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PagerDuty Alternatives: Top AIOps Tools for SMBs in 2023

End your hunt for PagerDuty alternatives!

While a leading platform, PagerDuty’s complex UI, subpar customer support, and problematic pricing often leave users dissatisfied as per their reviews.

SMBs need a balance of resources, time, and cost. So, we’ve compiled the top 5 alternatives.

Our comprehensive review evaluates top AIOps tools based on – pros & cons, pricing, customer support, client success stories, and customer reviews.

Discover the ideal PagerDuty replacement for your needs today. Let’s dive in!

PagerDuty: Limitations for Small Companies and Startups

PagerDuty is a powerful incident management platform used widely in IT infrastructure and operations. It offers real-time alerts, on-call scheduling, and other key features that automate the orchestration of work to resolve IT incidents quickly. 

However, for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), PagerDuty poses these limitations:

Source: PagerDuty

PagerDuty’s Pricing Structure

PagerDuty provides four tiers: Free, Professional, Business, and Digital Operations.

The professional tier is suitable for small and growing enterprises. Its pricing starts from $21 per user per month without AIOps. 

If you opt for the professional subscription, you must pay more for AIOps if you need it.

As a result of this pricing system which is based on the number of users and add-ons, it can quickly become expensive for small enterprises to keep up with the cost. 

Licensing costs are too high compared to tools like Opsgenie. The AIOps feature costs $399 monthly. 

Source: PagerDuty pricing

Source: G2.com

Lack of Built-in Ticketing System 

The ticketing system is crucial for the infrastructure operations team in incident resolution. PagerDuty, by default, doesn’t provide a ticketing system. One needs to integrate the ITSM ticketing tool to manage ticket workflow. 

Although it supports ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Jira, and Cherwell, it tends to become an overhead for small enterprises that cannot purchase licenses for the supported tools.

Complex Interface

Understanding the PagerDuty interface has some learning curve. One requires basic technical usage skills. UI isn’t easy to understand. 

The platform is quite heavily loaded with a lot of features.

Sometimes you might get lost while navigating through the platform.

Source: G2.com

Poor Customer Support

PagerDuty does not have an SLA for support tickets. Also, they have removed Support Chat for non-premium customers.

Not having a proper customer support channel hurts small enterprises more, as any incident that requires PagerDuty SMEs may turn out to be a showstopper.

Design Bugs

Many users have reported that PagerDuty’s UI isn’t easy to use. Some users have reported design bugs.

Based on the review below, you can see deleted users in the on-call list.

One has to do multiple setting configurations to make the tool behave in the desired manner. There is a learning curve, and it takes time to understand.

Source: G2.com

Interestingly, the PagerDuty team addressed the issues put forth by the user.

Source: G2.com

Lacks Proper Documentation

PagerDuty documentation seems outdated, according to customer reviews on review websites.

Having improper documentation increases the overhead for small enterprises as they may not have the technical expertise to implement a custom solution alone.

In-depth Review of 5 PagerDuty Alternatives

Investing in an AIOps tool solely based on its features can be risky for your small or medium-sized business. To reduce these risks, we thoroughly analyze PagerDuty’s top five alternatives. By combining insights from trusted review sites like Gartner Peer Insights, G2, and TrustRadius, we empower you to make a well-informed decision. Make a wise choice from the following tools to find the right fit for your SMB.

• Sniper
• DataDog
• Better Stack
• Opsgenie
• BigPanda

Let’s get started.

PagerDuty Alternatives #1: Sniper

Your infrastructure and operations team might find themselves grasping at straws to handle complex heterogeneous systems, alert fatigue, and identify and resolve issues while ensuring high performance and uptime.

Visualize having a solution that will optimize IT operations, reduce downtime and human dependency, improve incident response time, and ensure a seamless user experience with minimal business impact.

Introducing AppNeura’s Sniper.

With AI/ML technologies, appNeura’s Sniper automatically detects and reacts to issues within minutes, reducing manual intervention.

