Twilio > Case Studies > PagerDuty's Scalable IT Alert Notification System Powered by Twilio

PagerDuty's Scalable IT Alert Notification System Powered by Twilio

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices

Applicable Industries

Cement
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Leakage & Flood Monitoring
Speech Recognition

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, PagerDuty provides an incident management platform for IT operations and devops teams. The company was founded by Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, and Baskar Puvanasathan with the aim of making IT alerts reliable and simple to use. PagerDuty's customers include famous tech brands like Adobe, eBay, Etsy, and Square. The company has grown significantly over the years, raising nearly $11 million in funding in a round led by top-tier VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The Challenge

PagerDuty, an incident management platform for IT operations and devops teams, was faced with the challenge of making IT alerts reliable and simple to use. Traditional alerting systems were either complex, capital-intensive enterprise projects or unreliable, jury-rigged hacks that were as likely to fail themselves as the systems they monitored. The founders of PagerDuty, Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, and Baskar Puvanasathan, aimed to create an alerting system that was not only highly reliable but also simple and accessible. They envisioned a cloud-based service that could aggregate incidents from multiple IT monitoring systems.

The Solution

PagerDuty selected Twilio as its primary communications provider to build a scalable, easy-to-use, and reliable IT alert notification system. Twilio's rock-solid telecommunications service was crucial to PagerDuty's success. Twilio offered the flexibility of escalating from SMS to voice notifications, and a straightforward API that eased the integration of PagerDuty with monitoring services like Nagios, Pingdom, Splunk, and Zenoss. With PagerDuty, users have just one place to set up sophisticated alerting rules with multiple levels of coverage. If a primary contact doesn't respond, the alert is escalated to a secondary contact. Users can respond easily by simply replying to an SMS notification or selecting an option from a voice menu. Users can also immediately escalate an alert directly from their phones via a cross-platform mobile site or native iOS and Android apps.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Twilio as the primary communications provider has significantly improved the reliability and simplicity of PagerDuty's IT alert notification system. The system's flexibility allows for escalation from SMS to voice notifications, ensuring that alerts are not missed. The straightforward API has also simplified the integration process with various monitoring services. The ease of use and dependability of PagerDuty's service has allowed the company to grow its market share based solely on word-of-mouth recommendations for the first three years. The recent release of native iOS and Android apps has further simplified the management of IT infrastructure for users.

Quantitative Benefit