The best part about PagerDuty is its ability to minimize operational mayhem during actual production incidents, especially for firms where every second of downtime is associated with lost dollars, customer confidence, and regulatory risk. For example, in a fintech firm, we had an incident with our payment reconciliation system whereby our payment reconciliation process would fail at times during our settlement periods due to delays in queue processing between our bank partners and internal ledgers. Prior to implementing structured incident management, there was chaos in the way alerts were being handled via our Slack channels and email. However, after introducing PagerDuty, there was a defined process of alert escalations based on services. Every time latency levels increased, the relevant backend, infra, and database engineering teams would be escalated through the incident process to help minimize any delay in resolving the issue. Another benefit about PagerDuty was its ability to cut down on noise and prioritize critical alerts. When you work within fast-growing systems and event-driven architectures, it is easy for engineers to get used to too many alerts.

What really stands out is its unmatched reliability and sophisticated incident orchestration. The platform is incredibly effective at cutting through alert noise with AIOps, so our team is only paged for high-priority, actionable incidents. The on-call scheduling and escalation policies are also very robust, which gives us full confidence that critical issues won’t go unacknowledged.

I use PagerDuty for note-taking and incident management. I like the ease of use interface, which is user-friendly and makes things relatively simple.