One of our customers was using Pagerduty for on-call schedule management and alerting. They were considering a cheaper alternative as they found it to be expensive for their specific use case. They use artificial intelligence and augmented reality to connect blind people to highly trained, remotely-located agents. As their business is solely dependent on this agent service, they needed an economical alternative to get the right people on to the issues in real-time.
CloudEagle’s platform scanned its database of 150,000 applications to find three cheaper alternatives to Pagerduty which support all their existing use cases – Opsgenie, Zenduty, and Squadcast.
When would a customer choose Opsgenie?
When a customer needs lots of integrations built into the alerting and on-call management solution. It takes alerts from different integrated tools and routes them through different escalation paths for different alerts at different times. It has a number of useful features such as alerting via multiple channels, routing rules, reporting, and bidirectional integrations.
Integrations:
Over 200 integrations – Slack, Datadog, Jira, Amazon Cloud Watch, Zendesk, Zapier, Solarwinds, Dynatrace and Grafana, Splunk
Pros:
- Offers a free plan for small teams.
- Excellent reviews as an alerting and on-call schedule management tool
Cons:
- Though Opsgenie offers a free plan, most of the incident management features, alert enrichment, and notification policies are available only in the higher plans which can shoot up the cost.
- Less focus on the incident response side of things.
Customers:
Glassdoor, Bitly, Looker, The Washington Post
Pricing:
Free – up to 5 users
Essentials – $9/user/month
Standard – $19/user/month
Enterprise – $29/user/month
When should a customer Zenduty?
When a customer wants a platform that supports both – alert and on-call management and automation, and orchestration of incident response. Thus Zenduty excels through its end-to-end incident management capabilities by not just enabling you to respond to alerts quickly but helps you to stick with incident resolution throughout. It offers response features like custom incident roles, interactive incident playbooks, SLA alerts, and incident context.
Integrations:
Slack, Zendesk, Grafana, Datadog, Amazon Cloud Watch, Azure, Solarwinds and many more.
Pros:
- One of the killer features mentioned in many reviews is custom routing rules that let you route alerts with precision to the specific teams or subject matter experts depending on the services/customers/components that are affected.
- The platform also provides playbooks and contextual information for rapid incident analysis.
- Zenduty’s incident response capabilities are heavily influenced by Google’s SRE practices.
- End-to-end incident management in slack and teams.
Cons:
- The lack of in-app mobile alerts.
Pricing:
- Free – $0 per user/month
- Starter – $5 per user/month
- Growth – $14 per user/month
- Enterprise -$21 per user/month
When should a customer choose Squadcast?
Squadcast is ideal for teams who are looking to implement the SRE best practices and not merely manage on-call schedules and responses. Squadcast helps to maximize platform reliability and deliver outstanding customer experiences. Squadcast allows your team to keep an eye on site Reliability Objectives (SLOs) like latency, memory usage, status codes, etc. This way it is much easier to control SLA compliance and error budget expenditures.
Integrations:
AWS Cloudwatch, Azure, Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana, Jira, New Relic
Pros:
- Easy to set up and use.
- Excellent support.
- Highly customizable alerting setup.
Cons:
- As per some reviews, Squacast doesn’t have the ability to override volume controls or send repeated alerts to the same target, which is a serious limitation as an incident management system.
- Does not allow attaching an image or screenshot with an alert.
- Lacks many features as compared to competitors as mentioned in reviews.
Customers:
Hippo Video, Udaan, Yourstory, NestEgg
Pricing:
- Free – up to 5 users
- Pro – $9 per user/month billed annually
- Enterprise – $19 per user/month billed annually
The customer chose Zenduty and saved up to 70% of the cost they were earlier spending for Pagerduty. Zenduty has more affordable pricing and offers similar alerting and on-call management features as Pagerduty. In addition to this, compared to other tools, Zenduty has custom routing rules and a frictionless path to incident resolution.
The customer saved tons of time in searching for a more affordable alternative to Pagerduty. With the insights CloudEagle provides, they felt less overwhelmed by all the options and better prepared to make an informed decision.
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