The Sniper, developed by Avekshaa Technologies, provides more than actionable solutions. 

With this tool, you arm yourself with insightful and predictive analytics that enables you to identify error patterns and optimize your operations.

Source – Sniper

Key Features of Sniper

Sniper is packed with powerful features to streamline your ITOps:

• Alert Noise Reduction and Correlation
• Metric Causal and Correlation analysis
• Probable Root Cause Analysis
• NLP-Based Recommendations
• Hybrid / Cloud Environment Support
• Observability

Alert Noise Reduction and Correlation

Sniper’s capabilities can be a game-changer for your organization with its advanced alert reduction and correlation. 

Utilizing machine learning, Sniper tames alert storms from various APM tools during cascading incidents. Its platform identifies alert correlations, eliminating duplicates to minimize noise and reduce alert fatigue. 

This function can decrease alerts by up to 90%, enabling your IT team to concentrate on critical incidents and enhancing your IT operations.

The Sniper system is tested to handle 5M incidents a minute.

Source – Sniper

Metric Casual and Correlation Analysis

As data and metrics expand, manual analysis becomes impractical and time-consuming. 

Sniper’s Metric Correlation feature, powered by machine learning and pattern recognition, can efficiently identify relationships among different metrics. 

Sniper clusters metrics to swiftly pinpoint the root cause of incidents, significantly reducing the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) in business operations.

This feature optimizes IT operations and enhances decision-making capabilities by providing invaluable insights.

Probable Root Cause Analysis (PRCA)

Swift issue identification and resolution are vital in AI operations. However, with ever-expanding data and metrics, pinpointing the root cause can be difficult.

Enter Sniper’s Un-supervised Probable Root Cause Analysis.

Sniper’s Unsupervised PRCA rapidly identifies correlations and anomalies among metrics, enabling fast identification of root causes. It improves AI operations efficiency and speeds up issue resolution.

The Un-supervised PRCA automatically adapts to dynamic environments, effectively handling new alerts.  As a result, this feature saves you time and effort by automating the process of identifying root causes, so ITOps teams can focus on critical tasks and improve your AI operations.

NLP-Based Recommendations

Sniper is transforming the way we resolve technical issues. By integrating advanced data analytics, Unsupervised Probable Root Cause Analysis (PRCA), and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Sniper can swiftly find and fix problems. This results in a significant speed-up of the resolution process, reducing times by up to 40%.

At the heart of Sniper is a recommendation engine. It’s a powerhouse of knowledge, drawing on over 5000 complex technical issues that have already been solved. It also absorbs information from a variety of other sources, like technical documents, online articles, and user feedback.

Sniper’s recommendation engine makes life easier for IT teams by offering automated solutions based on similar issues that have been resolved in the past. But it doesn’t stop there. Sniper also proactively seeks out and fixes potential problems, thanks to its advanced algorithms. 

This means less manual work, fewer mistakes, and increased productivity. It’s a smart, forward-thinking approach to technical problem-solving.

Hybrid, Cloud Environment Support

Sniper understands the need to support a hybrid of on-premise and cloud environments catering to many small to medium enterprises.

appNeura’s Sniper operates proficiently on AWS, a widely-used cloud platform. With its centralized incident management dashboard, it offers an inclusive overview of an organization’s IT infrastructure.

This empowers organizations to effectively oversee and manage their cloud-based systems.

Observability

Sniper enhances observability by scrutinizing diverse data sources, including logs, metrics, traces, and events, yielding a comprehensive understanding of system dynamics, which allows for prompt issue identification and performance enhancement.

It supports distributed tracing, enabling an in-depth analysis of request pathways across numerous systems, and employs AI and machine learning to detect anomalies.

With its real-time monitoring feature, Sniper empowers IT teams to preemptively tackle issues.

Supported Integrations

• APM: Dynatrace, Appdynamics, Zabbix, Datadog, Newrelic
• Open Source: FileBeat, MetricBeat
• Cloud: AWS

Limitations of Sniper

• While Sniper offers many capabilities, the following areas could be improved.
• Sniper doesn’t provide the ability to create a custom integration.
• Compared to alternatives like BigPanda, Sniper covers only the ITOps aspect.
  • While BigPanda provides support for DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) as well. 

