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."
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.
Pingdom already does that. I'm not clear what you're offering here...
Couple of other questions for the team:
A Zabbix plugin forthcoming? Do you have to respond to alerts in your interface or can our monitoring software let pagerduty know the alert has been handled?
Though we already have a lot of the functionality you provide through a few custom scripts we don't have the scheduling of engineers which I've been meaning to write for a while (but doing it manually with a small team wasn't enough of an issue). So certainly a service I would consider using, if not on this project, my next one.
In terms of setting a formal SLA, we haven't done so mainly because we're not sure how to go about implementing this. I've checked the SLAs of a few hosting and cloud providers including AWS, Rackspace, Linode and Slicehost, and I haven't found a compelling example to work from. Some of these guys don't have an SLA (they try their best) and the others give you only a portion of your money back.
The whole point of an SLA is to incentivize us to never go down. In our case, we know that if we ever go down, we will lose our customers; that's incentive enough :). Having said that, we may still add an SLA guarantee as part of a larger "enterprise" pricing plan.
We definitely plan on adding plugins for all the popular monitoring systems. We've also released an integration API to allow PagerDuty to integrate with any system that can make an HTTP API call (or call a command-line script that can do this).
I'm pretty sure Zabbix will work with PagerDuty right now, via the integration API. We'd love to work with you to set this up. Please send me an email at alex@pagerduty.com.
Interesting. They don't include a free/freemium account, only paid ones with a free trial. I have been wondering about this.
I've always assumed the best business model is to offer a free plan for everyone that is not limited to time but with fewer features or some other limit/constraint like number of users, amount of storage etc.
I wonder how the two models compare. Because I know a lot of people simply will not sign up for anything, even if there is a free trial. People just want something free they can start using and that they don't run into walls - a la Google Docs, Gmail, Basecamp free account, etc...
Any thoughts?
The other reason is that we see PagerDuty as solving a real "hair on fire" problem, and we think if you're one of the businesses that needs this, it's reasonable to pay a certain amount for the service. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
Your target audience/market is obviously not the casual user/blogger type so it makes perfect sense.
PagerDuty starts at $12/month. For a personal account that's a huge chasm for me to cross, but for business it feels like nothing. It's probably not even my money.
In business you're just not use to getting much for free, especially service - my bank charges me to write a check, my ISP charges me more to get business DSL to the office than home DSL, etc.
Maybe we're just resigned to that, but having a no free account policy just rides that waves and presumably increases profits (forces conversions to paid, ensures no loss-making free accounts)
My thinking is that if more people are using the service, that also doubles as an advertisement if the users tell some of their friends, recommend to coworkers etc.
Though I think you may already have us beat by being YC funded, the jury is still out on that!
And I agree with the free trial model over freemium. Your service is worth paying for. Period. The trial is used for determining if your service actually works as expected. And you don't get network effects the more people that use your system. So there's really no point for freemium.
Keep up the good work guys! Very exciting!
congrats Andrew, Alex, Baskar and the rest of the team!
Btw, I've left you a "gift" in your Twilio account... whenever you happen to check your account balance :)
It's a similar level of cleverness as Lobby7, if anyone remembers that one...
We've found the automated phone calls to be a much more reliable way of getting the alert out. We can tell right away that the message has been received by asking the listener to press a button on their phone, and repeat or escalate as needed if we don't hear the tone.
