7 ms·

PagerDuty (YC S10) Makes Sure Your Team Knows When A Server Goes Down

94 points by alexsolo 16y ago

OmarIsmail 16y ago
Congrats Alex and Andrew!! That makes two UW SE2006 startups covered on TC :) 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!
- agmiklas 16y ago
  Thanks Omar. With Baskar, I think we might also have the distinction of being the first Comp Eng 2006 startup on TC, too :)
- jayair 16y ago
  Yay for UW!
- justin_credible 16y ago
  Congrats on the coverage you guys. Looking forward to seeing what else is up your sleeves.
rgrieselhuber 16y ago
Congrats! PagerDuty rocks.
arnorhs 16y ago
Nice. Good job guys. 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?
- alexsolo 16y ago
  The main reason we haven't offered a perpetually free account is because we're a bit different than other SaaS companies: hosting isn't our only cost, we also have to pay for each phone and SMS alert we send. 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.
  - arnorhs 16y ago
    Ok, that's understandable. My default thinking would be: offer e-mail only notifications for free users, but you made a good point. Your target audience/market is obviously not the casual user/blogger type so it makes perfect sense.
  - lsc 16y ago
    Might I suggest a free account that is limited to email alerts? It probably wouldn't cost you much, and it wouldn't cut into your 'business class' business... but it'd be a nice way for small timers to get a taste of your service monitoring their personal stuff (and then maybe recommend it to the boss)
    - btilly 16y ago
      I'd guess that anyone who needs to receive text messages already knows about the email to sms gateways that their phone carriers provide.
      - lsc 16y ago
        yeah, and many people disable those due to spam problems.
      - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
        But you don't really need this service for that. Nagios sends directly to those (just like any other email address). Of course, the two-way SMS that lets you wake up the other guys if needed would break under this.
johns 16y ago
Congrats guys!
mgorsuch 16y ago
I love PagerDuty, and it has already paid for itself many times over. The fact that it will phone my house if I miss the text messages has been a big win over AT&T's lousy coverage in my area.
- agmiklas 16y ago
  Thanks very much! It's always great to hear that PagerDuty is working well for people.
hartror 16y ago
Main Question What uptime guarantees do you guys make? I saw on your answer on your FAQ but if I was selling this to the powers that be I don't know if your answer would cut it. 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.
- alexsolo 16y ago
  We've taken steps to minimize outages as much as possible. The system is distributed across 3 data centers, with fast automatic rollover in case of a data center outage. We've architected the system to ensure we never drop alerts. PagerDuty integrates with monitoring via email or API; if we receive the message on our end, we guarantee you will be alerted. We've had a few incidents where we have delayed sending out the phone call or SMS alert for a few minutes, but we've never dropped an alert. 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.
  - alexsolo 16y ago
    I'd love to hear what some of you think about SLAs. Is it worth implementing one?
paul9290 16y ago
Nice! DO you have a link to the API details?
- alexsolo 16y ago
  Yep, right here: http://www.pagerduty.com/docs/api-integration-guide http://www.pagerduty.com/docs/api-integration-guide
dmor 16y ago
These guys were the Twilio developer contest winner back in November http://contests.twilio.com/2009/11/outbound-notifications-alerts-1.html http://contests.twilio.com/2009/11/outbound-notifications-al... congrats Andrew, Alex, Baskar and the rest of the team!
- agmiklas 16y ago
  Thanks Danielle! Twilio plays a big role here at PagerDuty. You guys have been great. More importantly, on the few occasions where's there's been service hiccups, we've never had problems getting hold of someone at Twilio. Can't say the same about other providers we've tried.
  - dmor 16y ago
    You're welcome, and I'm happy to hear you've been satisfied with Twilio's service - we're really passionate about doing it right and we'll always be here to help Btw, I've left you a "gift" in your Twilio account... whenever you happen to check your account balance :)
    - bpuvanathasan 16y ago
      Thanks Danielle!
epall 16y ago
We just picked up a couple of real, physical pagers because we're unwilling to trust SMS delivery.
- agmiklas 16y ago
  This is actually one of the big reasons we built PagerDuty. SMS is not as reliable as people think -- messages get dropped or delayed by hours all the time. 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.
leelin 16y ago
What a great name with a nice inside-joke component! The first question that went through my mind was "did they used to work at Amazon?" Was PagerDuty.com available or did you guys have to buy it? It's a similar level of cleverness as Lobby7, if anyone remembers that one...
- agmiklas 16y ago
  Amazingly enough, pagerduty.com was available. We were totally blown away by that -- thought for sure it would've been taken.
fedster 16y ago
congrats guys - awesome work!
andrewljohnson 16y ago
I'm usually pretty optimistic on new YC start-ups, but I'm not sure the world needs another uptime monitor. 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."
- johns 16y ago
  It's all about execution. Did we need another file storage service? Did we need another web site builder? There is a lot of room for companies to do existing things better.
- alexsolo 16y ago
  I agree. That's why we don't do uptime monitoring, or any kind of monitoring really. 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.
  - btilly 16y ago
    If you haven't done it then I'm going to suggest that you also work on mobile apps to make phones be as loud and annoying as possible. Yeah, it sounds stupid. But a random Blackberry can be as loud as a Skytel pager, even if it isn't by default. And it is worthwhile for someone on duty to make it so.
    - lsc 16y ago
      you know what I want? I want some sort of arm band to put my cellphone (or, better, a giant bluetooth vibrator) so that when I sleep, I can be woken by my pager without waking other people who may also be in the bed.
superk 16y ago
But can you send to my pager?

