J. Steven Y.

Site Operations Manager

Computer Software

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

7/27/2016

"Finally a Tool that gets it!"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

The fact that I can combine escalation/rotation schedules directly into a tool with consolidated monitoring was exciting. The added bonus of being able to route between various escalation points and direct communications for incidents is simply mind-blolwing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

The only thing thus far I have slight issue with is not having a tabbed view of environments. I would like an easier way of viewing what is production versus pre-prod alerts to better filter what takes precedence. I can do this in a round about way with transmogrification of incoming events and manual filtering, but I would like it to be simpler and built in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Just do it! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am solving the major problem of having far too many places to look when monitoring environments. With the consolidated view of our systems into one portal, my teams are able to focus attention on a front line of alerting. The system then specifies where an alert was generated; giving direction on a logical path to follow during triage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Filipe F.

Cloud Engineer

Computer Software

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

9/1/2016

"The best tool for incident routing and escalations"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

The incident timeline is always showing what are the recent events on our infrastructure. I also like the way it is easy to integrate external alerting tools like CloudWatch, Zabbix, NewRelic and even simple bash scripts can use just curl to create an alert.

The follow-the-sun team rotation is also awesome, we use that on our team and it was really simple to setup and get started using. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

It is a little bit expensive which makes difficult for smaller companies to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Let VictorOps be your central place for incidents. Point every other system to inject its alerts into VictorOps, that way you'll have a better experience with it, then you can use the transmogrifier to have filter/ignore/improve your alerts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

Incident handling, on-call scheduling. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Matthew F.

IT Technical Support

Information Technology and Services

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

7/8/2016

"Excellent service for tracking server outages as they happen"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

Instantaneous alerting for outage, ability to delegate alerts to team members. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

Since the calls use text to speech, its sometimes difficult to hear the name of the server which has an outage, though once aware you can just check the app. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Research and make sure the service has exactly what you need. Our needs are very basic but the VictorOps software is capable of much more advanced tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

Being in charge of the servers at my company, I need to be able to quickly be aware of and respond to any outages that occur. VictorOps is easily integrated into our existing monitoring software, and quickly calls my cell phone since I'm less likely to immediately be able to see the emails coming in. We've never had an issue with the reporting, and since all the phone numbers originate from the same area code, the calls are easily identifiable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Chad L.

Director, Technical Operations

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/3/2016

"An alert funnel"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

VictorOps has given us a place to send all alerts. Continuous integration, infrastructure monitoring, Zendesk, etc. That means that we spend less time configuring alerts in multiple different applications and instead configure them once in VictorOps. It also means not having to alert 20 different people, only the on-call user will know (if we choose so) the alert is happening and this has fixed the alert fatigue we were experiencing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

The on-call scheduling could use some tweaking. It works well for teams that hand off on-call on a consistent schedule, but we have one team that might hand off on-call multiple times during the day and the hours might not always be the same day to to day. Having a calendaring system (not unlike Outlook meetings) as an option would be handy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Take a look at the integration they offer and determine the value proposition for your company. For us they had about all of the bases covered and for the ones they don't we've been able to write hooks for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

The biggest item we were looking to solve for was having a consistent way of handling alerts. Every new system we use has it's own set of logic and rarely do they have the ability to alert only an on-call individual. This leaves you alerting far more people than you should just to hope that someone responds, this is a sure fired way to make sure that EVERYONE ignores the problem, assuming someone else is handling it.

We're now responding to and resolving issues much quicker because if you get paged you know you're the one responsible for starting triage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cameron H.

Site Reliability Engineer

Internet

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

6/2/2016

"VictorOps really does make On-call suck Less"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

I love their responsiveness to the community and their working directly with us to make the best of their solution. Web hooks and other features are coming along nicely. The company really does well in the DevOps realm and provides CI/CD on their product.

Any time I have an issue or a feature request the team is quick to respond and to implement requests.

