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Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

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Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#71

Post by throwmeaway1212 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of…

'Taking a holiday became like a 12 step program - email boss in advance, put in HR system request, cross check your PagerDuty schedule, negotiate a trade with another teammate for PagerDuty rotation, decline meetings, update your outlook calendar out-of-office, set your slack status & notifications, and re-remind everyone the week before you go. It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off?'

Most of this has nothing to do with pager duty, but instead is around the companies process.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#72

Post by steveBK123 »

throwmeaway1212 wrote: post #71
steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of…

'Taking a holiday became like a 12 step program - email boss in advance, put in HR system request, cross check your PagerDuty schedule, negotiate a trade with another teammate for PagerDuty rotation, decline meetings, update your outlook calendar out-of-office, set your slack status & notifications, and re-remind everyone the week before you go. It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off?'…

The problem is top-down CTO purchasing of these magic bullet tools w/o budgeting/planning integration.

Instead becoming "the place to look" it becomes "the Nth place to look" for alerts. Without thoughtful planning, its entirely possible to be in worse shape for having purchased it.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#73

Post by siliconc0w »

At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there. Ideally you to optimize around a number of factors - vacations (which can be auto populated) for one but also fairness, shift closeness (some labor laws here), holidays, or individual preferences (e.g I like to hike on the weekends). You then also need a tool for short-term trades/overrides to basically poll the team to see who can take/trade the shift to avoid the diffusion of responsibility of yelling into a slack chennel and complexity of negotiating trades. What is nice about this is that we can setup a daily oncall so if you have a re-occuring weekly obligation that is incompatible with being oncall we can set it up so you never get scheduled for that day (provided there is enough slack for vacations and so on).

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#74

Post by OJFord »

siliconc0w wrote: post #73

At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there. Ideally you to optimize around a number of factors - vacations (which can be auto populated) for one but also fairness, shift closeness (some labor laws here), holidays, or individual preferences (e.g I like to hike on the weekends). You then also need a too…

When I used one of these (we used VictorOps^) what it was really missing was 'fairness' as you say in the 'takes/trades'. We were rarely called and paid handsomely for it, so although nobody vocalised it, there was definitely a rush to grab it (because that was the 'system') if someone announced they had to put one up for grabs (due to holiday clash or whatever).

Really I think that should have automatically de-allocated some future rotation of the taker's, and definitely would've helped if it hooked into the holiday calendaring system, so anything booked far enough in advance was already avoided.

(^Not to slam VictorOps specifically, for all I know we just didn't have it configured well and it is capable of all that.)

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#76

Post by perlgeek »

mads_quist wrote: post #62
ChrisInEdmonton wrote: post #52

I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used. I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want…

That's a very helpful comment. Thanks. I might consider adding SMS / Calls to the notification channels. I didn't look from the perspective that Folks described here. Regarding Uptime 99.99%. That's very true and also a good hint. My current stack is very robust - tried and tested in many other products that I worked in. Some other HN user also suggested to include an uptime status page to create this kind of confide…

> My current stack is very robust - tried and tested in many other products that I worked in.

For uptime you also need to consider the availability of your hosting provider, you might even have to have a fallback installation at a different provider, something along these lines.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#77

Post by dmlittle »

amluto wrote: post #61

Can it have a calmer way to deliver notifications? The PagerDuty app goes directly from zero to klaxon, and the klaxons are horrible sounds from a bizarrely limited menu. Ideally there would be a configurable escalation-to-the-same-user policy. I might want: vibrate-only notification, then normal notification, then critical notification, then phone call, in that order, with configurable delays. Ideally this would int…

It might be plan dependent(?) but everything you’re describing is configurable on your PagerDuty profile. I have it configured to send me a notification immediately followed by a call if I don’t acknowledge it within a minute (yes, this is aggressive but I’m in a high urgency, quick response time SLA rotation)

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#78

Post by snird »

Seeing this post, I went over to check how much I pay PagerDuty.

49$ per user per month!!! And I don't need the features! I wanted to downgrade to the 29$ immediately, at least. And then I saw this: https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments

I have to contact their sales to downgrade.

I'm furious. I won't downgrade. I'll cancel completely and move to your app.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#79

Post by jedberg »

mLuby wrote: post #67
SanderNL wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You base your salary solely on living expenses?

My employer sure does. Unless you're telling me that devs in major US cities are actually 2x better than rural US coders, who in turn are multiple times better than devs in poorer countries.

You've reversed the relationship. As the employee, you're the seller. You're selling your time. It seems that you've priced yourself based on cost of living, because that is what the market will bear.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#80

Post by aserafini »

For the OP, you've got a typo in your docs. https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet

> by explicit excalation

should be 'escalation'.

Ps. I'm also in Berlin, and would be interested to have a chat: this product looks interesting. Email in my profile!

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