At PagerDuty, we're building an alerting and incident tracking system that helps IT operations groups detect and respond to high-severity issues.
We're not like the thousands of monitoring systems out on the market. In fact, we don't do monitoring at all. Instead, we plug into existing monitoring systems and handle the people part of the equation: alerting (via phone, SMS, email), on-call scheduling for teams, auto-escalation of critical alerts, and incident tracking.
Our current product helps IT ops people know about critical problems as quickly as possible, collaborate as a team to fix problems quickly, and help track and improve incident response performance over time. Our vision is to expand into the event management space. This means treating data from monitoring tools as events and intelligently filtering and correlating events across monitoring tools in order to reduce the noise. It's like spam filtering for events: a critical problem, such as a bad deploy, will automatically alert the entire team via phone call, while a minor issue like a server going down in a fleet of 20 will only generate a low-priority email alert.
Why you should work with us:
We are different than many startups out there: we charge money for a product. Companies like Intuit, National Instruments, VMWare, Square and 37signals love our product; that's a lot to say for a system that frequently wakes our users up in the middle of the night. We're also fairly early stage (13 people plus a few interns). This combination means you'll get a market-rate salary plus a decent chunk of stock in a company that has already figured out product/market fit.
We put a very big focus on the user experience (UI/UX), since some of our core concepts can initially be confusing to people who don't have a lot of experience in the operations and support realm. We want to guide people to use best practices whenever possible. Our customers span a gamut of sizes, from small start-ups just trying to monitor their websites to enterprise clients like Heroku who have to monitor thousands of servers and deal with complex infrastructural issues. As a result, our UIs have to scale and be intuitive with a wide range of data. Simply put, we're solving problems no one else has solved before, and we're doing so by designing clean, elegant, easy-to-use UIs.
At PagerDuty, we're building an alerting and incident tracking system that helps IT operations groups detect and respond to high-severity issues.
You know how there are thousands of monitoring systems out there? We don't do monitoring. Instead, we plug into all of the existing monitoring systems and handle the people part of the equation: alerting (via phone, SMS, email), on-call scheduling for teams, auto-escalation of critical alerts, and incident tracking.
Our current product helps IT ops people know about critical problems as quickly as possible, collaborate as a team to fix problems quickly, and help track and improve incident response performance over time. Our vision is to expand into the event management space. This means treating data from monitoring tools as events and intelligently filtering and correlating events across monitoring tools in order to reduce the noise. It's like spam filtering for events: a critical problem, such as a bad deploy, will automatically alert the entire team via phone call, while a minor issue like a server going down in a fleet of 20 will only generate a low-priority email alert.
Why you should work with us:
We are different than many startups out there: we charge money for a product. Companies love our product; that's a lot to say for a system that frequently wakes our users up in the middle of the night. Our revenue is growing steadily at more than 10% month-over-month since we launched in Jan 2010. Our customers include: Netflix, National Instruments, VMWare, NBC Universal, Square, Heroku, and 37signals. We're also fairly early stage (11 people, pre-series A). This combination means you'll get a market-rate salary plus a decent chunk of stock in a company that has already figured out its business model.
We have very interesting technical challenges. Our biggest challenge is engineering a system that never ever goes down. Since our customers rely on us to deliver their critical alerts, we are not allowed to go down ever. This means we've had to engineer a distributed system across multiple data centers that can survive a single data-center outage without skipping a beat. We're not done: we have a lot more work to do to ensure our system reaches the level of telephony reliability (five-nines). If you like engineering distributed fault-tolerant systems, join us.
At PagerDuty, we're building an alerting and incident tracking system that helps IT operations groups detect and respond to high-severity issues.
You know how there are thousands of monitoring systems out there? We don't do monitoring. Instead, we plug into all of the existing monitoring systems and handle the people part of the equation: alerting (via phone, SMS, email), on-call scheduling for teams, auto-escalation of critical alerts, and incident tracking.
Our current product helps IT ops people know about critical problems as quickly as possible, collaborate as a team to fix problems quickly, and help track and improve incident response performance over time. Our vision is to expand into the event management space. This means treating data from monitoring tools as events and intelligently filtering and correlating events across monitoring tools in order to reduce the noise. It's like spam filtering for events: a critical problem, such as a bad deploy, will automatically alert the entire team via phone call, while a minor issue like a server going down in a fleet of 20 will only generate a low-priority email alert.
