Hey there! Have you heard about PagerDuty? Since its launch in 2009, it’s been the go-to tool for organizations in need of a reliable paging and on-call management system. It’s the backbone of ‘always-on’ services, known for its incredible reliability.
But here’s the thing: while PagerDuty excels in reliability, some users feel it’s lacking in innovation within its core on-call product. Instead of focusing on advancements, PagerDuty has expanded into areas like AIOps and the Operations Cloud, whatever that means. As teams shift towards managing incidents within communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty has struggled to keep up.
One of the fundamental challenges with PagerDuty lies in its core experience and data model for routing alerts to the right person’s phone. In this post, we’ll dive into the process of setting up alerting systems and ensuring alerts reach the right recipients. We’ll compare PagerDuty’s data and routing model to our own at incident.io On-call, offering a more efficient way to operate on-call.
Let’s talk about the PagerDuty data model and its limitations…
The PagerDuty data model and its limitations
If you’re familiar with PagerDuty, you know about its data model for routing alerts. Let’s break it down:
- Services: Used to aggregate alerts and represent teams, systems, or services.
- Integrations: Connect external systems like Datadog or Prometheus.
- Escalation Policies: Define the order and timing of notifications until an issue is resolved.
PagerDuty’s approach is simple, but it comes with challenges like configuration sprawl, distributed alert routing, and complexity at scale.
Now, let’s see how we’ve simplified things with incident.io…
How we’ve simplified things with incident.io
At incident.io On-call, we aimed to address the pain points of PagerDuty’s model while maintaining its strengths. Our guiding principles include flexible routing, separation of static and dynamic data, and smooth migration.
Our core model includes alert sources, alert routes, and escalation paths, offering a more streamlined approach to managing alerts.
With our Catalog feature, routing logic is centralized and dynamically linked to organizational data, making changes easier to manage.
Catalog: the major unlock
Introducing “Catalog” in our model, we’ve centralized and dynamically linked routing logic to organizational data, simplifying the process.
Overall, our approach aims to simplify alert system setup, centralize routing logic, and provide scalability and flexibility.
Comparing the models
While PagerDuty and incident.io’s data models may seem similar, subtle differences lead to significant improvements in managing on-call operations.
Our approach reduces operational complexity, centralizes routing decisions, and offers scalability and adaptability.
Ready to make the switch?
Ready to make the switch?
Whether you choose to replicate your current setup or optimize it, incident.io On-call offers advanced features and flexibility to support your needs.
And hey, we’ve only scratched the surface here! incident.io offers a range of features like cover requests, smart escalation paths, and a modern mobile app.
