I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it.
I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate.<p>PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented.<p>The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of overrides.
I'd imagine some of the common tools like Workday should give you integrations for that.<p>Taking a holiday became like a 12 step program - email boss in advance, put in HR system request, cross check your PagerDuty schedule, negotiate a trade with another teammate for PagerDuty rotation, decline meetings, update your outlook calendar out-of-office, set your slack status & notifications, and re-remind everyone the week before you go.
It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off?<p>The other problem with these tools is you only get value out of them depending on the level of systems integration you spend your time on. If even a single system is not integrated & still sends emails/slacks/only updates a dashboard .. then PagerDuty is simply yet-another-tool to monitor, rather than the single pane of glass.
I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used.<p>I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want to make very sure you are aware why people still pay for Pagerduty. To compete, you need to be looking at 99.99% uptime or better (ideally 99.999%, 5 minutes of downtime a year) where 'uptime' is defined as the ability to exercise the entire notification stack. The moment someone's site has an outage and you aren't able to deliver the notification, you lose the customer and everyone they talk to.<p>I also worry about in-app notifications, but that's well-covered by everyone else's comments.<p>Pagerduty is vulnerable. Their UI is garbage. But you need to have bullet-proof uptime to take them down. It's a tough challenge and I wish you luck!
The main problem that Pagerduty solved at the time was deliverability of alerts. It was hard, and still is, to solve the problem of making sure the right people actually get the alerts. It was so expensive because they have redundant hardware all over the place with different providers, and they ran it all themselves, including SMS and phone gateways.<p>One of their key differentiators was that they were not built on AWS, so when AWS had an outage, you still knew about it. That also made it expensive.<p>With Pagerduty, you're mostly paying for reliability. The peace of mind knowing that someone <i>will</i> get notified when there is an outage.<p>This looks interesting, but from your page I'm not sure how you're better than Pagerduty.<p>App only notifications looks like a disadvantage to me. What if push notifications are down? What if I'm on DND?<p>Where is your infrastructure built? Is it on a cloud provider? What happens if that provider has an outage? If you want to build a PD competitor you have to build it on your own hardware in multiple datacenters owned by different people with different interconnects. If you haven't done that how will you stay up when your customer's provider goes down so that they know about it?
> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only.<p>This is prone to loss. I've struggled with notification delivery reliability on Android for <i>years</i>. If I don't touch my phone for a few hours and then wake the screen, I get a flurry of notifications all at once from the last few hours. But I need to be aware of pages in real-time.<p>There should really be a call and text notification channel else I don't see this getting much traction over PD.
Grafana OnCall is an OSS alternative (with a cloud offering) that works great out of the box if you are using Grafana/Grafana Alerting for monitoring your systems and want to have a pager-like system with phone/SMS/telegram integrations + it's own app. Best of all, it's self-hostable as well, which keeps me completely in control of my infra.<p><a href="https://grafana.com/products/oncall/" rel="nofollow">https://grafana.com/products/oncall/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/grafana/oncall">https://github.com/grafana/oncall</a>
Frustrated by expensive per-seat pricing and unfriendly contract terms, we looked for PagerDuty alternatives and found a fantastic open-source project called Uptime Kuma: <a href="https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma">https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma</a><p>Uptime Kuma is one of the few open-source projects that feels like a commercial product: polished user experience, frequent release cadence, and a rich set of features including monitoring PostgreSQL servers, Docker containers, and so much more. Its list of supported notification services is so long that I don't even recognize half of the options available. Truly impressive.<p>Side note and shameless plug… We love Uptime Kuma so much that we made it one of the cornerstone applications provided by Fortressa, which we think of as the “App Store for Open Source”: <a href="https://fortressa.com/" rel="nofollow">https://fortressa.com/</a>
I used to work at Opsgenie, which is one of the main competitors of Pagerduty, wish you good luck<p>Sms is a very good fallback channel for push notifications, especially when you don't have good internet coverage for an unexpected reason. I also personally hate phone calls, but I find it more effective to wake people up at night.
Can it have a calmer way to deliver notifications? The PagerDuty app goes directly from zero to klaxon, and the klaxons are horrible sounds from a bizarrely limited menu.<p>Ideally there would be a configurable escalation-to-the-same-user policy. I might want: vibrate-only notification, then normal notification, then critical notification, then phone call, in that order, with configurable delays. Ideally this would interact well with focus/sleep mode, so I could get a calm critical notification before full klaxons.<p>Other feature request: a way to tell the app to shut up already. I’ve occasionally dealt with an issue causing notifications every minute or so. The last thing I need while fixing it is more notifications to ack or silence.
> Don't lose alerts. We believe that crucial incidents need to have a dedicated context. Alerts sent out through Slack or Email can often be overlooked in those channels. That's why All Quiet notifications are app only.<p>Question - How does your app ensure incident notifications are received? I haven't used PagerDuty before, but for others I've used, we got a phone call for alerts and sometimes texts for warnings.<p>Recently, I've implemented Android notifications for an app. Even if you set "priority" : "high" (FCM level), some will still not be received right away, depending on battery level and polling frequency at device level. You may ask the user to disable battery optimizations for your app, but a call is still more reliable IMO.
Feature request: "Quiet wakeup mode" that vibrates the user's Apple Watch for a minute before making any sound. Then start the sound at the lowest volume (inaudible) and slowly increase it over 1 minute. This would be supremely useful for being oncall while sleeping near another person.<p>Feature request 2: "Earplug mode" that slowly increases volume and vibration from zero to max, and stays at max for 1 minute. Support alternating various tones, sounds, and voices.
