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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

#111

Post by HereBeBeasties »

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…

I am in management. I evaluated most of the on-duty tools that are available, at the cost of a couple of days of my personal time. At least they all have free trials. PageDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call (ex VictorOps), AlertOps, Squadcast, TaskCall, etc. etc.

They are all surprisingly hopeless. For example, none of them have SCIM integration to make managing your teams in them automatic. All of them have clunky calendar overrides. None of them seem to integrate well with Outlook / Google Calendar, particularly none take into account holidays. Many have no Terraform provider to manage them, and the ones that do are clunky at best, and hard to set-up/manage. OIDC is hit-and-miss. For example, for PagerDuty you need to call up their support team and get them to manually tweak something that's not in the UI settings to get OIDC for Azure AD sign-ins to work.

It's not that management is apathetic. We genuinely don't want to engineers spending their time working around vendor inadequacies and lashing this stuff together with barely-maintained scripting that they resent having to write in the first place. Why would anyone want that? Given there's seemingly no product out there that lets you avoid that, what should we do? When they're all rubbish, you either choose PagerDuty because everyone does, or Opsgenie as a protest vote, because at least both have Terraform providers and plug-ins for other things like Slack and Sentry, etc.

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

#112

Post by thayne »

danpalmer wrote: post #100
steveBK123 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn't universally true. At my medium sized company, the people on call are the ones responsible for choosing an on-call system. But we've rotated through most of the main options, because we haven't really been happy with any of them.

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

#113

Post by lIl-IIIl »

singron wrote: post #37
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…

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…

It's much much much easier to cook up a solution for internal use than to create a product for external use that you can sell and that caters to your customers whims and that reasonably easy to use without requiring direct access to the engineering team for support.

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

#114

Post by quickthrower2 »

mLuby wrote: 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.

Keeping the "I want it for 5 because my indie project makes no money" people happy is less lucrative than the "We are paying $1000/person in on call allowances, so what is $21 - nothing!" people.

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

#115

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

What is FANNG? Facebook, Amazon, Neural Nets & Google?

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

#116

Post by steveBK123 »

HereBeBeasties wrote: post #111
steveBK123 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am in management. I evaluated most of the on-duty tools that are available, at the cost of a couple of days of my personal time. At least they all have free trials. PageDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call (ex VictorOps), AlertOps, Squadcast, TaskCall, etc. etc. They are all surprisingly hopeless. For example, none of them have SCIM integration to make managing your teams in them automatic. All of them have clunky calend…

My point is not that management is bad & doesn't care, but that management has different priorities & cares about different things than the people using the app.

All of us have talked on this thread about all the things PD is bad at, but few have come to the defense with a list of things its great at.

The sales pitch, I am sure, to management is more along the lines of - metrics, dashboards, reports, "accountability", response times, yada yada.. and because management write the checks, I'm sure thats an area they do deliver.

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

#117

Post by zamnos »

lIl-IIIl wrote: post #113
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…

It's much much much easier to cook up a solution for internal use than to create a product for external use that you can sell and that caters to your customers whims and that reasonably easy to use without requiring direct access to the engineering team for support.

You're right, but for $173mm in funding, you'd think you could build a product for external users that's at least feature parity with a "cooked up" internal project.

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

#118

Post by steveBK123 »

zamnos wrote: post #117
lIl-IIIl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much much much easier to cook up a solution for internal use than to create a product for external use that you can sell and that caters to your customers whims and that reasonably easy to use without requiring direct access to the engineering team for support.

You're right, but for $173mm in funding, you'd think you could build a product for external users that's at least feature parity with a "cooked up" internal project.

And a $3B market cap, unbelievably.

What's kind of incredible too is they actually lose money still. The losses are growing faster than the revenue. They've only had, what, 14 years to figure this out? You wonder what their staff of 1000ish are working on.

Also, forgot this gem: "On January 21, 2023 PagerDuty CEO Tejada's layoff memo was criticized for insensitivity for inappropriately quoting Martin Luther King, announcing promotions of executives, and tone deafness." (from wiki)

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

#120

Post by icco »

jedberg wrote: post #96
cylix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your service needs to survive a global aws outage, you just can't run with any saas. So many of these companies are single regioned in AWS. Auth0, Okta, Datadog, many others put customers in a regional box, and if that region goes down, all of those customers go down.
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