Sniper: Product Demo

Get a  free demo of Sniper today.

PagerDuty Alternatives #2: DataDog

Datadog is a comprehensive AIOps platform offering real-time data collection and visualization for improved infrastructure observability. It uses machine learning for anomaly detection and forecasting, enabling proactive issue resolution and future performance prediction. 

Datadog supports auto-instrumentation, offers extensive integrations, and helps consolidate IT operations tools for enhanced efficiency and collaboration.

Source: DataDog

Key Features of DataDog

We just saw the DataDog AIOps solution in a nutshell, let’s now dig deeper into the features that this AIOps solution offers.

• Handling Massive Scale with AI: Datadog leverages machine learning to manage and monitor the complexities of dynamically scaling modern applications in diverse cloud environments.
• Application-Wide Issue Auto-detection: Datadog monitors every application metric, immediately surfacing potential issues regardless of whether specific dashboards or alerts have been set up.
• Identify anomalies and outliers: Datadog’s machine learning capabilities help identify unusual metric behavior or out-of-bounds metrics in large data volumes that could be hard to detect manually.
• Predictive Forecasts: Datadog predicts metric growth and behavior, taking seasonality into account, and alerting engineers of potential capacity constraints or unusual trending metrics.
• Watchdog Auto-Detection: Datadog provides a machine learning-based auto-detection engine that identifies performance issues without manual setup, ensuring all potential problems are detected.
• 24/7 Monitoring: Watchdog monitors every part of your application round the clock, automatically detecting latency spikes, elevated error rates, or network issues.
• Plain-language summaries: Watchdog provides summaries of identified issues in plain language, highlighting affected resources, location, and duration.
• Detailed Insight into Potential Issues: Watchdog offers a drill-down into potential issues, providing performance metrics, trends, and additional context for the affected service or endpoint.
• Sensitivity to Seasonality: Datadog’s anomaly detection and forecasting algorithms account for seasonal fluctuations in metrics, enabling more accurate predictions and detections.
• Dashboard and Alert Integration: Anomaly and outlier detection can be integrated into dashboards for visual tracking or configured to trigger alerts when anomalies or outliers are detected.
• Customizable Detection Parameters: Datadog allows fine-tuning detection algorithms and parameters, enabling customization for each metric.
• Capacity Issue Forecasting: Datadog’s machine learning algorithms evaluate metrics continuously to predict future values, providing early warnings for potential capacity issues.
• Alerts for Forecasted Issues: Datadog can set up alerts for potential issues detected by the forecasting algorithms, providing a buffer for engineers to address them preemptively.

Limitations of DataDog

For a comprehensive evaluation of DataDog, you must consider the potential drawbacks.

Pricing

The modular pricing structure of DataDog is quite complex to understand. To get an idea about pricing for the AIOps solution we need to combine at least four modules it offers – infrastructure, log management, APM continuous profiler, incident management, which further have different pricing tiers.

Customer Support / Notification

According to reviews on G2, users complained of poor customer support.
One of the reviews mentioned that Datadog had a service outage in early 2023. The Datadog team couldn’t communicate the issue and failed to provide a post-mortem.

Source: G2.com

Customers Review for DataDog

DataDog performs well over various criteria, making it a suitable tool for small enterprises.

Its monitoring solutions and variety provide reliability but, at the same, may confuse you if you don’t know what you want.

Users have criticized their customer service. There have been cases where users have reported that despite paying for premium customer support, their experience wasn’t good.

Source: TrustRadius

Pricing

Datadog’s pricing structure has many flavors. There are three tiers, namely – Free, Pro, and Enterprise, under various categories like infrastructure, log management, database monitoring, etc.