Why is the pricing per user? Is that what your costs are most dependent on? I bet not.<p>I'd argue $5/user is just teaser pricing on its way to PagerDuty's $21+/user.<p>Regardless, cool project—happy to see more competition.
You can build your own Pagerduty, feature-wise. But a system like that requires higher high availability than your app.<p>Pagerduty's SLA for availability is 99.9% (3 nines) which is up to 43.8 minutes per month.<p>If you build your Pagerduty clone on AWS, your theoretical maximum availability is 99.99%.
Seeing this post, I went over to check how much I pay PagerDuty.<p>49$ per user per month!!!
And I don't need the features!
I wanted to downgrade to the 29$ immediately, at least.
And then I saw this: <a href="https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments" rel="nofollow">https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/billing-invoices-payments</a><p>I have to contact their sales to downgrade.<p>I'm furious.
I won't downgrade. I'll cancel completely and move to your app.
Would love to see more disruption in this space. Like others have said it's actually amazing how bad the calendar/scheduling portion of PagerDuty is. Multiple places I've worked we ended up making our own interface to managing schedules because the UI at PagerDuty is so bad. Also, people mentioning the rock solid reliability of PagerDuty likely don't have good monitoring of PagerDuty. When I worked on monitoring in the past we regularly encountered delayed notifications and ingestion failures. Pulling up their status page right now confirms they still have multiple issues a month. At a past employer we had our notification system actually check outstanding alert status and fall back to direct SMS when the ingestion latency was too high.<p>I worked on pygerduty, a python client library for PagerDuty, at a past job so I spent a lot of time talking to people at PagerDuty but I think they stopped inviting me to their "Founder's Club" meetings when I told them I didn't care about AI Alerts and wanted better UIs for scheduling and better reliability.
I'm surprised to see you used Mongo (<a href="https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabbitmq-zeromq-kafka-etc">https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabb...</a>) after all the replies in this thread citing "delivery reliability"<p>What did you find that made NoSQL a good fit for tracking incidents and escalations?
At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there. Ideally you to optimize around a number of factors - vacations (which can be auto populated) for one but also fairness, shift closeness (some labor laws here), holidays, or individual preferences (e.g I like to hike on the weekends). You then also need a tool for short-term trades/overrides to basically poll the team to see who can take/trade the shift to avoid the diffusion of responsibility of yelling into a slack chennel and complexity of negotiating trades. What is nice about this is that we can setup a <i>daily</i> oncall so if you have a re-occuring weekly obligation that is incompatible with being oncall we can set it up so you never get scheduled for that day (provided there is enough slack for vacations and so on).
Bravo. PagerDuty is long overdue to be replaced by a better service. Their pricing is exorbitant, and their sales / account team forces you into year long contracts to buy seats you don't need. We are currently being threatened with an $8k bill because they claim we didn't "cancel renewal" in time.
You mention price as a motivation to build allquiet. I have been happy the last couple of years with <a href="https://simplepush.io/" rel="nofollow">https://simplepush.io/</a> which is 12.49$ per year (and similarly app only).
> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only.<p>Does this mean that there are no text/call options? I don't have a smartphone to install apps, but haven't had problems with being on on-call rotations with some of the other tools mentioned.
Is there a notification system that tries to be a little smarter about escalations? That seems a difficult area. A developer doesn’t know - should this be escalated, or should it not? Is it sufficiently impactful, or not? The same questions arise in customer success who generally error on the side of raising the escalation level at the expense of rest. This seems like an area that could be vastly improved with statistics (something like Robust Decisions) or machine learning. I haven’t seen that, and wonder if others have?
PagerTree (<a href="https://pagertree.com" rel="nofollow">https://pagertree.com</a>) is a great alternative to PD.<p>- Super simple interface, with a drag n' drop on-call scheduler.
- Supports escalations, calendar overrides, and SSO
- Half the price
For the OP, you've got a typo in your docs.
<a href="https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet" rel="nofollow">https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet</a><p>> by explicit excalation<p>should be 'escalation'.<p>Ps. I'm also in Berlin, and would be interested to have a chat: this product looks interesting. Email in my profile!
I would recommend running through your docs with a native english speaker.<p>Congratulations on the launch! Be proud of what you've put together here, and looks to be all by yourself too? The infra for a site, backend, and polished mobile apps for both platforms on your own.<p>From another "I'm doing it all myself" dude, very well done!
I worked for a company that used PagerDuty, but eventually moved to a service that provided actual physical pagers. Well, they looked like 1990s pagers, but connected to Wifi. Really cool. Not sure why more don't do this.
Will you be using PagerDuty or another competitor to monitor your own service? I always wonder what these companies use... or if they rely on their own service. And if so, then if their service breaks how would they know?
I am so glad someone is doing this. I’ve been using PD for 10 years and still can’t figure out the UI. Things that should be dead simple (IMO) like adjusting schedules requires a separate spreadsheet to figure out.
(This is my first post after lurking with an account for several years)<p>Congrats on the launch, you've done a great job. The app looks good and you've clearly and persuasively differentiated it from the competition.
I can recommend GoAlert for this... It works really well!<p><a href="https://github.com/target/goalert">https://github.com/target/goalert</a>
<i>I'm frustrated with the pricing of Pager Duty, so I'm developing my own solution and making it available here</i><p>What about a?<p>It won't do b, c, d, x, and y, that's a deal breaker for me.<p>Can I do d, f, t, m - no? Ugh, nice try good luck on your project.