I agree with your assessment of zero innovation or development.
I help manage a fairly large on-call rotation and we've actively been finding gaps in their product where we think the product should be of assistance. Through support tickets or even hopping on a call with them they didn't seem all that interested in hearing about it or finding a solution for it. I mostly just got a sales pitch about upgrading our plan for new reporting features.
Some of the problem we've frequently encountered:
1. Anyone who is offboarded from the company will just get removed during the next LDAP sync. This just moves everyone up a day for their next shift, no notifications so the visibility is hard. If you try to remove someone manually there is a pre-requisite that they get removed from any schedules they belong to manually.
2. Overrides do not coincide with a specific shift, but a point in time. While I understand why overrides work the way they do, when combined with the problem outlined above, can be a real pain to fix the rotation if someone is taken out since there is no Audit Log.
Here is a scenario that happens:
- Person A is on-call on 9/29
- Person B is on-call on 9/30
- Person C is on-call on 10/1
- Person D has an override for Person B since they couldn't make their shift. Person B now does not have a shift until it goes through the rotation again.
- Person A is offboarded after the override was configured.
- Person B's next on-call shift was moved up one day to 9/29. Person B now is on-call again, with no notification.
- Person C's next is now on-call on 9/30, which has an override from Person D and now is not on-call.
As you can see, it would be beneficial if there was at minimum a notification of a gap in the rotation through automated means, or at least allowing some overrides be tied to a specific persons shift rather than point in time.
We built a tool internally that every few minutes keeps a copy of the rotation and the order of its participants and detects any changes. If it does, it will open a GitHub issue with the user that was removed and the position in the rotation they were at before being offboarded. I often put myself in that spot to preserve the rotation from any breaking changes until the rotation goes through at which time I remove myself.
3. Assistance to find someone to take your shift. Say you get scheduled for 9/30 but find out you can't make it, with one click of the button PagerDuty could email 4-5 people about your shift time and ask if they can take it. Someone can accept it and it'd notify the person their shift has been covered, and others that the request was sent to it has been taken care of. It could factor in any fatigue or length of time someone has been on-call before it includes them in the pool of engineers to cover the shift.
4. Per schedule notification policies. Anyone can change their notification settings or how they're notified. For one particular rotation, we'd like to enforce certain minimums to make sure the push notification is sent immediately, and the engineer is called if not acknowledged in 5 minutes. Currently we cannot enforce that.
5. Audit Log. Who added X to the rotation? Who removed X from the rotation? Who changed the length of shifts? I could add more. For Enterprise level software an Audit Log would be great. They mention they have one internally but don't have plans to expose it for customers.
While their API allows you to build all these tools, having it a first-class part of their product would be wonderful.