We have covered the pricing for the following:

Infrastructure Management Pricing

Source: DataDog Infrastructure Pricing

Application Performance Monitoring Pricing

Source: DataDog Application Performance Monitoring Pricing

Incident Management Pricing

Source: DataDog Incident Management Pricing

Log Management Pricing

Source: DataDog Log Management Pricing

PagerDuty Alternatives #3: Better Stack

Better Stack allows you to see inside each application stack, pinpoint the problem and then fix every issue.

It allows you to visualize the entire app stack and combine all your logs into structured data as an individual database using SQL.

Better Stack enables you to monitor everything from servers to websites.

It lets you create on-call rotations, receive actionable alerts, and deal with incidents quicker. It’s designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing workflow.

Source: Better Stack

Key Features of Better Stack

Better Stack stands out with its on-call calendar scheduler besides other features.

On-call Calendar Scheduler

Better Stack comes with an inbuilt on-call calendar scheduler. You can configure each member’s on-call duty rotations using the scheduler to notify them at the appropriate time.

Flexible Incident Escalations

A custom notification system can be configured based on the incident’s origin, urgency, and context.

Incident Audit Timeline

For any enterprise, finding the incident’s root cause is crucial. Using Better Stack, users can Find out exactly how the incident was developed and who was notified via a second-by-second timeline.

Cron Job Monitoring

It is one feature that isn’t available in popular tools like PagerDuty. The loss of an essential database backup could inflict serious harm on your project. This risk can be mitigated by monitoring your cron jobs and serverless workers. 

Better Stack’s user-friendly web interface enables easy setup of cron job monitoring, allowing adjustments like setting check frequency and defining incident escalation procedures.

Smart Incident Merging

Managing multiple alerts blasting your inbox when an incident occurs is tedious. Better Stack provides the feature of incident combining that allows unifying similar incidents into one for better issue tracking.

Limitations of Better Stack

Besides the numerous benefits of using Better Stack, there are certain factors potential users should consider before switching. These include:

Design Bugs

There are design bugs that make the application behave undesirably at times.

New Software

As a relatively recent addition to the market, Better Stack presents substantial opportunities for enhancement from the user perspective. The novelty of the software could also imply a lower initial level of user trust.

Customer Reviews

Despite being a new company in the AIOps domain, Better Stack has made waves amongst the user base.

Browsing through the review websites, you will see a common trend of users being impressed by the features and ease Better Stack provides compared to other popular tools.

Although improvements are needed on the design front, the Better Stack team has done a good job of keeping their existing customers happy.

Source: Better Stack

Source: G2.com

Pricing

Better Stack’s pricing structure provides four tiers – Basic, Freelancer, Small team, and Business.

The basic tier is free for everyone, while the freelancer tier starts from $24.

Better Stack serves as a comprehensive alternative to numerous existing tools. 

Compared to PagerDuty, Pingdom, and Statuspage, it offers a remarkably cost-effective solution for teams of six individuals.

PagerDuty Alternatives #4: Opsgenie

Opsgenie provides a solution for always-on service providers to manage incidents.

Opsgenie is trusted by thousands of users worldwide. It provides alerting and on-call management solutions and effectively responds to IT/DevOps problems.

It even allows teams to create incident response plans and collaborate on the actions.

Almost 200 of the best tools on the market can be integrated into Opsgenie’s monitoring, ITSM, ChatOps, collaboration, and communication applications.

Source: Opsgenie

Key Features of Opsgenie

Besides wholesome integration options, Opsgenie offers many useful features as described below:

Advanced Reporting & Analytics

Opsgenie empowers businesses to enhance operational performance through valuable reporting insights. 

It meticulously tracks all aspects related to events and alerts, enabling the utilization of robust reports and analytics.

With Opsgenie, you gain a comprehensive understanding of the root cause of incidents, the team’s turnaround time and efficiency, and the equitable distribution of on-call tasks among team members. 

It offers a wide range of analytics insights, including productivity analysis, efficiency analysis, and infrastructure health reports.

On-call Management & Escalations

Opsgenie simplifies the management of on-call responsibilities, offering a streamlined solution. 

