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

PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#41

Post by rosser »

whalesalad wrote: post #30
foodstances wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you find it lacking?

Aside from the lack of innovation, it's got lots of bugs. Sometimes it will continue to call you over and over when things have been acknowledged, or it wont acknowledge things, or you will try to acknowledge something that has already been acknowledged and it will error out.

So much this.

Because the things we monitor are heavily interrelated, and an outage or degradation in one service will often affect others, it's not uncommon for us to see multiple alerts at once.

The typical scenario goes like this:

1. Pile of alerts goes out.

2. I acknowledge all of them in the course of acknowledging the first.

3. Some of the alerts will decide, despite having state-changed to yellow in the app, that they somehow haven't been acknowledged, so the app will issue the notification tone — for, again, previously acknowledged alerts.

4. Some more alerts will decide they still haven't been acknowledged, and will play the notification tone again, to remind me that I have outstanding, "unacknowledged" alerts.

All of this while I'm trying to fix the broken thing and am being interrupted to attend to the feels my alerting tool has about having alerts.

That is to say: PagerDuty is getting in the way of my fixing the outage. No, I can't just ignore them. We have a global team, and whoever's secondary is probably asleep, because we've taken care in crafting our on-call rotations such that people shouldn't get alerted at 3am. If they sleep through the alerts, they will escalate up my management chain. Then I'm having to explain to my director or VP why there are "unacknowledged" alerts — while I should be fixing the fucking fire.

It's an abhorrently crap user-experience, in a way that is antithetical to the tool's very purpose, and I'm not the only person on my team who has either wanted to throw, or actually has thrown, their phone through the nearest wall because of it.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#42

Post by askafriend »

cphoover wrote: post #5
holstvoogd wrote: post #3

plz stop.. PD should be a cash cow, stop 'innovating' and 'growing', just deliver what it says on the tin. Over the past few years I've been using PD it is becoming worse and worse, it seems to me because they have to keep their developers busy. They could of course just make the core product better, but thats not cool enough i guess.

This is the main problem with the SAAS model. Trying to increase value is antithetical to the Unix Philosophy.

Frankly, I don't care about what the Unix philosophy has to say and I don't see why it's relevant here.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#43

Post by moritzplassnig »

brightball wrote: post #22
benjaminwootton wrote: post #4

Amazing how a relatively niche product like this can have such a huge valuation. Shows how big the market is.

Don’t take for granted that their biggest competitor was just purchased by Atlassian as well.

And Splunk bought VictorOps, the third company in that market

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#44

Post by armiiller »

whalesalad wrote: post #15

I was a PD customer for 3 years at FarmLogs. There was literally zero innovation or development on that product during the entire time there. It was abandonware. I am shocked that they're dominating this space with such lackluster enthusiasm about their own product. I'm not just referring to a lack of new features... it’s a lack of improving their core product. It's buggy and painful to use. I can’t tell you how many…

For those of you fed up with PD, you should check out https://pagertree.com

Fraction of the price, reliable, and not packaged with monitoring.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#45

Post by askafriend »

justboxing wrote: post #26
benjaminwootton wrote: post #4

Amazing how a relatively niche product like this can have such a huge valuation. Shows how big the market is.

> Shows how big the market is... I think the huge valuation has more to do with how absurd startup valuations really are[1], and less to do with showing how big the market for a niche product is. [1] Behind the gloss of absurdly high startup valuations https://42floors.com/blog/startups/absurdly-high-valuations Discussed here => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6874838

Investors paid to be a part of what Pagerduty can eventually become. Not to have a piece of what Pagerduty is today.

What Pagerduty can become, is much more than just alerting for IT. That's what the $90mm is for.

They hint a little in the article at what some of that future can include: "PagerDuty has shifted some of its focus to doing more with the data it tracks for customers in the future, an area in which it plans to invest."

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#46

Post by donavanm »

perlgeek wrote: post #39
donavanm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youre looking at the wrong market. Pagerduty is working “bottom up” in to the IT support game. The trending and business reporting tools are leading indicators of this. Im genuinely curious how long until they have pro services & billable hours. See ServiceNow as an example, $1.9B revenue & $30B market cap.

Uhm, ServiceNow seems to be in a nearly entirely different game than PagerDuty. ServiceNow is a pretty generic business process and service management solution, with modules for ERP, software development, HR planning etc. And maybe also a module for alerting and incident management. I haven't used PagerDuty, but it seems it's a pretty focused and specialized application. Is there any indication that PagerDuty is tryi…

Agree servicenow is bigger than just incident & problem management. But they are very big in that area, as a subset of ITSM. As mentioned upthread I definitely see Pager Dutys move away from alerts & messaging as preliminary steps. A lot of their investments in the last few years are around business metrics, process, and visibility. Theyre explicitely talking about problem management, outside the traditional event engagemnt actions folks in here are focusing on. And if youre doing both problem & event management how long until billable hours come in to “reach the enterprise.” And then its a (shorter) jump to generalized ITSM.

So no, I dont think pager duty is going after hr & payroll functions. But the value/market theyre after is much more than just event engagement.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#48

Post by chx »

draw_down wrote: post #7
cphoover wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main problem with the SAAS model. Trying to increase value is antithetical to the Unix Philosophy.

Who said anything about Unix? Or capital-P Philosophy?

I believe GP meant PagerDuty does one thing and it does extremely well which is similar of how Unix is (or was or perhaps should be but I digress).

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#49

Post by IronWolve »

We just consolidated all our remote offices into a global corporate account, we all had pagerduty setups for our alarming systems, solarwinds, nagios, email, etc.

I've been using pagerduty for years, and I've been getting other admins to switch from private emails to it, so no more single point of failures. They just had to be shown how simple it was to configure and use.

I won't wake up in the middle of the night to a text, but a phone call, wakes me up. I don't even answer, I refuse the call then open the pagerduty app. Love it.

Post reply on HN