[andrewljohnson]

I'm usually pretty optimistic on new YC start-ups, but I'm not sure the world needs another uptime monitor.

There are so many free, cheap, and other services like this that it's hard to imagine what a company might differentiate on to become the "next big thing."

[alexsolo]

I agree. That's why we don't do uptime monitoring, or any kind of monitoring really.

PagerDuty is an alerting system which plugs into any monitoring system (Pingdom, Nagios, Cloudkick, etc) and alerts your team via phone, SMS and email when problems are detected. We add advanced alerting features, like 2-way voice and SMS alerts, automatic alert escalation, and on-call duty scheduling to these existing tools.

You're right though, in that many people, on first glance, confuse us with a server monitoring or website pinging system. The "pitch" has gotten better over time, but it's still something we have to work on to improve.

[btilly]

If you haven't done it then I'm going to suggest that you also work on mobile apps to make phones be as loud and annoying as possible. Yeah, it sounds stupid. But a random Blackberry can be as loud as a Skytel pager, even if it isn't by default. And it is worthwhile for someone on duty to make it so.

[lsc]

you know what I want? I want some sort of arm band to put my cellphone (or, better, a giant bluetooth vibrator) so that when I sleep, I can be woken by my pager without waking other people who may also be in the bed.

[epochwolf]

Here you go: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/9e31/

[lsc]

Ooh, thanks! that looks like it might solve my problem.

[axod]

>> "PagerDuty is an alerting system which plugs into any monitoring system (Pingdom, Nagios, Cloudkick, etc) and alerts your team via phone, SMS and email when problems are detected."

Pingdom already does that. I'm not clear what you're offering here...

[agmiklas]

Pingdom doesn't provide our full range of alerting features, such as phone alerts, on-call scheduling, and two-way SMS (so you can hand off problems to other engineers straight from your phone).

Actually, Pingdom is one of the most common services used in conjunction with PagerDuty.

At a higher level, what we're trying to provide is an on-call management and alert dispatching tool. What PagerDuty does is let you control who, how, and when people are notified when problems occur. In contrast, monitoring tools like Pingdom and Nagios focus more on detecting problems. While they have some native alerting functionality, we think with PagerDuty's advanced alerting, they can function all the better.

[alexdong]

ok, so PagerDuty's main focus/differentiation is duty and scheduling management? I do see the value of such system, you want to wake only Joe instead the whole team up if he is on duty that night.

Maybe you should highlight that? My first impression was "what, yet another pingdom"? Definitely need a bit fine tuning there.

Wondering who will be your main target customer? Any website that has more than one sysadmin?

[agmiklas]

Yeah, we're going after companies with big uptime requirements that have already grown to the point that they have an operations team of more than one person.

[koenigdavidmj]

Nagios does that too. You can define schedules to your heart's content, and it will send email anywhere. Given that basically all pagers/mobiles have email addresses, you're set.

The only thing that this does that is really new is two-way SMS.

[agmiklas]

PagerDuty also includes voice calls, which we've seen through experience are more reliably delivered than SMS messages (esp. SMSes through email-to-SMS gateways). As with the SMS messages, you can immediately acknowledge or escalate during the phone call using touch-tone.

I also think PagerDuty's ability to graphically define the on-call schedule and escalation rules is much nicer than mucking around with Nagios's configuration files, but I'm a bit biased :)

[johns]

It's all about execution. Did we need another file storage service? Did we need another web site builder? There is a lot of room for companies to do existing things better.