[HereBeBeasties]

I am in management. I evaluated most of the on-duty tools that are available, at the cost of a couple of days of my personal time. At least they all have free trials. PageDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call (ex VictorOps), AlertOps, Squadcast, TaskCall, etc. etc.

They are all surprisingly hopeless. For example, none of them have SCIM integration to make managing your teams in them automatic. All of them have clunky calendar overrides. None of them seem to integrate well with Outlook / Google Calendar, particularly none take into account holidays. Many have no Terraform provider to manage them, and the ones that do are clunky at best, and hard to set-up/manage. OIDC is hit-and-miss. For example, for PagerDuty you need to call up their support team and get them to manually tweak something that's not in the UI settings to get OIDC for Azure AD sign-ins to work.

It's not that management is apathetic. We genuinely don't want to engineers spending their time working around vendor inadequacies and lashing this stuff together with barely-maintained scripting that they resent having to write in the first place. Why would anyone want that? Given there's seemingly no product out there that lets you avoid that, what should we do? When they're all rubbish, you either choose PagerDuty because everyone does, or Opsgenie as a protest vote, because at least both have Terraform providers and plug-ins for other things like Slack and Sentry, etc.

[steveBK123]

My point is not that management is bad & doesn't care, but that management has different priorities & cares about different things than the people using the app.

All of us have talked on this thread about all the things PD is bad at, but few have come to the defense with a list of things its great at.

The sales pitch, I am sure, to management is more along the lines of - metrics, dashboards, reports, "accountability", response times, yada yada.. and because management write the checks, I'm sure thats an area they do deliver.