the call to action graphics "Create your first alert now" were bright
yellow and rectangular yet not clickable. No deal-breakers, and I was
certainly able to quickly get setup and trial alerts coming.

~~~
alexsolo
Hi sokoloff, thanks for the feedback.

We actually support having the same email address for multiple alarms in the
system. We also have regex trigger rules for each alarm, which are based on
the subject and/or body of the trigger email. This means that you can set up a
single email address, and trigger one alarm if "port XX on switch YY" is down,
and trigger a different alarm if the "CEO video conference network" is down.

It might be easier to discuss your requirements over email. My address is
alex[at]pagerduty[dot]com.

------
ch0wda
I looked into this and really like the idea of the service, but found there
was one shortcoming that I couldn't get around. Perhaps I missed something,
but I needed a much shorter escalation window than 15 minutes. If my site is
down, I cannot wait for 15 minutes for the next person to be notified if the
original person doesn't respond. It needs to be within 3-5 minutes, maximum.
Perhaps this was configurable and I just missed it.

I really like this service and should the escalation change I would sign up in
a heartbeat, it's exactly what I was looking for.

We left a comment on UserVoice, but I thought it couldn't hurt discuss here.

~~~
alexsolo
Yes, we do support custom escalation times. You can set the amount of time
that the Primary on-call has to respond to an alert (after which it is
escalated to the secondary). Likewise, you can set the time that the Secondary
on-call has to respond to an alert, before it is escalated to the tertiary.

This is configurable under the Settings tab.

------
alexsolo
Clickable link: <http://www.pagerduty.com>

~~~
benhoyt
Meta HN discussion: this problem often crops up when people are doing "rate my
startup" type posts. They want to post an intro blurb for HN people, so they
can't link to the website. Does this smell of a feature waiting to be added to
HN, or is it people using it "wrong"?

~~~
simonista
I agree that this should be discussed. One problem though is that it's not a
problem in a normal web browser with a mouse, because it's really easy with a
script or just a couple mouse clicks. It's just a problem with mobile browsers
like the iPhone's.

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snitko
I especially liked the idea of taking action from the phone. And the site
looks nice and clean. Do you know of any competitors in that field?

~~~
snitko
But the logo sucks. Pretty much a lot. Spoils the impression.

~~~
jvdh
I second that, the logo looks like it's ancient. It looks completely out of
place in amidst the web 2.0 look and feel of the rest of the page.

~~~
mrtron
It looks a bit retro - but strikes me as being easily recognizable and suits
the topic quite well.

Perhaps they should A/B test the logo - try <http://www.markiter.com>
(shameless plug)

------
dynamite
This is a no-nonsense product that people actually need in the field. I think
small companies would find this indispensible, the preliminary pricing seems
really attractive compared to competitors. And once small companies become
big, I don't see any reason to switch to more expensive products either! This
one has enough features even for the most critical applications.

------
weaksauce
A couple of suggestions:

1\. Have the lightbox title text be more readable. Right now it is white on
whatever is on the page.

2\. Have the call to action at the bottom of the page favor the sign up
process. I would reuse the green button from the top of the page and leave the
"learn more" link as text.

3\. The email based integration feature is fairly meaningless on its own. It
is redundant if it is covered 3 items down with "Alerts via phone call, SMS,
and email" I would personally cull out the overlap and have just a few key
features on the right. Really only put the stellar features that you offer.

4\. To keep the logo more web 2.0 like the rest of your interface I would have
the text framed in what looks like a pager but make the pager look 2.0ish.

Overall it looks as if this might be successful. I am not really in the market
for it but I could see some smaller businesses jumping on board.

~~~
alexsolo
Great suggestions, thanks for the feedback.

------
stingraycharles
Your service looks awesome, especially the "we'll keep nagging you until you
f...ing respond" aspect. I've looked at a lot of similar services in the last
few months (you have no idea how relevant your startup is to me at this time),
and I definitely am interested.

One thing I'm wondering about is why you have no international calls. I would
love to pay (a lot) more money if you could support international calls.
Without that, the service is only half as useful, and I will sleep only half
as good during the night. :-)

~~~
alexsolo
Yep, thanks for the feedback. We will definitely add international calling
soon.

------
hbeaver
This looks very useful in keeping your monitored issues from getting
dropped/missed b/c someone forgot to change the oncall phone number for that
week,etc.

~~~
bmelton
I was thinking about this the other day -- something like a Google Voice would
work well for a support phone type of operation. I haven't done support in a
long while, but last time I did, we would physically hand off a phone, which
made for interesting times.

With either the newly oncall or the previously oncall being able to update the
number, that handoff now becomes virtual.

~~~
agmiklas
There are a few problems with the phone handoff idea, though. One of the
problems is there's no safety net: if the guy who has the phone doesn't pick
up for some reason, the alert can't auto-escalate. That might be fixable with
something like Google Voice, but I don't think they give you a way to manually
escalate an alert if you know you can't handle it in time. In both cases, you
probably have to manually roll over the number when someone new comes on-call,
instead of having the system do that automatically from an on-call schedule.

We've actually been anxiously waiting to try out Google Voice up here.
Unfortunately, they haven't yet extended their coverage to include Canada.

~~~
bmelton
Sorry -- I didn't mean to imply that Google Voice was a competitor, rather to
say that a Google Voice-like service (with many tweaks) would work perfectly
for this goal.

