We recently switched over from PagerDuty to VictorOps while refactoring our monitoring and alerting infrastructure. We wanted to go with a more ChatOps approach and we were ready for something new. The support at VictorOps has been great, and they have responded to every request we've made. They are adding features with every release that are rounding out their offering and adding even more value to their product.

Lots of integration's.

Interface can be hard to use.

When we went looking for an alerting solution, we wanted something that would make life easier for our folks on-call, as well as something that would help us clean up and make sense of the nigh-impassable flood of alert emails we were seeing constantly from our monitoring. Allowing folks to use their own devices also meant that there was no confusion as to how to reach out to someone, and it's something they always have on them. We were immediately captured by the Twitter-like timeline, so that every person (on-call or not) could view the incoming stream from the entire environment, and the rest of the features common in this space seemed very well-implemented. Since then, they've added tons of new features (the Transmogrifier and Control Calls each were game-changers) that have only made the service better. My director has identified this as the single best product we've implemented in the past two years, based on its impact to our team's efficiency and happiness.

- Communication-centric design - great for team efforts

- Some advanced/niche scheduling options are not currently possible

I enjoy the clean direct design. It makes it very easy to use. It was by far the easiest and most simple to setup when comparing other products.

The main negatives of VictorOps are that it doesn't seem to be as flexible as some of the competition in terms of how alerts can be accepted, there are some strict guidelines. I would also like to see some improvements made on the alerting - for instance to put in a delay. I also don't like that some transmognifier features are only available in enterprise.

VictorOps has helped us keep all of our alerts in a single place. Don't underestimate how much time you save having an authoritative source for all of your alerting. From VictorOps you can then dole out the alerts to only the teams and therefore the on call member that needs to see the alert. On call member doesn't take care of the issue? You can then automate the process of alerting more people in the team, it's all up to you.

Simple when you want it to be, more advanced when you need it to be.

Could work better with non-standard schedules. Not every group we work with does on call in standard follow the sun or one week on type of scheduling. Some do on-call in spurts of 4 or 3 hours depending on events.

very configurable, easy to start and manage calls

configuration of alerts can be a bit cumbersome

We use VictorOps for real time incident reporting. This is integrated using scalyr and splunk and slack. So we get alerts on slack with clickable links from scalyr with the actual incident reports logged into victorops. the service is very reliable, and has never failed us once. I would recommend it without reservations to teams who rely heavily on cloud based systems where real time incident reporting is very important

works like clockwork, providing a smooth seamless experience. It is incredibly easy to assign on call schedules, and set up alerting. the details is provides about the incidents is very granular and helps provide much needed context. it is fairly inexpensive and integrates really well with several other softwares

This isn't a con but a good to have feature I should say. basically it is only as good as your configuration and your logging. victor ops on it's own won't detect new incidents based on past incidents. If certain configurations are off, then it would never receive data input from those points, and you would never be notified of potential incidents arising from the same without human intervention.

Efficient way to manage and aggregate alerts. Easy UI to make the rules for the alerts.

The team information, on call routines and schedules is not very user-friendly .

Very customizable, easy to use, and fantastic support. This has really made managing alerts and on-call so much easier, and we've always had helpful and friendly support when needed.

Overall, VictorOps has significantly improved our signal to noise ratio by letting us pay attention just to the important notifications (like the site being down) rather than the many many other logs we gather.

I love that it lets you customize contact schedules between different users in a company so granularly. This is a new product for us and we are a small company so we need to be careful about easing people into these types of dev-ops schedules and VictorOps allows us to do so.

In certain places of the UI, it doesn't make sense the order in which you have to do certain actions like adding users vs creating a schedule. Ultimately we figured it out but it's very strict in some places about how exactly you go about organizing your company's scheduler.

This is a really good tool to integrate into your tech stack if you need an alert filter, which you probably do. The down side is that it's very basic and routing alerts takes a degree of skill deploying regex or matching conditions. The cost point is very amicable for a decent filtering tool, but the tool itself has a lot of room for polish which could be a detriment to less technical departments.

The software does a good job of the basics. It seemed easy enough to give out to the whole team and we seem to get the needed functionality out of it. The reports are straightforward and easy to identify the problem areas. Integrations are via API so any noise generator that can make an HTTP POST in theory could be integrated.

