Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 54 posts

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

#41

Post by agmiklas »

axod wrote: post #39
alexsolo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> "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." Pingdom already does that. I'm not clear what you're offering here...

Pingdom doesn't provide our full range of alerting features, such as phone alerts, on-call scheduling, and two-way SMS (so you can hand off problems to other engineers straight from your phone).

Actually, Pingdom is one of the most common services used in conjunction with PagerDuty.

At a higher level, what we're trying to provide is an on-call management and alert dispatching tool. What PagerDuty does is let you control who, how, and when people are notified when problems occur. In contrast, monitoring tools like Pingdom and Nagios focus more on detecting problems. While they have some native alerting functionality, we think with PagerDuty's advanced alerting, they can function all the better.

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

#42

Post by mseebach »

lsc wrote: post #33
btilly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lies, damned lies, and SLAs. Personally I only find an SLA useful if it is worthwhile. Most of the SLAs out there aren't. And for good reason. You should probably offer one, but like a smart company shouldn't make the burden too bad. Suppose someone doesn't respond to a page. Is it because they were too far asleep to hear the paging device? Because the paging device didn't work? Because some other problem k…

SLAs with exceptions based on "fault" are meaningless. Either you guarantee you will keep your shit working, or you don't. (Either way is fine, really... but arguing over "fault" is not a productive activity.)

It's not meaningless? If "working" is dependent on several pieces working, and only some of them is under your control, you can be in a state of "not working" without being at fault.

I've had a server go down for a large group of users because of a malconfigured routing table between them and the server. If we'd had an expensive SLA, there would have been significant "what the heck is it we're paying for, then?" discontent.

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

#43

Post by alexdong »

agmiklas wrote: post #41
axod wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "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." Pingdom already does that. I'm not clear what you're offering here...

Pingdom doesn't provide our full range of alerting features, such as phone alerts, on-call scheduling, and two-way SMS (so you can hand off problems to other engineers straight from your phone). Actually, Pingdom is one of the most common services used in conjunction with PagerDuty. At a higher level, what we're trying to provide is an on-call management and alert dispatching tool. What PagerDuty does is let you cont…

ok, so PagerDuty's main focus/differentiation is duty and scheduling management? I do see the value of such system, you want to wake only Joe instead the whole team up if he is on duty that night.

Maybe you should highlight that? My first impression was "what, yet another pingdom"? Definitely need a bit fine tuning there.

Wondering who will be your main target customer? Any website that has more than one sysadmin?

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

#44

Post by epochwolf »

lsc wrote: post #34
btilly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't done it then I'm going to suggest that you also work on mobile apps to make phones be as loud and annoying as possible. Yeah, it sounds stupid. But a random Blackberry can be as loud as a Skytel pager, even if it isn't by default. And it is worthwhile for someone on duty to make it so.

you know what I want? I want some sort of arm band to put my cellphone (or, better, a giant bluetooth vibrator) so that when I sleep, I can be woken by my pager without waking other people who may also be in the bed.

Here you go: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/9e31/

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

#46

Post by agmiklas »

alexdong wrote: post #43
agmiklas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pingdom doesn't provide our full range of alerting features, such as phone alerts, on-call scheduling, and two-way SMS (so you can hand off problems to other engineers straight from your phone). Actually, Pingdom is one of the most common services used in conjunction with PagerDuty. At a higher level, what we're trying to provide is an on-call management and alert dispatching tool. What PagerDuty does is let you cont…

ok, so PagerDuty's main focus/differentiation is duty and scheduling management? I do see the value of such system, you want to wake only Joe instead the whole team up if he is on duty that night. Maybe you should highlight that? My first impression was "what, yet another pingdom"? Definitely need a bit fine tuning there. Wondering who will be your main target customer? Any website that has more than one sysadmin?

Yeah, we're going after companies with big uptime requirements that have already grown to the point that they have an operations team of more than one person.

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

#47

Post by justin_credible »

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…

Congrats on the coverage you guys. Looking forward to seeing what else is up your sleeves.

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

#48

Post by koenigdavidmj »

alexdong wrote: post #43
agmiklas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pingdom doesn't provide our full range of alerting features, such as phone alerts, on-call scheduling, and two-way SMS (so you can hand off problems to other engineers straight from your phone). Actually, Pingdom is one of the most common services used in conjunction with PagerDuty. At a higher level, what we're trying to provide is an on-call management and alert dispatching tool. What PagerDuty does is let you cont…

ok, so PagerDuty's main focus/differentiation is duty and scheduling management? I do see the value of such system, you want to wake only Joe instead the whole team up if he is on duty that night. Maybe you should highlight that? My first impression was "what, yet another pingdom"? Definitely need a bit fine tuning there. Wondering who will be your main target customer? Any website that has more than one sysadmin?

Nagios does that too. You can define schedules to your heart's content, and it will send email anywhere. Given that basically all pagers/mobiles have email addresses, you're set.

The only thing that this does that is really new is two-way SMS.

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

#49

Post by koenigdavidmj »

btilly wrote: post #38
lsc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might I suggest a free account that is limited to email alerts? It probably wouldn't cost you much, and it wouldn't cut into your 'business class' business... but it'd be a nice way for small timers to get a taste of your service monitoring their personal stuff (and then maybe recommend it to the boss)

I'd guess that anyone who needs to receive text messages already knows about the email to sms gateways that their phone carriers provide.

But you don't really need this service for that. Nagios sends directly to those (just like any other email address).

Of course, the two-way SMS that lets you wake up the other guys if needed would break under this.

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

#50

Post by agmiklas »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #48
alexdong wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, so PagerDuty's main focus/differentiation is duty and scheduling management? I do see the value of such system, you want to wake only Joe instead the whole team up if he is on duty that night. Maybe you should highlight that? My first impression was "what, yet another pingdom"? Definitely need a bit fine tuning there. Wondering who will be your main target customer? Any website that has more than one sysadmin?

Nagios does that too. You can define schedules to your heart's content, and it will send email anywhere. Given that basically all pagers/mobiles have email addresses, you're set. The only thing that this does that is really new is two-way SMS.

PagerDuty also includes voice calls, which we've seen through experience are more reliably delivered than SMS messages (esp. SMSes through email-to-SMS gateways). As with the SMS messages, you can immediately acknowledge or escalate during the phone call using touch-tone.

I also think PagerDuty's ability to graphically define the on-call schedule and escalation rules is much nicer than mucking around with Nagios's configuration files, but I'm a bit biased :)

Post reply on HN