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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

I used Splunk at a previous job and that’s one of my few/only complaints with it. Great tool but extremely expensive for what you get. Datadog is the same way as well as Pagerduty. There’s not enough competition in these spaces

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That's super true of PagerDuty. It's a pretty good product and cheap when you only have a few people on it. However, the jump from the basic license to the next tier is HUGE and any add-ons you might need (ie. webhook triggers) bump the price up even more. Just having a simple monitoring solution with >10 people could cost you $100's a month.

That said, every other product in this space is crap. I'm not sure why though. This seems like a pretty good market for disruption. Maybe there is some hidden "problem" that I don't know about.

what's your take on xMatters?

My take on xmatters is that it gives you some building blocks to build a decent paging system, and has a fair amount of flexibility, but many things that work out of the box, or with a little bit of configuration in PagerDuty require a non-trivial amount of work in xmatters to set up. And you will likely run into limitations.

PagerDuty is extremely expensive and I decided to disrupt the market a little bit by creating All Quiet: You might want to check it out: https://allquiet.app

Why is pagerduty hard to switch off of? It has all kinds of useless and expensive bells and whistles, while the core functionality is a commodity that several companies offer.

We moved vendors a few time and it wasn’t that painful.

Who else will call a POTS phone line when there's an alert?

Fact: I'm not going to hear my phone ping in the middle of the night. I'm much more likely to hear my phone ring.

Depending on the team, a phone tree in twilio could do the trick, with calls made down the list if people do not pick up for escalation.

What happens when Twilio is down? Same questions for your email, sms and server. Part of the difficulty is guaranteed uptime and PagerDuty is rock solid in that regards.

Pager Duty uses Twilio.

NodePing

Calling landline is table stakes for all “paging as a service” companies.

Hmm, are you referring to their Observability product or SIEM capabilities? There's a wild amount of competition in the Observability side of things, but SIEM not so much.

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