5,000 total alerts per month maximum which may sound like a lot, but a growing enterprise company may find that total to be limiting. The UI is very basic, possibly by design or my limited permissions but in a lot of ways it feels hollow and lacks any real character if you have to use it daily. The mobile application works well, and again keep things organized, but underwhelms visually and doesn't captivate the user in any way.

I can't really say much about this tool other than: it works, and it works well. Having tried a competitors offering, we found VictorOps to be the right balance of flexible, well-priced, and reliable. It has become an integral part of our operations.

Great price/value

Splunk's purchase of VictorOps gives the opportunity for major improvement and excellent customer support.

Provides all of the necessary functionality for managing multiple teams of on-call professionals across an organization. App and Slack integration provide a feature-rich experience. override existing schedules, acknowledge or snooze alerts, see detailed history, and run reports.

Some features are buried in menus, and the calendar is a little hard to use at times. Some options require clicking a specific toggle icon instead of just the text.

VictorOps allows you to consolidate alerts coming from multiple platforms, into one easy to read interface (and hand mobile app). I would recommend this service for anyone who is responsible for maintaining services and receives alerts from multiple platforms.

This has made all the difference for our OnCall

Haven't quite figured out how to make VictorOps resolve our issues for us ;-)

We have moved from an email to sms gateway homegrown solution to VO. We love the ease of sending alerts and correlating them together in one easy to follow twitter like stream.

Plenty of integrations, and easy to post to REST API for those that don't exist

Notification messages on home screen could be longer. by VictorOps on 12/05/2016 Thanks for the five star review! We work with lots of teams that migrate from homegrown systems to improve their overall alerting process. It's great to see that making the change to VictorOps has been helpful in reducing the pain of being on-call!

Using VictorOps is like adding another member to your team. By removing the cumbersome problem of over-active alerts, which can cause some serious team fatigue which we experienced prior to using victor ops, you have the ability to add a number of important options relative to the alerts you have created. With the Transmogrifier you can filter through irrelevant alerts with great ease, delivering only the critical alerts to your team. This is of course a process that involves tuning and can take some time. We use Nagios as one of our monitoring tools and the integration with victor ops was seamless. Allowing us to quickly adapt to the ever changing environment that makes up our infrastructure.

I am really looking forward to our increased use of the Transmogrifier and its ability to attach documentation to alerts on the fly. I can hardly wait until the next alert that rolls in, including a specific and detailed path to solving the problem that is currently alerting. With the Transmogrifier, this feature is only a few clicks away and I am speaking to our team on this on a regular basis in order to improve the team’s efficiency bringing newer folks up to speed faster. The mobile app interface is outstanding and is constantly improved based upon user feedback.

The only Con that I have discovered is the time it takes to weed through the alerts that you setup. The robustness of what alerts can be programmed in to be registered is an ongoing process as new systems get added. by VictorOps on 03/03/2016 Wow - "I can hardly wait until the next alert rolls in." Thankfully, this means we're doing exactly what we set out to do: making our users' lives better. Thanks for such a wonderful review!

Best move the company has made to make our on-call rotation be easier. Amazing integration and support. The team is also very responsive to questions.

Ease of integration. Quick response on bugs. Proximity to their headquarters. The People! by VictorOps on 02/03/2016 We love what we do here at VictorOps, and it's great that it shows through in the support that we offer our customers!

Excellent service for the notification of incidents in the system. It is possible to set different rules and schedule on a group of users: DevOps, Managers. ViсtorOps team quickly implement feature requests - thank you very much!

Good Android application to manage/acknowledge incidents. East integration with Zabbix. Nice community and documentation.

The application for Android has no buttons on / off for Maintenance mode. by VictorOps on 12/05/2016 The ability to manage alerts from mobile platforms is priority for us, so it's great to see that you're actively leveraging the Android app! We're continuously adding new features to our mobile platforms, so keep an eye out for updates that support improved maintenance mode functionality.

We've been using VictorOps for close to 2 years now and both the app and the service behind it are fantastic. Being able to funnel all of our alerts into 1 alerting system where we manage schedules is a great feature..but others have this. What really makes VictorOps shine is the timeline feature where you can see full history of alerts in a simple timeline view and then 'loop in' team members for help if needed.

does what it says on the tin

Android app looks a little (very little!) dated by VictorOps on 02/03/2016 We love hearing the word "fantastic" in VictorOps reviews! It's also great to note how we're different. We strive hard to make the lives of our users better, and the timeline is a key element in doing just that. Also - we just released a new UI for our Android App! You can check out the full release notes here: https://victorops.com/blog/release-notes-2-26/

Excellent service for tracking server outages as they happen

I like the best is the simplicity to set it up and to integrate with other tools, as well as the versatility to create different teams with different escalation schedules and paging policies.