The team also is a leader in the DevOps community and they are willing to share their experiences with other teams out there.

I also love the fact that they are a local company so we are able to collaborate with them in person. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

Nothing that I have disliked hasn't already been addressed. The one they are working on right now is the sms length sent from VO but that is more on the Nagios side of the house than VO. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Talk to their sales team. Look at playing around with a sandbox. Checkout onsite demos. These people are awesome at what they do and they integrate really well with multiple monitoring systems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are getting all our monitoring through VO now and are ability to respond to alerts has increased dramatically. We are also able to see trending and are actively working to get play books and ticketing integrated with the alarms through the transmogrification tools.

As we continue to flesh out our monitoring system we look forward to integrating even more into out system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sky L.

Senior DevOps Engineer

Retail

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/25/2016

"VictorOps - Centralizing alerting and improving communication"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

The ChatOps nature of VictorOps is one of the biggest reasons we chose it over competitors. They are a growing company and very responsive to customers needs. Anytime we've ever had an issue or requested a feature they've replied immediately and kept us informed of their progress. Aso, integrations! The amount of integrations (DataDog, HipChat, StatusPage, etc.) already matches our existing needs and it continues to grow. On top of all that the Transmogrifier has been very useful for us in amending alerts with critical information like graphs and Runbooks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

The API is not as robust as I would like, but there are many built in integration's. That is being corrected though with many improvements being added and in the pipeline. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

VictorOps can take a bit of time to set up and get everyone on board and comfortable using the tool, but once it's done everyone will be happier. Managing Alerting and on-call rotations without this type of tooling is untenable as your organization grows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

Initially we used a competitor for part of our company, but the rest was still using phone numbers on a spreadsheet to contact people during an incident. We used VictorOps to centralize all of our alerting and got everyone into this tool. The individual paging policies and team escalations made contacting the right person a breeze, and has dramatically improved our incident resolution times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Aaron A.

DevOps Consultant and Evangelist

Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

5/24/2016

"VictorOps makes on-call suck less through improved visibility"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

VictorOps has a very clean, streamlined approach to alerting and some excellent DevOps philosophies tied into product design that really create a top-notch product.

My favorite feature is the Transmorgrifier that allows you to attach annotations and runbooks directly to an alert. So in the same breath that you get alerted about a problem, all the tools you need to fix it, can be linked. Very, Very handy.

The timeline layout lends itself well to the ChatOps philosophy and quickly allows you to see exactly whats happening. If your response is completed in Chat as well, it can all be exported in a single PostMortem Review. Very handy for quickly getting from Problem to Fix to Review and improvement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

The only real issue I have with VictorOps is the available API. There are some issues with the quality and quantity of the API currently published, but they are working on this now. They have also improved with the availability of outbound Webhooks that I have not yet had a chance to dive deeply into and incorporate in our own processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Definitely get engages with the VictorOps product team. They're very communicative about their product and will do many things to make sure their product works for you. We have been nothing but satisfied with the product, but more importantly, the VictorOps team and community. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

This product has solved our need for an on-call alerting system while also providing additional functionality beyond simple on-call handling. While it fits the simple roles of alerting the on-call technician and getting awareness of problems in the production environment, it also allows us to enforce an awareness in our Ops community about ongoing issues and ties in well to our existing processes.

With the available API we have also been able to automate our telephone on-call support queue using the existing scheduling in VictorOps, including the ability to override the current schedule for vacations, etc. This has been a great benefit as we now only have a single place to manage all of our on-call scheduling. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Broadcast Media

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/29/2016

"The Way On-Call alerting should be"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

Hands down my favorite aspect of Victorops, besides the fact that it integrates with nearly every monitoring tool on earth, is the Ack Back feature. With our previous on-call tool, alerts would be routed to the on-call sysadmin and there was no way knowing if it was a single flap or a critical issue until we actually dug in and investigated.

