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

allquiet.app

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

#91

Post by jq-r »

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…

I have absolutely no idea why PD doesn't have a big button which stops all PD notifications the moment you press it. There are very few events in life more stressful then dealing with an incident, people on the call and having your phone alerting and ringing all the frigging time. I was once told to mute myself on incident bridge because all that alerting was not only super iritating for me, but for others too. I was supposed to fix the problem but I was so distracted with alerts I wanted to snap the phone in two and punch a random PD manager in the face.

"Yes PagerDuty, I now our infra is melting, please shut the fuck up and let me do my job."

PD does have a feature IIRC "intelligent alert grouping" which will group new alerts and not display more of those. So it makes it relatively easy to snooze group of alerts for X period of time so it makes it much quieter. Unfortunately, this is locked as a feature paid extra. But still, they need a way to tell PD to stop alerting.

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

#93

Post by akhayam »

tky wrote: post #85
snird wrote: post #78

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.

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.

+1. I am really upset about the pricing for the value. Great that we have alternatives now

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

#94

Post by dilyevsky »

closeparen wrote: post #84
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…

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.

Yeah I’ve seen a number of outages there so dunno what TP is about.

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

#96

Post by jedberg »

cylix wrote: post #89
jedberg wrote: post #70

The 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.

Alerting or control plane or both? If alerting is AWS only, I'm very sad. What happens if there is a global AWS outage? Never been one yet, but never say never.

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

#97

Post by atonse »

snird wrote: post #78

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.

Yup I went from being ambivalent about PagerDuty to actively hating them. They swindle you, make it hard to cancel or downgrade, and that seems to be their way of doing business.

I’ll ditch them as soon as I can.

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

#98

Post by viraptor »

jq-r wrote: post #91
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…

I have absolutely no idea why PD doesn't have a big button which stops all PD notifications the moment you press it. There are very few events in life more stressful then dealing with an incident, people on the call and having your phone alerting and ringing all the frigging time. I was once told to mute myself on incident bridge because all that alerting was not only super iritating for me, but for others too. I was…

You can manually put the service in maintenance mode. That will stop it alerting for a specified period.

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

#100

Post by danpalmer »

steveBK123 wrote: post #42
singron wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance at Google, taking vacation in workday puts an OOO event on your Google calendar. Then the oncall scheduler takes that into account along with your oncall history when it schedules new rotations. You only have to get someone to cover if you are taking time off in the near future, and any surplus or deficit will be fixed by the scheduler going forward. It's kind of wild that an expensive product with tons…

I think outside some FAANG firms with strong engineering management, the purchase of these tools is a top-down affair. So as cynical as my statement may seem- " It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off?" .. user ergonomics just doesn't enter into the conversation at all, because the users are internal devs.. who cares. I also worked at an org that gave each of 50+ large customers a dedic…

> the purchase of these tools is a top-down affair

This is absolutely it. Pager Duty don't sell on-call tools to engineers, they sell the idea of having an on-call rota to CTOs, the tools are an implementation detail.

Bottom up engineering tools take more time to start with, but almost always cost less in the long run, contribute to a good engineering culture, and build a sense of ownership.

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