PagerDuty - Stop Getting Paged for Bullshit at 3am

PagerDuty is incident management software that sits between your monitoring tools and your on-call engineers. It takes the thousands of alerts your monitoring systems generate and tries to figure out which ones actually matter. The goal is simple: stop waking people up for stupid shit, get the right person looking at real problems faster.

How PagerDuty sits between your 47 monitoring tools and the poor bastard getting paged

The dashboard shows which shit is broken and who's supposed to be fixing it. Groups related alerts so you don't get 47 pages for the same database meltdown.

The Alert Fatigue Problem It Solves

Anyone who's been on-call knows the pain: you get paged at 2:47am because disk usage hit 85% on a server that's been at 84% for three months. Meanwhile, the database is actually throwing connection errors but that alert got lost in the noise. You spend 20 minutes checking a non-issue while customers can't log in.

PagerDuty's main job is correlation - when 47 different monitoring tools start screaming about the same outage, it groups them together and sends one page instead of 47. The AI part mostly works, though it occasionally decides your coffee machine going offline is related to your payment processor being down.

What You Actually Get

Smart Alert Routing: Instead of blasting everyone, PagerDuty follows escalation policies. Page the database guy for database errors, not the frontend team. If database guy doesn't respond in 10 minutes, page the manager. If manager doesn't respond, page everyone and update your resume.

Integration Hell Made Bearable: PagerDuty connects to over 700 tools, which sounds impressive until you realize you'll spend two weeks configuring webhooks and API keys. But once it's working, alerts from Datadog, New Relic, AWS CloudWatch, and your janky homegrown monitoring all flow through one system.

Incident Timeline: Every alert, acknowledgment, and action gets logged with timestamps. Useful for post-mortems when you're trying to figure out why it took 4 hours to notice the load balancer was returning 503s to half your traffic.

Runbook Automation: You can configure automated responses - restart this service, scale this auto-scaling group, run this diagnostic script. Works great until the automation breaks and now you're debugging both the original problem and why your fix-it script is making things worse.

Here's how it actually works: Alert fires → PagerDuty groups similar alerts → Pages someone → Creates Slack chaos → Hopefully runs diagnostics → Escalates when nobody responds → Auto-generates post-mortem that nobody will read.

Real-World Usage Patterns

Teams that get value from PagerDuty usually have:

• More than 10 engineers (smaller teams just use Slack)
• Multiple monitoring tools generating alerts
• Formal on-call rotations
• Services that actually make money (downtime costs real dollars)

We've seen teams go from 3-hour "who's looking at this?" incidents to 20-minute fixes. Not because PagerDuty magically solves problems, but because it eliminates the 2 hours and 40 minutes of "wait, who's on-call?" and "is this alert related to that other alert?" confusion.

One customer told us their average incident went from affecting 50,000 users for 4 hours to affecting 5,000 users for 30 minutes. Same types of failures, but faster detection and clearer escalation paths meant smaller blast radius.

Real War Story: Had a customer whose payment processor shit the bed during Black Friday - like 2:30am when everyone was drunk shopping. Normally would've taken them hours to figure out who was on-call, but PagerDuty got the right people awake in minutes. Still lost some transactions during the chaos, but way less than usual. They said it probably saved them millions, but who knows - companies always exaggerate those numbers.

The Gotchas Nobody Mentions

Configuration Complexity: Getting PagerDuty configured properly takes months, not days. You'll think you're done after the first week, then discover your escalation policies have a logical flaw that becomes apparent during the next major outage.

Alert Tuning Never Ends: The AI helps, but you'll spend significant time tuning which alerts actually deserve pages versus which ones can wait until business hours. Get it wrong and you're either back to alert fatigue or missing critical issues.

Mobile App Dependencies: When your site is down, you're depending on PagerDuty's mobile app working, your carrier having signal, and push notifications being delivered. War story: Spent 3 hours debugging why our on-call engineer wasn't responding - turns out his phone was in airplane mode and the backup person's iPhone had some iOS notification bug that was silently dropping push notifications.

Mobile app interface: Home screen shows active incidents, on-call status, and quick actions. Notification sounds are loud enough to wake you from deep sleep (by design). Push notifications work 95% of the time - the other 5% is usually when you need them most.

The mobile app's home screen displays active incidents with one-tap acknowledge and resolve buttons. Push notifications are intentionally loud and persistent - they need to wake you up at 3am. The interface shows incident severity, affected services, and allows quick escalation or reassignment.

Integration Brittleness: Those 700 integrations break when third-party tools change their APIs. You'll discover your monitoring integration stopped working three weeks ago right when you need it most.