With Victorops, when Zabbix sends a critical alert followed by an OK alert, it automagically resolves the alert and informs the on-call engineer that his services are no longer required. It saves a lot of time and stress and is hands down my favorite feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

The integration with our Zabbix server was not as easy as I had initially hoped. They have automated scripts that were supposed to set everything up, but I had to manually go in and edit their code to be compatible with our installation. I notified their support team of the issue and they said they would be addressing it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Definitely give it a try. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

The benefits are primarily noticed by the on-call team. False positives, network hiccups, larger than normal volume that may cause message queues to hit an alert threshold, were all issues that had to be manually investigated even if they cleared up 3-5 seconds after the alert was triggered.

Now, we get more sleep and it's easier to focus on when a true alert gets triggered. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dave N.

Director of DevOps

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

3/28/2016

"Does what it says on the tin - and more!"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

VictorOps is the Cadillac of alert management. The timeline and 'social' aspects of VO are what differentiate it from simple "beep this person at this time" offerings and having used it for a few years now, it's hard to imagine operating any other way. Being on call can be stressful but being able to easily 'loop in' help via the chat/timeline features is absolute gold.

In addition, the ability to change (VO calls them "transmogrify" - thanks Calvin!) alerts on the fly is a great feature. For example, we transmogrify our alerts to include a link to a runbook, a direct link to the logs for the service and the status of whatever public cloud we are using. You can also re-route alerts dynamically to a different team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

I think my only dislike is with the mobile app. The app generates alerts using push notification with a sound tied to the alert. Alerts have 2 status - alert (duh!) and resolved. Alas, there is only one sound you can associate with an alert. So you get woken up to RED ALERT but it's also RED ALERT when an issue is resolved. It would be great to have separate sounds per state. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

Evaluate VO head-to-head with the main competitor in this space and you'll see that VO does everything AND more. Don't underestimate how helpful the timeline and chat functionality can be when working on an issue at 2am Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main problems we were solving were two fold:

1) Consolidate alerts from many systems into one place. We had alerts coming from around 6 different sources, each of which had to be individually configured with email addresses, etc. With VictorOps, we just funnel the alerts into VO and the logic for who gets notified is now in one place.

2) Alert the right person. As per above, some systems (like Nagios) do have the ability to route alerts but others just send an email to an address. We wanted all alerts to be routed to the correct person or team. By routing them all into VO, we can now do this. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ian N.

Cloud Services Engineer

Computer Software

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

3/16/2016

"Victor Ops, the not always silent but happily added team mate!"

5/5

What do you like best about Splunk On-Call?

From an operation perspective victor ops has allowed my organization to go from purely a reactionary based operational agenda, to a proactive team with awareness filled to the brims. We have the capability to tune and modify our configuration to generate even more detailed reports surrounding events that occur during shifts. Honestly the best feature would have to be the seamless capabilities when switching from mobile to desktop/laptop interface. I love the ability to ack an alert on my mobile device and read the full details, and then go to my system and write up any annotations corresponding to the alert I received. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Splunk On-Call?

So far you have the ability to isolate alerts to a specific team. I think a great addition would be the ability to boil down alerts to a specific team member. We have had several instances where there is only one resource available during a window, and since they are a member of multiple teams an alert was missed. Granted the alerts were not critical or customer impacting but the potential was there. Otherwise this is one of the most solid Alerting/On-Call/Dev tools I have utilized in quite some time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Splunk On-Call:

If you are considering using VictorOps then you are one step in the right direction! Step two is contacting victorops for a demo or trial and see for yourself exactly how they are changing the shape of the industry to allow us to provide better service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Splunk On-Call solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are constantly evolving our integration with victor ops and expanding the benefits to more teams. Currently we are in the process of bringing our development team closer to our alerting system so they are more in tune with the day to day operational challenges that the ops team is facing. Having the ability to route alerts to a different team so as to bring their attention to the matter is a godsend for my organization. We all know that communication between teams can be a challenge. With victor ops a good portion of those challenges are no longer a factor! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.