Why you should work with us:
We are different than many startups out there: we charge money for a product. Companies love our product; that's a lot to say for a system that frequently wakes our users up in the middle of the night. Our revenue is growing steadily at more than 10% month-over-month since we launched in Jan 2010. Our customers include: Netflix, National Instruments, VMWare, NBC Universal, Square, Heroku, and 37 signals. We're also fairly early stage (11 people, pre-series A). This combination means you'll get a market-rate salary plus a decent chunk of stock in a company that has already figured out its business model.
We have very interesting technical challenges. Our biggest challenge is engineering a system that never ever goes down. Since our customers rely on us to deliver their critical alerts, we are not allowed to go down ever. This means we've had to engineer a distributed system across multiple data centers that can survive a single data-center outage without skipping a beat. We're not done: we have a lot more work to do to ensure our system reaches the level of telephony reliability (five-nines). If you like engineering distributed fault-tolerant systems, join us.
There's a good reason for that: when AWS has problems, we are under very heavy load because many of our customers are on AWS. The last thing we want to do at that point is an emergency flip to a secondary provider.
PagerDuty (http://www.pagerduty.com) is hiring both interns and full-time software engineers. We're still quite small - 5 people. We're located in the SOMA district of San Francisco.
The poster is assuming that once a YC startup is funded with a convertible note with no cap and no discount, that all other notes in the round will be at similar terms (and thus small angels won't be able to afford to participate in the deal). Maybe he doesn't realize that you can raise an angel round with different terms for different investors.
Personally, I don't think many YC companies in the batch will be able to raise an entire round with no cap, no discount. However, the $150K investment from SV Angel/Yuri will help companies negotiate better deal terms than they would have otherwise obtained.
We have a simple integration API and we can also integrate with any system that can send email. Regarding the integration, just shoot us an email: [email protected].
Thanks for the feedback! Very good point, we should allow you to send multiple replies per SMS alert to ack and then resolve (currently, there's a limit of one reply per alert).
Or just because MySQL is really to get started with when using Rails and other frameworks, and that when you're starting a business, you think "if I actually ever run into MySQL scaling issues, that's a good problem to have".
I agree. That's why we don't do uptime monitoring, or any kind of monitoring really.
PagerDuty is an alerting system which plugs into any monitoring system (Pingdom, Nagios, Cloudkick, etc) and alerts your team via phone, SMS and email when problems are detected. We add advanced alerting features, like 2-way voice and SMS alerts, automatic alert escalation, and on-call duty scheduling to these existing tools.
You're right though, in that many people, on first glance, confuse us with a server monitoring or website pinging system. The "pitch" has gotten better over time, but it's still something we have to work on to improve.
We've taken steps to minimize outages as much as possible. The system is distributed across 3 data centers, with fast automatic rollover in case of a data center outage. We've architected the system to ensure we never drop alerts. PagerDuty integrates with monitoring via email or API; if we receive the message on our end, we guarantee you will be alerted. We've had a few incidents where we have delayed sending out the phone call or SMS alert for a few minutes, but we've never dropped an alert.
In terms of setting a formal SLA, we haven't done so mainly because we're not sure how to go about implementing this. I've checked the SLAs of a few hosting and cloud providers including AWS, Rackspace, Linode and Slicehost, and I haven't found a compelling example to work from. Some of these guys don't have an SLA (they try their best) and the others give you only a portion of your money back.
The whole point of an SLA is to incentivize us to never go down. In our case, we know that if we ever go down, we will lose our customers; that's incentive enough :). Having said that, we may still add an SLA guarantee as part of a larger "enterprise" pricing plan.
We definitely plan on adding plugins for all the popular monitoring systems. We've also released an integration API to allow PagerDuty to integrate with any system that can make an HTTP API call (or call a command-line script that can do this).
I'm pretty sure Zabbix will work with PagerDuty right now, via the integration API. We'd love to work with you to set this up. Please send me an email at [email protected].
The main reason we haven't offered a perpetually free account is because we're a bit different than other SaaS companies: hosting isn't our only cost, we also have to pay for each phone and SMS alert we send.
The other reason is that we see PagerDuty as solving a real "hair on fire" problem, and we think if you're one of the businesses that needs this, it's reasonable to pay a certain amount for the service. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
What I don't get is, if you pay yourself $100K, aren't you personally taxed on your 100K income?
Or, will you claim you only had a 100K - 80K = 20K income on your personal taxes? I would think the government would try to match up the $100K company expense with a $100K personal income (and if they don't match, audit you).
I'm actually really curious if you can pull this kind of thing off.