The platform serves 30,000+ companies including big names like Netflix and Spotify, but remember - these companies also have dedicated reliability teams and sophisticated monitoring setups. Your mileage will vary based on how much effort you put into configuration and maintenance.

The Sticker Shock

PagerDuty's pricing starts at $21/user/month for the Professional plan, but nobody uses just the base plan. Here's what you'll actually pay:

PagerDuty pricing is the usual SaaS shakedown: Free (useless), Professional ($21/user), Business ($49/user), and Enterprise (bend over). Each tier hides features you actually need - Free is a joke, Professional is missing half the good stuff, Business lacks enterprise features, and Enterprise costs whatever they think they can get away with.

Free Plan: 5 users max, 100 SMS/month. Good for testing or tiny startups. You'll outgrow this in about 3 weeks.

Professional ($21/user/month): What most teams start with. Includes unlimited notifications and basic integrations. For a 10-person team, that's $2,520/year. Add taxes and you're looking at $2,800 annually minimum.

Business ($49/user/month): Where you'll probably end up. Same 10-person team costs $5,880/year. You need this tier for decent reporting and advanced integrations.

Enterprise (Custom pricing): Starts around $70+/user/month but comes with volume discounts. A 50-person team might pay $180k/year or more.

The Hidden Costs That Fuck You

AIOps Add-on: $699/month minimum for event correlation. Sounds optional until you're drowning in 10,000 alerts per day from your Kubernetes cluster having a bad time.

Runbook Automation: Another $415/month to automatically restart services. You'll convince yourself it's worth it after the third time you had to drive to the office at 2am to click a button.

Status Pages: $89/month per 1,000 subscribers. Your marketing team will insist you need this. They're not wrong, but your wallet will disagree.

Professional Services: They don't advertise this, but you'll need help configuring everything properly. Budget another 10-20% of your first year costs for someone to actually make it work.

Real Talk on Budgeting

Here's what teams actually spend:

• 10-person startup: $30k/year (Professional + AIOps because alert fatigue is killing them)
• 50-person scale-up: $80k/year (Business plan + all the add-ons)
• 200-person enterprise: $200k+/year (Enterprise with custom integrations and professional services)

For a 25-person engineering team, annual costs typically range from $15k (Opsgenie) to $60k+ (PagerDuty Enterprise). The pricing gap widens significantly when factoring in add-ons: PagerDuty's AIOps ($8k/year) and Process Automation ($5k/year) can double your bill, while competitors often include similar features in base plans.

Fair warning: your first month's bill will be 3x what you expect because nobody configures alert limits properly. We've seen teams rack up $500 in SMS overages during a single outage.

PagerDuty's pricing reality: Free gets you almost nothing. Professional is where you start. Business is where you end up. Enterprise is where your budget dies. Each tier adds features you didn't know you needed until you need them.

When It's Actually Worth It

Yeah, it costs more than a small country's GDP, but if your site going down costs you $10k/hour, the math works out. One customer told us they were losing $50k per incident due to slow response times. Paying $100k/year to cut incident resolution time from 4 hours to 30 minutes was a no-brainer.

War Story: A SaaS company was spending $120k/year on PagerDuty Enterprise for 200 engineers. During a database failure at 1:47am on a Tuesday, it got the DBA awake fast and they failed over to a replica pretty quickly. Still took 45 minutes total because the DBA had to drive to the office (VPN was fucked), but way faster than their old system where nobody would've known until morning standup. Company said it saved them hundreds of thousands, but CTOs always say that shit.

If you're a 3-person startup making $10k MRR, just use Slack webhooks. If you're doing $10M ARR and outages make customers churn, PagerDuty will pay for itself.

The Cheaper Alternatives (And Why They Suck Less)

• Opsgenie: $9/user - cheaper but the mobile app crashes when you need it most
• VictorOps (now Splunk On-Call): $29/user - good for small teams but doesn't scale well
• DIY Slack/email setup: $0 - works until you hit 20+ engineers, then it's chaos

Hidden Gotchas

SMS costs: International SMS charges are fucking brutal. One team got a $2,000 bill for paging their offshore team during a major incident.

User licensing: You pay per user, even if they're only backup on-call once a quarter. That part-time contractor who helps with deployments? That's another $41/month.

Data retention: They delete your incident history after a certain period on lower plans. Hope you don't need those post-mortem details from 2 years ago.

API rate limits: If you build a lot of custom integrations, you might hit API limits and need to pay for higher tiers.

The bottom line: PagerDuty costs a fortune but works. If downtime costs you real money, it's worth it. If you're just trying to avoid getting paged for disk space alerts, there are cheaper ways to solve that problem.