The only thing thus far I have a slight issue with is not having a tabbed view of environments, Since the calls use text to speech, it's sometimes difficult to hear the name of the server which has an outage, though once aware you can just check the app.

Intuitive design for the app (which is available for both iOS and Android of course) which makes me use it just as much, if not more, than the web portal.

Could use some minor tweaks to Teams configuration, although there is a very good chance we might just be using it wrong.

We started using VictorOps six months ago, and now it's almost a pleasure being on call. Alerts come from a single source now, and only when you're on your rotation. (Before everyone on the team was getting a mix of text messages & emails 24x7) The timeline gives a good summary of events, and makes handing off on-call responsibilities a breeze.

The incident timeline is a great way to view events. Mobile apps are great on both iOS & Android.

Transformation system (transmogifier) can be pretty confusing at times. Some features seem to only exist in mobile.

Prior to Bluestem Technologies migration to VictorOps, only a few of our squads were using Pagerduty for on-call incident management. Our major goals and justifications for switching to VictorOps was onboarding our entire technology team onto one on-call solution as well increasing our major incident responsiveness. VictorOps was chosen over PagerDuty for it’s people-centric focus, feature capabilities and cost.

The transmogrifier has been an extremely useful tool for many of our teams. We've added playbook annotations to most of our alerts which has been a boon for our 24 by 7 support team. The Datadog integration has also shown VictorOps's savviness and people-centric approach to building a product. A Datadog VictorOps incident will send all of the pertinent information and graphs to an on-call users phone. The VictorOps mobile app can also be used as a platform to seamlessly chat with other users. We've also been encouraged by some of VictorOp's new features they have started to roll out. Their Statuspage.io integration has made many in our organization excited about the ability to have a one-stop-shop dashboard to communicate down-time incidents to a diverse group of users within our company. Their brand-new Control Calling feature (a feature that creates a conference call and pages users to join, penned "the new bat signal" by VictorOps) is also an intriguing feature that several of our teams have started to explore. Possibly our favorite aspect of working with VictorOps over PagerDuty is how responsive their team has been to both our support and development requests.

VictorOps is still lacking some of PagerDuty's clerical and reporting functionality; for example, we no longer have the ability to easily reference a specific incident in the past. by VictorOps on 14/03/2016 Thanks for such a positive review! We see people make the switch from PagerDuty on a regular basis, not just because of our feature set, but because we also put our users first. It's great that you noticed that too. It's also good to note that if you capture each incident as a post-mortem report, you'll always be able to go back and reference it. However if you need a more specific way to reference past incidents, I would definitely suggest you drop our support team a line. They are constantly looking for ways to improve the product, and would love to hear your ideas.

VictorOps has been used in our environment for over a year. This has been an invaluable tool to making sure our staff are aware of what's happening in the environment and pulling in alerts from a couple of different systems. The Transmorgrifier is my favorite feature that I cannot find anywhere else. We've completely transformed at least one custom alert so that our techs don't have to dig for relevant information, they can just find it right in front of them. The best non-replicable asset going, however, is the staff and the culture at VictorOps. They genuinely care about their customers and have even worked with us to develop an integration that we wanted to use in our environment.

Excellent On-call management and escalations, Transmorgrifier, Customer Service

Potentially, there could be more integrations, but there seem to be more products out there daily that want to send alerts. It is obvious that the dev staff is looking to include more integrations and are extremely responsive to their customer requests even assisting us with working on custom integrations. by VictorOps on 07/03/2016 "Customers first" is our mantra here at VictorOps. That's exactly why we built the Transmogrifier, and why our tech team is always happy to offer personalized support. Our dev team is always working on adding new integrations - so be sure to check in to see what's available!

VictorOps is a great application to funnel and route alerts from all your systems in one area. It has scheduling, so any team member is never always on call. The iOS app is a great tool for acknowledging alerts.

alert routing and team scheduling are great features. annotations for leaving notes on how to handle an alert for new team members.

not sure I can think of one at this time by VictorOps on 01/03/2016 It's always great to hear that we're making a positive impact on how teams are managing their on-call processes. Our focus for the VictorOps platform is on improving the lives of our users so they can focus on driving innovation and not fighting fires - so be sure to let us know how we can improve to capture that fifth star in your review!