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

allquiet.app

121–130 of 135 posts

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

#121

Feature request: "Quiet wakeup mode" that vibrates the user's Apple Watch for a minute before making any sound. Then start the sound at the lowest volume (inaudible) and slowly increase it over 1 minute. This would be supremely useful for being oncall while sleeping near another person. Feature request 2: "Earplug mode" that slowly increases volume and vibration from zero to max, and stays at max for 1 minute. Suppor…

Nice idea!!

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

#122

You can build your own Pagerduty, feature-wise. But a system like that requires higher high availability than your app. Pagerduty's SLA for availability is 99.9% (3 nines) which is up to 43.8 minutes per month. If you build your Pagerduty clone on AWS, your theoretical maximum availability is 99.99%.

"...requires higher high availability than your app."

How do you know the availability of All Quiet? :)

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

#123
post #91
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…

With All Quiet you can acknowledge an incident. It will then stop pinging you and your colleagues. Also incidents and their triggers are idempotent, so All Quiet won't create new incidents when they're triggered several times by your monitoring solution.

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

#124
post #67

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.

Your employer couldn't care less about your costs of living. He is a buyer and will gladly pay exactly zero dollars for your services. Unfortunately for him, that's not something you and your friends will accept. The price is hiked until both parties can live with it.

People in different situations accept different levels of compensation. Cost of living only becomes a significant factor under competitive pressure. If you were the sole programmer for the region you would be paid millions. I'm sure you personally, being an upstanding citizen, would lower your fee to match your costs of living as to maximize your clients' profitability. But you are rare. Most will accept the highest bid.

All I'm saying is that nothing is fundamentally based on "cost" unless under pressure. If it earns you say 500 bucks, you take the 20 dollar hit. It doesn't matter to you if it costs them 1 cent to produce. Until a competitor comes and drops the prices.

Also note that this "value"-thing is complex. Programmers that live close by and are sufficiently adjusted to the culture of the company have more value than cheap, capable, but remote workers that don't "get" you. Rural programmmers are indeed no less capable than devs in major cities, but it never was just about being capable.

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

#125

You can build your own Pagerduty, feature-wise. But a system like that requires higher high availability than your app. Pagerduty's SLA for availability is 99.9% (3 nines) which is up to 43.8 minutes per month. If you build your Pagerduty clone on AWS, your theoretical maximum availability is 99.99%.

"...requires higher high availability than your app." How do you know the availability of All Quiet? :)

If it's not published or part of contract negotiation, it could be zero and it would not be a problem.

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

#126

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…

> decline meetings, update your outlook calendar out-of-office

When I am adding OOO to my Google Calendar, there's an option to auto-decline meetings. Isn't it like that in Outlook?

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

#127
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)

Sure, but this doesn’t help. The “Push” notification type goes straight to Klaxons. I have hacked around it by delaying Push until after SMS, but that’s, at best, a kludge. There should be multiple classes of push.

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

#128
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your employer couldn't care less about your costs of living. He is a buyer and will gladly pay exactly zero dollars for your services. Unfortunately for him, that's not something you and your friends will accept. The price is hiked until both parties can live with it. People in different situations accept different levels of compensation. Cost of living only becomes a significant factor under competitive pressure. If…

This is an easy take to have on the labor market when you have bargaining power. The fact that highly paid professionals buy so readily into the moneyed class discourse disturbs me.

Here's hoping you don't get displaced by automation and suddenly discover yourself providing zero marginal gains to them. I mean, would you then sit quietly and starve?

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

#129

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…

> 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…

It's actually pretty straightforward without a lot of get-outs. See Service Credits in the Service Level Agreement [1].

1: https://www.pagerduty.com/standard-service-level-agreement/

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your employer couldn't care less about your costs of living. He is a buyer and will gladly pay exactly zero dollars for your services. Unfortunately for him, that's not something you and your friends will accept. The price is hiked until both parties can live with it. People in different situations accept different levels of compensation. Cost of living only becomes a significant factor under competitive pressure. If…

This is an easy take to have on the labor market when you have bargaining power. The fact that highly paid professionals buy so readily into the moneyed class discourse disturbs me. Here's hoping you don't get displaced by automation and suddenly discover yourself providing zero marginal gains to them. I mean, would you then sit quietly and starve?

I will be replaced and when it happens it wil be for the exact reasons I laid out above and there is nothing I can do about it.

Do we disagree about something?

It’s not “a take”, it’s how markets operate. Am I missing something?

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