Grafana OnCall is an OSS alternative (with a cloud offering) that works great out of the box if you are using Grafana/Grafana Alerting for monitoring your systems and want to have a pager-like system with phone/SMS/telegram integrations + it's own app. Best of all, it's self-hostable as well, which keeps me completely in control of my infra.
Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
81–90 of 135 posts
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#82I 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…
> 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. Ah, but as always, the million dollar question is ..... What does the PagerDuty small print say ? My guess is the small print is not "bulletproof reliability" or five-nines. I betcha their contract is full of exclusions and ge…
Sure, but contracts just establish the formal baselines for "when we have to talk".
You still want reliability that's far higher than your contract baselines.
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#83You mention price as a motivation to build allquiet. I have been happy the last couple of years with https://simplepush.io/ which is 12.49$ per year (and similarly app only).
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#84I 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…
We use PagerDuty, but we also have an internal email/SMS based "paging backup" service and I have seen it in action 4 or 5 times in 7 years. PagerDuty isn't bulletproof.
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#85Seeing 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.
They’ve adopted terrible dark patterns with account management and even their service tiers. Prices keep going up; this is an excellent time for competition.
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#86Will you be using PagerDuty or another competitor to monitor your own service? I always wonder what these companies use... or if they rely on their own service. And if so, then if their service breaks how would they know?
Who do PagerDuty or OpsGenie use to monitor their services?
In the "old days" (2015 and before), PD used Wormly to mass-blast all engineers.
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#87I worked for a company that used PagerDuty, but eventually moved to a service that provided actual physical pagers. Well, they looked like 1990s pagers, but connected to Wifi. Really cool. Not sure why more don't do this.
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#88Frustrated by expensive per-seat pricing and unfriendly contract terms, we looked for PagerDuty alternatives and found a fantastic open-source project called Uptime Kuma: https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
Uptime Kuma is one of the few open-source projects that feels like a commercial product: polished user experience, frequent release cadence, and a rich set of features including monitoring PostgreSQL servers, Docker containers, and so much more. Its list of supported notification services is so long that I don't even recognize half of the options available. Truly impressive.
Side note and shameless plug… We love Uptime Kuma so much that we made it one of the cornerstone applications provided by Fortressa, which we think of as the “App Store for Open Source”: https://fortressa.com/
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#89The main problem that Pagerduty solved at the time was deliverability of alerts. It was hard, and still is, to solve the problem of making sure the right people actually get the alerts. It was so expensive because they have redundant hardware all over the place with different providers, and they ran it all themselves, including SMS and phone gateways. One of their key differentiators was that they were not built on A…
FYI, PagerDuty is built on top of AWS. They used to do some multi-cloud stuff, but no longer the case (too expensive, too complex, causing more issues than it solved). Source: worked there for 2 years.
Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
#90> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. This is prone to loss. I've struggled with notification delivery reliability on Android for years . If I don't touch my phone for a few hours and then wake the screen, I get a flurry of notifications all at once from the last few hours. But I need to be aware of pages in real-time. There should really be a call and text notification channel else I don't see this gett…
I did not yet had a problem with notifications in Android but I also see app-only as a disadvantage. What if I have no internet but could be reachable via SMS/phone? (still not that rare in Germany ;))
btw: there is an helpful Android app "missed notifications reminder" in fdroid store that re-triggers app-specific notifications if you do not view them within a minute.