PagerDuty

Why Teams Rely on PagerDuty

When production breaks, the right person needs to know immediately. PagerDuty ensures alerts reach the right people through the right channels.

My Experience

I’ve been on the receiving end of many 3am PagerDuty alerts. They always get through—phone calls, SMS, push notifications. The reliability when it matters most is why teams trust PagerDuty.

What Makes PagerDuty Essential

1. Reliable Alerting - Multiple notification channels ensure alerts get through. Phone calls, SMS, push notifications, email. If you’re on-call, you’ll know about incidents.

2. Escalation Policies - Define who gets paged and when. If the primary doesn’t respond, escalate to secondary. Time-based schedules for different scenarios.

3. On-Call Scheduling - Manage rotations, handle overrides, balance the load. Fair scheduling that doesn’t burn out your team. Coverage visibility for everyone.

4. Incident Timeline - Track what happened and when. Who was paged, who responded, what actions were taken. Essential for post-mortems and learning.

Where PagerDuty Falls Short

Expensive for small teams. Default configurations can be noisy—tuning is required. The platform has expanded beyond core incident management, which adds complexity.

Who Should Use PagerDuty

• DevOps teams with on-call rotations
• SRE teams managing production
• Engineering running critical systems
• IT teams supporting infrastructure

PagerDuty vs Opsgenie

Factor	PagerDuty	Opsgenie
Reliability	Excellent	Strong
Pricing	Higher	Lower
Integrations	700+	200+
Atlassian Stack	Independent	Native
Best For	Dedicated incident	Atlassian users

The Bottom Line

PagerDuty is the industry standard for incident management. The reliability justifies the cost for teams running production systems. Smaller teams might consider Opsgenie.