With its user-friendly interface, team leaders can effortlessly create plans, modify schedules, and establish escalation rules, eliminating the need to navigate multiple pages to make on-call schedule changes. 

During high-severity incidents, staying informed about the Point of Contact (PoC) is vital. Opsgenie ensures team awareness by providing visibility into the availability and accountability of team members in such situations. 

With Opsgenie, you can rest assured that critical alarms will be promptly acknowledged and addressed.

Actionable & Reliable Alerting

Opsgenie guarantees that no important messages will go unnoticed. It is a comprehensive system integrating monitoring, ticketing, and chat software functionalities. 

By intelligently grouping alerts, it effectively eliminates the problem of receiving overwhelming notifications for the same issue. 

Users are promptly notified through various channels, ensuring swift initiation of the incident resolution process.

Furthermore, users can customize and categorize alerts based on their specific time requirements, allowing for greater control and organization.

Source: Softwareadvice

Limitations of Opsgenie

In addition to Opsgenie’s positives, there are some possible downsides to consider:

Non-Atlassian Tool Integration

Opsgenie, as an Atlassian tool, seamlessly integrates with other Atlassian products, and provides a cohesive ecosystem. 

However, it is essential to note that smaller enterprises may not have an existing Atlassian ecosystem. Therefore, the ability to integrate with non-Atlassian tools becomes a little challenging. 

Alerting & Notification 

Although Opsgenie combines most of the alerts based on similar incidents, the users still cannot stop the notification from being sent to a particular user.

There is no way to blacklist an individual user from getting alerts & notifications if they are part of the group.

Learning Curve

Opsgenie may present a learning curve for new users since it has a wide range of capabilities. 

Becoming familiar with the platform and its various functionalities may take some time and training.

Customer Review for OpsGenie

Based on the overall consensus of the users, Opsgenie is quite impressed by the ease of use in setting up the alerts and notification system.

Users have many options for choosing the right integration for their use.

At the same time, the users also expressed their discontent with setting a good on-call rotation policy. The dashboarding feature also seems basic and doesn’t help much.

Source: Getapp

Pricing

The Opsgenie pricing structure has four standard tiers: Free, Essentials, Standard, and Enterprise.

Small teams can quickly try out the free tier, which accommodates 5 members, but users won’t be able to access all the features.

Users of the other tiers can try Opsgenie for 14 days without providing credit card details.

Source: Opsgenie pricing

Product Demo

You can watch the product demo below to learn more about Opsgenie.

The demo walks through the features that make Opsgenie stand out from other tools available in the market.

PagerDuty Alternatives #5: BigPanda

IT Ops teams, DBAs, DevOps, and SREs struggle to respond to incidents in a manual, reactive manner, which is unsuited to modern IT environments due to their complexity and speed.

The result is painful outages and unhappy customers. There are also an increasing number of IT staff and a lack of focus on innovation.

BigPanda tries to help enterprises deal with these issues with the power of AIOps.    

It enables teams to swiftly detect, respond, and resolve IT incidents.

Source: BigPanda

Key Features of BigPanda

After evaluating BigPanda’s features and benefits, let’s consider its advantages.

Alert Intelligence

BigPanda Alert Intelligence converts thousands of events to actionable alerts.

It can filter out noises that are not related or false alarms. This reduces the noise by 90%, according to the BigPanda team.

You can visualize the advantages of monitoring and create a strategy for advanced observability based on your data.

BigPanda can ingest event data using alerts or email. It even generates an event each time a resource’s state is altered. These events are then presented to the user as a timeline.

Incident Intelligence

BigPanda’s Incident Intelligence engine is an AI/ML alert correlator that helps detect IT incidents quickly.

Adding the business context to incidents allows them to be merged and managed better.

Escalation is a part of ITOps, but BigPanda allows teams to use insights quickly and act on incidents.

BigPands provides Automated root cause analysis to help you better understand your issue. It collects and visualizes your data, and AI/ML helps correlate suspicious events to incidents.

