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PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

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Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#21

Post by dotBen »

arnorhs wrote: post #3

Nice. Good job guys. Interesting. They don't include a free/freemium account, only paid ones with a free trial. I have been wondering about this. I've always assumed the best business model is to offer a free plan for everyone that is not limited to time but with fewer features or some other limit/constraint like number of users, amount of storage etc. I wonder how the two models compare. Because I know a lot of peop…

I think it's a no-brainer for b2b SaaS.

PagerDuty starts at $12/month. For a personal account that's a huge chasm for me to cross, but for business it feels like nothing. It's probably not even my money.

In business you're just not use to getting much for free, especially service - my bank charges me to write a check, my ISP charges me more to get business DSL to the office than home DSL, etc.

Maybe we're just resigned to that, but having a no free account policy just rides that waves and presumably increases profits (forces conversions to paid, ensures no loss-making free accounts)

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#22

Post by bpuvanathasan »

dmor wrote: post #17
agmiklas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Danielle! Twilio plays a big role here at PagerDuty. You guys have been great. More importantly, on the few occasions where's there's been service hiccups, we've never had problems getting hold of someone at Twilio. Can't say the same about other providers we've tried.

You're welcome, and I'm happy to hear you've been satisfied with Twilio's service - we're really passionate about doing it right and we'll always be here to help Btw, I've left you a "gift" in your Twilio account... whenever you happen to check your account balance :)

Thanks Danielle!

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#23

Post by jayair »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #15

Congrats Alex and Andrew!! That makes two UW SE2006 startups covered on TC :) Though I think you may already have us beat by being YC funded, the jury is still out on that! And I agree with the free trial model over freemium. Your service is worth paying for. Period. The trial is used for determining if your service actually works as expected. And you don't get network effects the more people that use your system. So…

Yay for UW!

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#25

Post by mahmud »

alexsolo wrote: post #20
alexsolo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've taken steps to minimize outages as much as possible. The system is distributed across 3 data centers, with fast automatic rollover in case of a data center outage. We've architected the system to ensure we never drop alerts. PagerDuty integrates with monitoring via email or API; if we receive the message on our end, we guarantee you will be alerted. We've had a few incidents where we have delayed sending out th…

I'd love to hear what some of you think about SLAs. Is it worth implementing one?

At a former employer, it took weeks to negotiate the terms of an SLA with a solution provider and it ultimately fell through. We glossed over several vendors because of the lack of one (it's usually negotiated, not pre-written like a privacy policy or T&Cs.)

However, what ultimately made the deal was not an SLA, but a new vendor that showed substantially deeper pockets than we expected. A meeting was organized with their sales guy and FOUR suits showed up in a black sedan. Most gangsta display of power, and our glass cubicles were gassed down with the musk of cigar, Brut and Drakkar Noirs.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#26

Post by agmiklas »

epall wrote: post #24

We just picked up a couple of real, physical pagers because we're unwilling to trust SMS delivery.

This is actually one of the big reasons we built PagerDuty. SMS is not as reliable as people think -- messages get dropped or delayed by hours all the time.

We've found the automated phone calls to be a much more reliable way of getting the alert out. We can tell right away that the message has been received by asking the listener to press a button on their phone, and repeat or escalate as needed if we don't hear the tone.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#28

Post by andrewljohnson »

I'm usually pretty optimistic on new YC start-ups, but I'm not sure the world needs another uptime monitor.

There are so many free, cheap, and other services like this that it's hard to imagine what a company might differentiate on to become the "next big thing."

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#29

Post by johns »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #28

I'm usually pretty optimistic on new YC start-ups, but I'm not sure the world needs another uptime monitor. There are so many free, cheap, and other services like this that it's hard to imagine what a company might differentiate on to become the "next big thing."

It's all about execution. Did we need another file storage service? Did we need another web site builder? There is a lot of room for companies to do existing things better.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

#30

Post by alexsolo »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #28

I'm usually pretty optimistic on new YC start-ups, but I'm not sure the world needs another uptime monitor. There are so many free, cheap, and other services like this that it's hard to imagine what a company might differentiate on to become the "next big thing."

I agree. That's why we don't do uptime monitoring, or any kind of monitoring really.

PagerDuty is an alerting system which plugs into any monitoring system (Pingdom, Nagios, Cloudkick, etc) and alerts your team via phone, SMS and email when problems are detected. We add advanced alerting features, like 2-way voice and SMS alerts, automatic alert escalation, and on-call duty scheduling to these existing tools.

You're right though, in that many people, on first glance, confuse us with a server monitoring or website pinging system. The "pitch" has gotten better over time, but it's still something we have to work on to improve.

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