Opsgenie

Comments: We needed a more suitable monitoring alerting platform to help us grow and make use of systems outside of our infrastructure. Ultimately, Ops Genie has helped us do that. We can now plug services like AWS and Jira into our monitoring without having to force Nagios checks to do the work that has mostly already been done elsewhere. It's provided us more accurate and reliable alerting and reduced the effects of duplicate alerts coming through whilst an incident is being investigated. We hope to make further gains using additional features we haven;'t touched upon yet in the Ops Genie ecosystem

Pros: We had previously been using a Nagios + SMS provider solution, which had served us well as a small company. However as we have grown, we have found that SMS just wasn't a reliable enough solution. We looked around at various alerting providers, and found Ops Genie to be the closest match to what we were looking for. It's given us the ability to test out new notifications before enabling them for our on-call schedules, Re-arrange on call as we see fit without having to fiddle with Nagios configs, utilise integrations to alleviate the sometimes difficult task of adding checks into Nagios from other systems and gain a better insight into our alerts while reducing the all too common "alert fatigue". It gives the ability to create much more complex workflows and setups that previously weren't possible.

Cons: As is often the case with software that provides a wealth of options, getting started was quite complex, particularly around scheduling on call patterns. I think larger organisations may not have this problem, but we wanted to do some rather custom set ups. Fortunately, the support from Ops Genie is frankly brilliant, and they walked us through everything we needed to do. Should there still be difficulties, they can enact the changes you're looking for and guide you through what was done.

Comments: We need an application that works hand-in-hand with our SIEM, Splunk, and OpsGenie does just that. As events filter into Splunk's incident management platform, our analysts are alerted through OpsGenie (via a webhook integration). Analysts can then acknowledge and manage alerts. We also use OpsGenie as a tool for documentation, although this may be a somewhat unconventional use case. Analysts can search back through past incidents, using them as a reference. This is a highly valuable tool to us and we look forward to future improvements.

Pros: We love the scheduling feature, which keeps all of our security analysts on track with their shifts. The mobile application is also very useful, as it allows analysts to manage their schedules and keep track of alerts while on the go. There are a plethora of applications that OpsGenie integrates with, such as Slack and AWS. The ability to integrate other applications with OpsGenie is important to us, as our services to our clients depend on it.

Cons: Sometimes new features are slow to be implemented, even if they are minor. For example, we have requested some minor features such as a dark mode and the ability to expand the text entry box, but these features have yet to be seen. Sometimes the search function can be difficult to use, as it requires a specific syntax that doesn't always function as expected.