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PagerDuty vs Uptime Robot: What are the differences?
Developers describe PagerDuty as "Incident management with powerful visibility, reliable alerting, and improved collaboration". PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem. On the other hand, Uptime Robot is detailed as "Free website uptime monitor". Uptime Robot is all about helping you to keep your websites up. It monitors your websites every 5 minutes and alerts you if your sites are down.
PagerDuty can be classified as a tool in the "Monitoring Aggregation" category, while Uptime Robot is grouped under "Website Monitoring".
Some of the features offered by PagerDuty are:
- Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS or email, to multiple numbers, with retries.
- Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works great with almost all monitoring tools including: Nagios (and Icinga), Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Circonus, Red Gate SQL Monitor, Server Density, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds and many others. If it can send email, it will work with PagerDuty.
- Native apps with push notifications- iOS and Android native apps with push notifications and a cross-platform mobile website ensure you can respond to alerts wherever you are, even on the go.
On the other hand, Uptime Robot provides the following key features:
- http(s): that's perfect for website monitoring. The service regularly sends requests (which are the same as if a visitor is browsing your website) to the URL and decides if it is up or down depending on the HTTP statuses returned from the website (200-success, 404-not found, etc.)
- ping: this is good for monitoring a server. Ping (ICMP) requests are sent and up/down status is decided according to the "if responses are received or not". Ping is not a good fit for monitoring websites as a website (its IP) can respond to ping requests while it is down (which means that the site is down but the server hosting the site is up)
- keyword: checks if a keyword exists or not exists in a web page
"Just works" is the top reason why over 51 developers like PagerDuty, while over 12 developers mention "Free tier" as the leading cause for choosing Uptime Robot.
According to the StackShare community, PagerDuty has a broader approval, being mentioned in 300 company stacks & 44 developers stacks; compared to Uptime Robot, which is listed in 61 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.
I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.
VictorOpsDisclosure I work at Splunk and VictorOps is a Splunk product. But I would suggest in addition to trying the others adding VO to your list. It's important to note that some of the tools are designed as Incident Response tools, others started as mass notification tools. For on-call stick to those designed for incident response.
SquadcastI would say to use Squadcast, the configuration is easy, provides a lot of features such as war room, RCA tracking postmortem, RBAC and they are quick to add features on request as well, recently I asked for custom on call reminders and I am sure they will add it really soon.
Pros of PagerDuty
- Just works55
- Easy configuration23
- Awesome alerting hub14
- Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management11
- User-customizable alerting modes9
- Awesome tool for alerting and monitoring. Love it4
- Most reliable out of the three and it isn't even close3
Pros of UptimeRobot
- Free tier22
- Easy to understand18
- Instant notifications14
- Simpler than Pingdom8
- Free public status pages5
- Cheap but Reliable5
- Public Status Page4
- Keyword monitoring4
- Mobile App3
- Receive twitter status message1
- Good api0
- SSL Checking0
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Cons of PagerDuty
- Expensive7
- Ugly UI3
Cons of UptimeRobot
- False-Positives2
- Consistently bad UI2
- Confusing UI1
- Extremely bad UI experience0
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