Learn more about how incident.io compares to PagerDuty
Before we dive into a comparison of PagerDuty and incident.io, it’s worth taking a step back to understand incident management and the lifecycle of an incident a little more holistically. Broadly speaking, every incident follows a relatively well-defined set of stages:
On paper, PagerDuty covers entire lifecycle of an incident, but in our experience – and the experiences of our customers – we’ve observed it to be strongest in the alerting phases, and weaker at helping them to respond to and learn from incidents. At incident.io, we believe that we’re the most sensible incident response and management tool for companies looking to do more than just alert. We’ll explain why below.
Today, PagerDuty is both a integration with and an alternative to incident.io. We offer a powerful integration with their on-call management and alerting capabilities, allowing you to trigger incident.io incidents from PagerDuty alerts, and to escalate to other folks as necessary.
PagerDuty is great (and probably the most popular tool) for alerting engineering teams when something goes wrong. However, PagerDuty doesn’t offer as much when it comes to incident coordination, response and follow-up — arguably the most important aspects of incident management.
This is where incident.io comes in.
We take responsibility for everything that happens from the moment that you’re woken up by a PagerDuty alert, up until you close your incident and understand what went wrong, and right through until you have the last action item completed.
Most of our customers use incident.io in conjunction with PagerDuty (or an alternative alerting system). This page is designed to walk you through a typical incident response process in both PagerDuty and incident.io.
Let’s break down how incident.io compares to PagerDuty across a few steps in the incident management process.
incident.io | PagerDuty | |
---|---|---|
Declaring | Within Slack, incidents can be declared using a simple /inc command. From here, all subsequent actions can be done using the same command | You can either declare an incident in the PagerDuty dashboard, or within Slack using the /pd command. However, all subsequent response actions must be done in the web dashboard. |
Responding | With the /inc command in Slack, you can initiate several response actions, such as designating incident leads, severity, and much more in just a few click | Because there are no Slack commands, all incident response actions must be communicated and raised manually. Because of this, it’s difficult to have a streamlined and highly visible incident response process. |
Status updates | Using the /inc command in Slack, you can quickly and easily provide status updates for your team | Templated SMS or email updates can be sent by Pagerduty customers on higher-paying tiers and are not available via Slack |
Follow-ups | Through our integrations with Jira, Linear, and others, follow-up actions are created and logged automatically. | Incidents cannot be linked to follow-up actions. |
incident.io | PagerDuty | |
---|---|---|
Set-up | Slack-based UI that allows for a seamless adoption process plus customizable fields to tailor your incident response process to your organization | Set up and declare incidents in Slack but all subsequent actions must be taken through a Web-based dashboard |
Accessibility | Designed to be accessible to everyone with minimal training, not just engineers | Complex user interface requires training and up-skilling |
User interface | Intuitive interface that’s designed for ease-of-use for all roles and responsibilities | Complex interface that’s geared towards incident response teams and incident management power users |
At incident.io, we believe that incident management and communication go hand-in-hand. For that reason, it’s our philosophy that your incident response process should meet you where you’re communicating, which for our customer is Slack.
For a full run through of how both tools work when it comes to responding to incidents in Slack, check out the walkthrough video below.
Once an incident is triggered, it’s hard to take control of your incident through PagerDuty’s Slack integration. There are no Slack commands to update your incident, log follow-ups, or take actions against external systems like your public status page. Because of this, responders have to context switch between Slack for communications, and the other tools they need to use in their response process. In short, you have a relatively blank canvas to deal with the incident on your own.
For engineers who have experience dealing with incident coordination and response, this might not be a big deal. But for other folks, such as customer support, this process may be a bit more intimidating and cumbersome.
Once you declare an incident using the /inc
shortcut in Slack, you can fill out all the known details about the incident. Once filled, a Slack channel will automatically be created that can be either public or private.
In that channel, you can take several actions immediately with the click of quick action buttons including: designating incident leads, updating your status page and more. To make things better, whichever action you take, you’ll be given a set of instructions to ensure that you go about that action properly – and all within Slack itself.
Throughout the response, the /inc
command can be used to take control of the process, including Status updates, logging actions, escalating with PagerDuty, and managing actions and follow-ups. This simplicity makes it easy for even non-technical folks to declare incidents like a pro.
Once an incident is declared, updates are crucial to keeping everyone in the loop. Here’s what a typical update flow looks like on Pagerduty and incident.io
Nicely templated status updates via SMS and email can be sent from the PagerDuty website, but only if you’re on their Business or Digital Operations tiers – lower tiers don’t have access to this feature. None of this is available through the Slack integration.
Subscriptions can be managed from the PagerDuty UI on each incident, and on a personal level you can opt to subscribe to “Business Services” only.
Once again, any and all incident updates can be triggered using the /inc
command.
Once triggered, you can easily update the incident severity, status as well as include any details you feel are important to share. Templates can be used to aid consistency.
With Workflows and subscriptions you’re in full control of how status updates are delivered. For example, sending updates to executives via email for all Critical severity incidents, or configuring a personal auto-subcribe rule to get Slack DM updates for incidents related to your team.
incident.io connects to your issue tracker (Jira, Linear, Asana, GitHub, etc) and allows you to seamlessly create actions to be picked up after the incident. Actions logged through incident.io will automatically track the status in the respective issue tracker, and our follow-ups dashboard allows you to track completion rates, define policies and perform bulk actions.
PagerDuty has no concept of linking incidents to follow-up actions.
incident.io connects to your issue tracker (Jira, Linear, Asana, GitHub, etc) and allows you to seamlessly create actions to be picked up after the incident. Actions logged through incident.io will automatically track the status in the respective issue tracker, and our follow-ups dashboard allows you to track completion rates, define policies and perform bulk actions.
PagerDuty has no concept of linking incidents to follow-up actions.
In short, Pagerduty has been designed with engineers in mind. Because of this, the platform can be a hard sell for non-technical teams who don’t have excess time to onboard onto a highly technical tool.
incident.io on the other hand was designed with non-technical roles in mind.
With our tool, anyone can be onboarded quickly and drop in to manage the incident response process with low friction. It’s an ideal workflow for organizations that want to standardize the use of incident management tools across all functions.