As I travel around the country and meet folks who are interested in what VictorOps is all about, I’m often pressed with the question of “How are you different than some other alerting service?”. The responses are varied but more or less echo the sentiment that the initial alert is just step one in the incident management lifecycle.
The responsibility of being on-call is a much larger role than simply “ACK’ing” an alert pushed to your mobile device. Now that you’ve received the page, it’s time to get busy.
Would you prefer to have a ton of valuable context delivered to you automatically with the alert, or would you rather go look for that stuff on your own? If you’ve ever been woken up in the middle of the night and responsible for diagnosing and resolving a huge problem, I think you know the answer to that.