PagerDuty S-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#31

Post by buryat » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

thanatos_dem wrote: post #28

I run a service that integrates with pager duty on behalf of our users, and man oh man did they make some poor design choices with their API. The most glaring one is their integration keys, which is how you trigger an alert. They’re just v4 uuids with the hyphens removed, or in other words, completely random. This is fine by itself, except they have two versions of their event API, and keys for the v1 API don’t work…

that's it, this comment is a nail in the coffin of their future IPO.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#32

Post by buryat » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

akavi wrote: post #10

nevir wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their seed round was in 2010—early investors are likely pretty interested in an exit

Not to mention early employees

employees have no say on this matter

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#33

Post by whalesalad » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #24

whalesalad wrote: post #12

PagerDuty feels like abandonware. It hasn't changed in the last 4-5 years.

What are they doing with all those R&D dollars?

Timbits and Crown Royal. It’s not going to the product that’s for sure.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#34

Post by grouseway » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

thanatos_dem wrote: post #28

I run a service that integrates with pager duty on behalf of our users, and man oh man did they make some poor design choices with their API. The most glaring one is their integration keys, which is how you trigger an alert. They’re just v4 uuids with the hyphens removed, or in other words, completely random. This is fine by itself, except they have two versions of their event API, and keys for the v1 API don’t work…

One of the nice little features that I appreciate about Twilio, and have adopted myself, is their API keys are always prefixed with a 2 character type.

e.g.

"account_sid": "ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", "phone_number_sid": "PNXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", "sid": "CAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#35

Post by buryat » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #12

PagerDuty feels like abandonware. It hasn't changed in the last 4-5 years.

For me it's mostly about changes to their phone/watch apps and schedules management

And check this https://www.pagerduty.com/whats-new/

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#36

Post by beberlei » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #17

whalesalad wrote: post #12

PagerDuty feels like abandonware. It hasn't changed in the last 4-5 years.

Agreed, too many good open source solutions now. No one thinks of alerting as paging anymore. You can use email to text now, chat solutions like Slack/Mattermost/etc. You no longer need an SMS gateway and if you do then Prometheus supports Twilio. All PagerDuty has going for it is a sales team trying to get managers to sign up for a service before exploring alternatives.

The value of Pagerduty is not in its notification, but the workflows around it. Alert in the middle of the night? Don't page unless its critical. Management of on-call schedules, escalate when on-call engineer doesn't answer. We use OpsGenie for this (in addition of sending messages to a chat, but off work that is usually muted or not installed on engineers phone), but PagerDuty has the same functionality.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#37

Post by 52-6F-62 » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #33

icedchai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they doing with all those R&D dollars?

Timbits and Crown Royal. It’s not going to the product that’s for sure.

Man, if I was them I'd be going for Bearface Whiskey and Pie Commission beef pies. But that's just this humble Torontonian's opinion.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#38

Post by throwawaykings » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

This makes them probably the second ever YC company to go public, the first being Dropbox. Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#39

Post by thanatos_dem » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #30

thanatos_dem wrote: post #28

I run a service that integrates with pager duty on behalf of our users, and man oh man did they make some poor design choices with their API. The most glaring one is their integration keys, which is how you trigger an alert. They’re just v4 uuids with the hyphens removed, or in other words, completely random. This is fine by itself, except they have two versions of their event API, and keys for the v1 API don’t work…

Do the same calls to the same APIs from the same customers ever change from v1 to v2 (or vice versa)? If not, can you record if it was v1/2 and then always make the same call after that? And then don't record errors for your initial probe request? Then your data will be clean and you'll make a lot less calls.

Yeah, we have some caching and retain metadata to avoid making more calls than we need to.

It’s just frustrating that we need to keep this information around on our side to mitigate issues with the API that is central to their entire business.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#40

Post by cm2012 » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

cm2012 wrote: post #4

Professional marketer perspective: Sales and Marketing is around 60% of revenue at 47 million a year. Advertising is around 5 million a year, so the rest of the spend looks like sales costs, content production, and maybe event marketing. The media spend seems to be mostly adwords: "The effectiveness of our online advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, chan…

Jesus, do people really like company FB pages (especially B2B companies) at all these days?

For every $ spent in fb newsfeed ad spend, you'll get some folks liking your page.