94 points by alexsolo 16y ago

Congrats Alex and Andrew!! That makes two UW SE2006 startups covered on TC :) 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!

agmiklas 16y ago
Thanks Omar. With Baskar, I think we might also have the distinction of being the first Comp Eng 2006 startup on TC, too :)
jayair 16y ago
Yay for UW!
justin_credible 16y ago
Congrats on the coverage you guys. Looking forward to seeing what else is up your sleeves.

rgrieselhuber 16y ago

Congrats! PagerDuty rocks.

arnorhs 16y ago

Nice. Good job guys. 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?

alexsolo 16y ago
The main reason we haven't offered a perpetually free account is because we're a bit different than other SaaS companies: hosting isn't our only cost, we also have to pay for each phone and SMS alert we send. 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.
- arnorhs 16y ago
  Ok, that's understandable. My default thinking would be: offer e-mail only notifications for free users, but you made a good point. Your target audience/market is obviously not the casual user/blogger type so it makes perfect sense.
- lsc 16y ago
  Might I suggest a free account that is limited to email alerts? It probably wouldn't cost you much, and it wouldn't cut into your 'business class' business... but it'd be a nice way for small timers to get a taste of your service monitoring their personal stuff (and then maybe recommend it to the boss)
  - btilly 16y ago
    I'd guess that anyone who needs to receive text messages already knows about the email to sms gateways that their phone carriers provide.
    - lsc 16y ago
      yeah, and many people disable those due to spam problems.
    - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
      But you don't really need this service for that. Nagios sends directly to those (just like any other email address). Of course, the two-way SMS that lets you wake up the other guys if needed would break under this.

johns 16y ago

Congrats guys!

mgorsuch 16y ago

I love PagerDuty, and it has already paid for itself many times over. The fact that it will phone my house if I miss the text messages has been a big win over AT&T's lousy coverage in my area.

agmiklas 16y ago
Thanks very much! It's always great to hear that PagerDuty is working well for people.

hartror 16y ago

Main Question What uptime guarantees do you guys make? I saw on your answer on your FAQ but if I was selling this to the powers that be I don't know if your answer would cut it. 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.

alexsolo 16y ago
We've taken steps to minimize outages as much as possible. The system is distributed across 3 data centers, with fast automatic rollover in case of a data center outage. We've architected the system to ensure we never drop alerts. PagerDuty integrates with monitoring via email or API; if we receive the message on our end, we guarantee you will be alerted. We've had a few incidents where we have delayed sending out the phone call or SMS alert for a few minutes, but we've never dropped an alert. 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.
- alexsolo 16y ago
  I'd love to hear what some of you think about SLAs. Is it worth implementing one?

paul9290 16y ago

Nice! DO you have a link to the API details?

alexsolo 16y ago
Yep, right here: http://www.pagerduty.com/docs/api-integration-guide http://www.pagerduty.com/docs/api-integration-guide

dmor 16y ago

These guys were the Twilio developer contest winner back in November http://contests.twilio.com/2009/11/outbound-notifications-alerts-1.html http://contests.twilio.com/2009/11/outbound-notifications-al... congrats Andrew, Alex, Baskar and the rest of the team!

agmiklas 16y ago
Thanks Danielle! Twilio plays a big role here at PagerDuty. You guys have been great. More importantly, on the few occasions where's there's been service hiccups, we've never had problems getting hold of someone at Twilio. Can't say the same about other providers we've tried.
- dmor 16y ago
  You're welcome, and I'm happy to hear you've been satisfied with Twilio's service - we're really passionate about doing it right and we'll always be here to help Btw, I've left you a "gift" in your Twilio account... whenever you happen to check your account balance :)
  - bpuvanathasan 16y ago
    Thanks Danielle!

epall 16y ago

We just picked up a couple of real, physical pagers because we're unwilling to trust SMS delivery.

agmiklas 16y ago
This is actually one of the big reasons we built PagerDuty. SMS is not as reliable as people think -- messages get dropped or delayed by hours all the time. 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.

leelin 16y ago

What a great name with a nice inside-joke component! The first question that went through my mind was "did they used to work at Amazon?" Was PagerDuty.com available or did you guys have to buy it? It's a similar level of cleverness as Lobby7, if anyone remembers that one...

agmiklas 16y ago
Amazingly enough, pagerduty.com was available. We were totally blown away by that -- thought for sure it would've been taken.

fedster 16y ago

congrats guys - awesome work!

andrewljohnson 16y ago

I'm usually pretty optimistic on new YC start-ups, but I'm not sure the world needs another uptime monitor. 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."

johns 16y ago
It's all about execution. Did we need another file storage service? Did we need another web site builder? There is a lot of room for companies to do existing things better.
alexsolo 16y ago
I agree. That's why we don't do uptime monitoring, or any kind of monitoring really. 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.
- btilly 16y ago
  If you haven't done it then I'm going to suggest that you also work on mobile apps to make phones be as loud and annoying as possible. Yeah, it sounds stupid. But a random Blackberry can be as loud as a Skytel pager, even if it isn't by default. And it is worthwhile for someone on duty to make it so.
  - lsc 16y ago
    you know what I want? I want some sort of arm band to put my cellphone (or, better, a giant bluetooth vibrator) so that when I sleep, I can be woken by my pager without waking other people who may also be in the bed.

superk 16y ago

But can you send to my pager?