Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by darkwater 471 days ago
Reading the comparison with PD [1] and having been a Pagerduty customer...even if it's promo material for a competitor, it resonates a LOT with my experience with PD (and boy, I do have experience with it). The web UI and the limitations around overrides, paging groups, escalation policies etc are all real and makes me wonder: how is it possible that a behemoth in the space like PD is stagnating like that? I understand, big enterprises as clients which are notoriously slow, being the incumbent and being a big corporation yourself, but still, I don't get it.

[1] https://rootly.com/landing/pagerduty-vs-rootly-on-call
2 comments
jjtang1 471 days ago
Not trying to dunk on my competition but that is one thing that always surprised me too. Speed to deliver/innovate. I see large corporations all the time like even Slack (Agent marketplace), AWS (Bedrock), deliver at a high clip. PD truly had the opportunity to be a Datadog sized company given the brand name. Now it's a reputation impossible to shake.

There are some pretty low hanging fruit stuff that would make the PD experience palatable (e.g. ability to page teams not just services, allow for partial overrides). These things for us were <1 week projects.

I do think PD is trying to rectify it by acquiring Jeli, giving it away for free in their new pricing plan, etc. Def feeling the squeeze a bit if I had to guess.

link
dmgodbout 466 days ago
PM from PD, chiming in here. tl;dr: we hear you and understand some of the challenges raised by that comparison sheet and frankly, we appreciate that folks like Rootly have challenged us to innovate in our core product more. And yeah, we're also pretty psyched to have the Jeli crew onboard, we think they're pretty smart, too. : ) As JJ calls out below, we've revamped our pricing plans to bring more incident management to all of our plans and spent a lot of time rethinking our chat experiences! (Again kudos to the Jeli crew!)

To not give too much of our roadmap away in a public forum, some of the basic components of overrides, paging groups and the web UI - keep your eyes peeled this year, one of our big focus areas is looking at how not only do we eliminate some of these gaps around on-call management and UI, but also going beyond just filling these table stakes. As you might imagine, PagerDuty scaled pretty aggressively (while also keeping our high reliability standards in place - customer trust is our #1 priority, after all we need to be up when everyone else is down), and we've had to make some investments to unlock our roadmap for this upcoming year.

Real talk though, happy to continue the conversation/ meet up over a zoom. Send me an email: dgodbout[@]pagerduty.com. There are humans over here at PagerDuty who care a lot about folks like yourself and I consider myself lucky to get build products for people who are responsible for ensuring things just "work".

link