Workflow Automation

Using the power of automation, BigPanda aims to reduce the toil and increase the speed of incident resolution.

Investigating an IT incident requires manual effort, especially when you’re a small enterprise with limited resources.

BigPanda solves this pain point by providing the following automation solution:

• Ticketing automation
• On-call automation
• Chat Automation
• Runbook automation

Unified Analytics

It’s the first and only analytics solution designed specifically for ITOps. It provides deep insight into metrics and trends that can be used to optimize continuously.

BigPanda offers a variety of reports that provide an easy way to measure and track team productivity.

It allows ITOps to optimize tools that provide poor-quality alerts and eliminate tools that produce noise.

You can also see recurring events and identify which infrastructure components are responsible.

Limitations of BigPanda

According to the user reviews, the following are some of the downsides of BigPanda:

ML Algorithm

While reviewing the user reviews on various forums, users complained about the ML algorithm implemented by the BigPanda team. Users felt that the algorithm feels basic and needs improvement compared to other alternatives.

Source: G2.com

Integrations

The out-of-the-box integration support is relatively minimal in BigPanda. As a result, if you’re a small enterprise, you struggle a lot with integration support. 

It takes a lot of effort for custom integrations.

Cost

Although the pricing structure is not readily available on the website. Most users complained about high pricing and less feature availability in a plan.

Customer Support

According to trusted reviews on public forums, customer support isn’t compelling. Some users reported that low-severity cases took 3-5 days to respond.

Source: G2

Customer Reviews

Customers have a positive experience using BigPanda. The customer success stories of companies like FreeWheel and Zayo are insightful.

Even on review websites like G2, Peerspot, or TrustRadius BigPanda scores a good 8.5 out of 10.

Source: TrustRadius

Pricing

Contact the BigPanda sales team for pricing structure.

Choose the Correct Alternative

Choosing the ideal AIOps tool demands a deep understanding of your organization’s unique requirements. However, let’s explore some universal considerations to guide your selection process for an AIOps solution: 

• Real-time Analysis: AIOps solutions should provide real-time insights and operations data analysis. This feature can help businesses spot issues immediately and respond accordingly, reducing downtime and enhancing performance.
• Machine Learning Capabilities: Machine learning is the backbone of AIOps, helping to predict incidents and automate tasks. Ensure your solution has strong, flexible ML algorithms that can learn from your data and adapt over time.
• Root Cause Analysis: A valuable feature of AIOps is the ability to determine the root cause of issues. The tool should be capable of examining network patterns and identifying the underlying cause of problems.
• Noise Reduction: SMBs might not have large IT departments. An AIOps tool that can reduce alert noise and prioritize alerts based on their severity and relevance can help smaller teams focus on the most pressing issues.
• Open APIs for Integration: AIOps tools must easily integrate with other IT operations tools already in use, like ITSM, ITOM, or DevOps tools. Open APIs allow for easier, more flexible integration.
• Data Processing Capabilities: The tool should be capable of handling a variety of data types and sources, including structured and unstructured data from logs, metrics, and more. This will ensure a holistic view of operations.
• Predictive Capabilities: Your AIOps tool should not just react to issues but predict them based on past data. This proactive approach can help prevent incidents before they impact your operations.
• Proven ROI: Lastly, consider case studies or testimonials from businesses similar to yours that demonstrate the tool’s ability to deliver a real, tangible return on investment.

Empower your SMB with Sniper by appNeura, an AIOps tool that intelligently combines AI/ML capabilities and big data. It simplifies operations, boosts user experiences, and facilitates rapid, insightful decisions.

Sniper offers an intuitive, centralized dashboard for real-time monitoring, alerting, and incident management. Its proactive, predictive analytics ensure minimal disruptions and peak system performance.

Automation features liberate your IT team from tedious tasks, enhancing productivity and fostering strategic initiatives. Sniper’s advanced analytics provide comprehensive visibility into your IT environment, promoting effective communication and collaboration.

Transform your IT operations with Sniper. Start your free trial today!