PagerDuty is an incidence response and alerting service that works with just about any monitoring service. The service can be configured to deliver alerts by phone call, email, text, or via iOS and Android apps, complete with delivery confirmation and automatic re-routing. A dashboard shows you incidents and alert status across all of your monitoring tools. Sophisticated scheduling and alert escalation configurations keep your whole team in the loop. PagerDuty's advanced analytics help identify hotspots and team performance trends.
I have been involved with incidence response solutions for over 20 years and I can safely say that PagerDuty strikes a great balance between ease of use and power. I admit it, I'm in love with PagerDuty.
Installation
Sign up was very easy and merely required my email address and a password. I was then prompted to send a test alert via SMS, phone, and email. Within 10 seconds I received all three alerts. The PagerDuty SMS alert urged me to download a mobile app, while the phone call said "hi this is a PagerDuty test alert. Add this number to your phone to make sure you always receive your alerts." It felt reassuring that the alert system was working.
The next step was to connect my monitoring tool. This could be done simply by selecting my preferred tool from a drop down box of the supported programs including HP SiteScope, New Relic APM, CopperEgg, or any one of the 50 or so that were listed. I chose CopperEgg because I had already set up an account in order to review the service. I could also have chosen to submit email to PagerDuty to trigger alerts or connect directly to PagerDuty's REST API. When I clicked to add CopperEgg I was directed to a web page with additional information about the integration. Next, I needed to generate and add a PagerDuty API key to CopperEgg. I then set up incident escalation so that if I didn't respond from the first alert within 10 minutes and secondary responder would be emailed.
Working with PagerDuty
Logging into PagerDuty, I was struck by how straightforward the interface looked. PagerDuty's interface provides all of the navigation options across the top of the page: dashboard, incidents, configuration, analytics, and help. The dashboard opens by default and includes a list of my open incidents and company-wide open incidents, plus all incident activity for the past seven days. The incidents screen is much like the dashboard but includes more options for working with incidents.
The real meat to PagerDuty resides within the configuration menu, which includes options for schedules, services, escalation policies, users, and teams. The first step in working with PagerDuty is to create users who will be alerted when incidents occur. Users are assigned to one of four roles ranging from limited, a user who can only trigger, acknowledge and resolve incidents, to an account owner who has the ability to manage anything in the PagerDuty system. Each user gets assigned notification rules; they can be alerted on new or changed incidents and when their on-call period starts by email, phone call, or SMS. It's very likely that large organizations will want to assign users to teams so that schedules, notifications and escalation policies can be managed more easily. For example, an organization could have a team that gets notified for server incidents and another team that gets notified for security incidents.
In PagerDuty, as with any incidence response system, the devil is in the details. The overall concept is to notify those who need to know at the right time and then build in backups so nothing falls through the cracks. Doing this requires paying careful attention to schedules and notification policies, in particular escalation policies. PagerDuty does a fantastic job of making the details easy to configure and manage and this is primarily because of a powerful yet easy to understand GUI. Setting an on-call schedule required little more than selecting users, choosing a rotation type (daily, weekly, or custom), and choosing a start time and date. On-call schedules can be layered on top of each other so you can see where they overlap, and a calendar appears on the schedule management page that clearly shows on-call schedules and overlaps. Escalation policy is also very easy to configure and manage due to a straightforward GUI.
My first test of PagerDuty involved manually opening an incident, which is incidentally a great feature for testing how notifications and escalation policies are configured. Within five seconds, I received incident notifications by phone call, SMS, and email. The phone call read aloud to me the service that caused the alert and some basic information about the alert, plus gave me options to respond such as "press 4 to acknowledge, 6 to resolve, or press 8 to escalate." I pressed 4 to acknowledge and, following my notification policy, I was re-notified in a half hour that the alert condition still existed (the only ways to stop notifications are to resolve or escalate them). The notifications that I received via email and SMS were similar, with the email alert also containing a link to the PagerDuty site so that I could see more information. PagerDuty performed admirably during my testing, dutifully notifying me in a timely fashion of incidents, following my escalation policy, and re-notifying me when I neglected to mark an issue as resolved.
PagerDuty's help is excellent. Every page in the portal includes at least one link to context sensitive help. There is also an in-depth getting started section that covers everything from basic topics such as how to set up and respond to notifications to more advanced topics such as creating an on-call schedule and creating escalation policies. Online help also includes detailed information about integrating PagerDuty with other monitoring tools, developer resources, and a form for submitting a tech support request.
PagerDuty's reports are very straightforward and easy to understand. Reports can be shown system-wide, or filtered on the service, team, or escalation policy. Summary metrics are also provided that show the mean time to acknowledge, the mean time to resolve, the number of escalated incidents, and more. This information is very helpful operationally, but managers will probably want greater depth for planning and analysis purposes, in which case they'll want to get this data out of PagerDuty. If you subscribe to an Enterprise plan then it is possible to export reports. PagerDuty recommends that you query the incidents through their API instead of exporting reports.
PagerDuty is an excellent incidence response and alerting service that is both straightforward and powerful and will make sure that every member of your team stays in the loop regarding IT infrastructure status.
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