------
mgcreed
Design is way too similar to the 37signals homepage...that was my initial
impression. Will dig deeper into the site now.

~~~
mgcreed
actually, i take that back - it did immediately remind me of a previous
homepage design of theirs...not the current one though

~~~
tortilla
It looks like peashootapp.com which looked like basecamphq.com...

<http://peashootapp.com/>

~~~
apsurd
wow, it does not _look like_ peashoot. It is a near-exact clone of the site!
I'll leave my personal opinion of the matter at the door..just saying!

------
ook
This looks really neat but it's not a runner for us as it's a 3rd party hosted
solution.

Do you have any plans for a packaged version which companies can host
themselves?

~~~
alexsolo
Hello ook. Just shoot me an email at alex [at] pagerduty.com, and we can work
something out.

------
pradeepgatram
Good idea, great start. I needed something like this in my own app and was
considering building it myself. I'd prefer to use some other app to deliver
these features tho. You should seriously look at a few of these points. I am
breaking my comment into 2 logically separate comments (separation of
concerns, too much of a coder :D)

~~~
pradeepgatram
Service features

\- You are assuming direct consumers of your service. Think of indirect
consumers too. Other startups who can piggyback on your offering to add value
to their own product.

\- Give an api where I can tell you the email message, sms message, various
escalation options, option to repeat email/sms/phone after some delay if
nobody responded. Also consider an SMTP api interface too. Not much of an
effort for you if you already have the http api present.

\- The api should also accept email addresses, mobile numbers and phone
numbers. I might be signing up paying customers and using your app to send
them alerts. I should be able to do this without having to register each of
these email/phone numbers to you. Think of your pricing in this scenario.

\- People mentioned ticketing system integration. Great idea. Extend it
further. Also have an option where u will send the response back to the
originating application.

~~~
alexsolo
Thanks for the feedback pradeepgatram. We are planning to add the ability to
integrate PagerDuty with external products (most likely products in the
monitoring space). Please send me an email to alex[at]pagerduty[dot]com if
you'd like to know more.

------
latortuga
Just signed up our small startup for this. We had a server on Amazon go down
last week really hard - so hard that monit never said anything and we only
knew because an external server does pinging on it every half hour or so. Will
give this a try for more prompt phone calls!

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blasdel
Don't show incremental user numbers in URLs for commercial services. It's nice
to know you were one of the first to sign up for a community thing, but it's
offputting when you're paying :/

The yellow boxes under "Follow these steps to get started..." look a little
godaddy-ish

~~~
alexsolo
Makes sense, we will fix the user number thing.

As for the getting started steps looking godaddy-ish, is that a compliment? :P

------
latortuga
Set this up with some guys in my company and we're giving it a try today. So
far, after going through the interface quite a bit, I decided that it's kind
of confusion to reason about who is going to be called when. For example, you
have timeouts for escalation and timeouts for consecutive notifications - at
what point in your notification chain for a specific user does the escalation
happen? Is it only after all types of contact have been exhausted? Or will
secondary on-call be notified after the admin-settable X minutes (default 30)
no matter what primary does?

------
dynamite
Your "feedback" button on the left of the main page overlaps the "Stop
sleeping through outages" text when my browser window is not full-screen, this
could be moved a little to look more professional.

------
crocowhile
Have you considered having a plan where you actually pay "per alarm"? It would
be appealing and you can still make easy money. I have in mind $10 per alarm
or so.

~~~
blasdel
A thousand times yes! Allow free signup, and send me a $3 SMS when an alarm
goes off, avoiding any need for credit card billing.

Another option would be to have a purely prepaid plan, where your account gets
debited based on alarms/users per-period, and per-incident. I'm definitely
going to use this service while it's free, but I don't think I'd pay $120/year
for it unless I had a web startup.

------
rufugee
Awesome...I was just wishing for something like this yesterday...will
definitely be giving it a shot.

------
ssanders82
Looks like you're getting great feedback here, congrats. Without giving away
proprietary info, is it possible to give some technical details such as what
backend technologies you use, and who you're using to send SMS & phone calls?

------
rupello
It seems easy to use but also flexible enough. What are your plans for
pricing?

~~~
alexsolo
The pricing page is here: <http://www.pagerduty.com/plans>

It is linked off of the FAQ, from the question "How much are you planning to
charge for PagerDuty?". We didn't make any links to the pricing page off the
main page because we want as many people to try the product out while we are
in beta.

------
mishmax
So what software manages the pagerduty for pagerduty? :-)

~~~
alexsolo
I've been thinking of writing a blog post about this for a while... probably
with the title "Who Watches the Watchers" :).

We use Wormly to monitor our site, email and DNS. We also have an exception
reporting system which alerts us about any 500 errors in the site. We also
alert if phone call or SMS messages sit in our event queues for more than 3
minutes after the scheduled delivery time.

We also have redundant data centers and rapid rollover to the backup systems
in the event of a data center outage.

We don't use PagerDuty to do the alerting and schedule the on-call though. We
alert everybody in our team via SMS and phone if any of the aforementioned
alerts go off.

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rlm
Do your phonecalls and SMS'es work outside the US?

~~~
agmiklas
We support two-way (i.e. we send you a message on an alarm, and you send back
a message telling us to suppress, resolve, or escalate the incident) SMSing to
most of the world. Unfortunately, we can only do phone calls to the US and
Canada right now. We're looking at adding international phone calls in the
near future, though.

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aw3c2
Nice idea! Good luck.

I would make "phone calls, SMSes, and emails" much more prominent though. It
took me too long to find how I would actually be alerted. There is a lot of
fuzzy text on the site that makes it hard to scan.

------
dzlobin
love the idea, great work.

