Used For

• +**Your database crashes at 3am and nobody knows for 6 hours** → Auto-detects, runs restart scripts, pages on-call only if restart fails
• +**Getting 47 Slack alerts about the same Redis timeout** → Groups related alerts into one incident, cuts noise by 80%
• +**DevOps engineer quits and takes all the tribal knowledge with them** → Documented playbooks run automatically, anyone can handle common issues
• +Connects to any monitoring tool via webhooks - no ripping out your Datadog setup
• +Phone calls and SMS that actually work when Slack is down during an outage

Best For

• >Your team gets blamed for outages nobody knew were happening
• >You're manually calling people at 2am when the payment system crashes
• >Spent last weekend debugging while customers couldn't buy anything

Not For

• -Teams under 20 people with simple apps — the on-call overhead isn't worth it yet
• -Companies wanting plug-and-play simplicity — setting up good automation takes dev time
• -Anyone hoping this replaces monitoring tools — it orchestrates alerts, doesn't create them

Pairs With

• *Datadog (sends the actual performance alerts that trigger PagerDuty incidents)
• *Slack (where your team coordinates during incidents and complains about being paged)
• *Terraform (to define infrastructure that PagerDuty's scripts can restart automatically)
• *Jira (where incidents become tickets for post-mortem tracking)
• *Grafana (for the dashboards you'll stare at while troubleshooting)
• *AWS CloudWatch (another monitoring source feeding alerts into the system)

The Catch

• !You'll spend 2-3 weeks fine-tuning alert noise or your team will hate getting paged for minor issues
• !The automation scripts are only as good as your runbooks — garbage in, garbage out
• !Per-user pricing adds up fast when you have large on-call rotations

Bottom Line

The difference between getting woken up for every hiccup versus only getting called when something is actually on fire.