

Show HN: Pagerbot, a chat bot for managing PagerDuty on-call schedules - macobo
https://stripe.com/blog/pagerbot

======
gregone
That's funny, our internal hubot implementation at PagerDuty is called
Pagerbot.

------
nelsonenzo
Why didn't they just use hubot with the pagerduty script? hubot integrates
into hipchat, pretty sure irc too, but maybe not. I would think writing that
connector would have been easier than creating a whole new "bot" though.

~~~
gdb
We don't currently use Hubot internally. We've certainly thought about it, but
we've also had chat bots at Stripe for a number of years (and writing a chat
bot isn't actually that difficult), and consequently it's never been a clear
enough win to port our existing stuff.

We would be more than happy to see someone port Pagerbot to use Hubot instead,
though.

~~~
nelsonenzo
Hubot has pagerduty integration already: [https://github.com/github/hubot-
scripts/blob/master/src/scri...](https://github.com/github/hubot-
scripts/blob/master/src/scripts/pagerduty.coffee)

~~~
gdb
Cool. Looks like it has some similar features/workflows to Pagerbot, and some
different.

------
rip747
just checked out pageduty and they seems kind of expensive. $40 per month, per
user. How many users are you currently in your account?

~~~
yebyen
We have a small team, and the cost can balloon depending on the number of
pages you send, but overall it's worth it. One thing that makes it cheaper is
having a phone that will repeatedly ping you with noise if you don't answer an
SMS (you can send fewer pages for unanswered incidents if you have this.)

I had PD set up to attempt contacting me four or five times in a half hour by
SMS and phone until I learned the service better. It also supports Android
Push which seems to get delivered faster and also I believe has no incremental
cost at PagerDuty. Now I also have a tablet that's usually in WiFi, so I get
android push before the SMS goes out, and only need to get SMS when my tablet
is out of WiFi range.

You're paying for the reliability, the integrations, and the excellent support
staff. Just read the PD blog. They are obviously "top men" working at PD. We
pay other services a good bit more per-annum and we usually see them going
down all the time. PagerDuty pretty much stays up, and it works with
everything.

~~~
ultrasaurus
That's great advice. Email & push are cheap for us, so they're free for you.
SMS and phone are slightly more reliable but orders of magnitude more
expensive, so 1 SMS and many push notifications can be the best of both
worlds.

We do in fact have top men and women on our eng team if anyone is looking to
join [http://pduty.me/1DEFTuV](http://pduty.me/1DEFTuV)

~~~
yebyen
Wow. I wasn't even going to click the link, but that is actually a great
landing page for job applicants.

------
SEJeff
Man, I wish this was written as a hubot plugin :(

~~~
jorts
As nelsonenzo referenced, there is a Hubot plugin that's very similar:
[https://github.com/github/hubot-
scripts/blob/master/src/scri...](https://github.com/github/hubot-
scripts/blob/master/src/scripts/pagerduty.coffee)

