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

allquiet.app

11–20 of 135 posts

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

#12
post #7

> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Does this mean that there are no text/call options? I don't have a smartphone to install apps, but haven't had problems with being on on-call rotations with some of the other tools mentioned.

Yes, it doesn't have SMS / call Options explicitly.

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

#13
post #7

> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Does this mean that there are no text/call options? I don't have a smartphone to install apps, but haven't had problems with being on on-call rotations with some of the other tools mentioned.

Yes, it doesn't have SMS / call Options explicitly.

This a deal breaker for me. I understand your intention here and from a pure alerting perspective you're correct, but I have use cases for other forms of notification.

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

#14
> 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 getting much traction over PD.

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

#15
post #11

Why is the pricing per user? Is that what your costs are most dependent on? I bet not. I'd argue $5/user is just teaser pricing on its way to PagerDuty's $21+/user. Regardless, cool project—happy to see more competition.

On the pricing page I'm explaining that I think it's the fairest option. If you have a small team, you probably have "less money" than a huge team.

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

#16

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…

I tried to make managing the incident escalation policies as simple as possible. It currently works with a simple drag&drop mechanism. The way PagerDuty is doing this also seemed very cumbersome to me. Of course All Quiet is currently missing holiday / off hours features. I'm still figuring out what's the best approach there.

Regarding your last paragraph - can you elaborate on this? I tried to make All Quiet be integratable with basically every system by Email and Webhook integrations. Do you see this as a problem?

Thanks for your feedback in general!

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

#17

> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings. Rec…

I'm also not sure about why multiple notification channels can't be used. If there's an alert I'd like to be notified by all means possible (depending on severity)

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

#18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it doesn't have SMS / call Options explicitly.

This a deal breaker for me. I understand your intention here and from a pure alerting perspective you're correct, but I have use cases for other forms of notification.

Too bad. :( Would've loved to help you out. Would you mind elaborating on your usecases and why it's axactly a deal breaker?

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

#19

> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings. Rec…

I cannot ensure that notifications are received. But neither can you with Email or SMS. Technically a Call might be more reliable, but still, your phone could be turned off or might not even have reception for a call.

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

#20
post #8

> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings. Rec…

I think the design is you use the automatic escalation if the page isn't acknowledged.

Yes, it will auto-escalate to your team mates, if you don't acknowledge.
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