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I’m a peon.  I am a sad end-user who has to go oncall every now and then.

My god this thing is terrible to use!!

I want to quickly put in a override because I’ll be doing some work and I’ll create alarms.  So I need to take over that time.

Here’s what I’m presented with when I login.

 

 

I can go into each of those menus above, none of them are clear or related to the fact I’m oncall and want to do a thing relating to it.

Finally after fiddling around I get to schedules. No, that’s useless.
 

Can’t do an override in there (or can I...)

Oh! Go to schedules and there’s a big blue “Create Override” button.  Great! I click that, fill in all the details and get a message:

 


Get REALLY annoyed by this stage.  Fluff around, FINALLY realise I have to back to Schedules above, find the person who’ll be doing the shift I need to override, click on their name and then add it in there.

I mean I got there in the end but why did I have to fight with this tool for 10 minutes to figure this out? Shouldn’t this be the most basic, easy to use feature of this product?  Why is it hidden away in menus after menu?? Why are there 9 menus along the top?

Does anyone who works on this product use it like us Peons who actually go on call have to use it?  I guess there’s a tonne of AI wankery and fluffy that management loves and all that reporting guff, but can’t there be a simple UI for us lowly peons to make life easy?

I absolutely hate using this product - not because it puts me on call, I signed up for my role knowing that was the case and I don’t mind at all, but for how difficult this product makes simple tasks. Trying to do this stuff when there’s actual alerts etc, it’s stress inducing.

Don’t even get me started on trying to edit an override (we’ve decided you can’t, you have to delete it and re-do it)

I asked a few workmates and they all have similar feedback, mostly it’s just “It’s all we have to use, get used to it”

So here’s my feedback from the trenches.  I don’t know what other products there are in this space, maybe this is really great compared to the others.  But it seems the core function of the product “Know who’s on call, be able to change that easily” has been sidelined for whatever the product is now.

Hi ​@tjh,

Thanks so much for sharing your honest feedback. Reading your story in the perspective of a peon really takes me back to my Warcraft II days. I totally get how frustrating it can be when a tool you rely on for on-call work feels more complicated than it should, especially when you’re just trying to do something as basic as creating an override.

The current process involves going to Schedules, finding the right schedule, clicking the “Create Override” button, and then selecting the person and time. It’s not as intuitive as it could be, and you’re definitely not alone in feeling this way. Editing overrides is also a known limitation; right now, you do have to delete and recreate them if you need to make changes.

We’re always working to improve the experience for on-call engineers, and feedback like yours is super valuable. I’ll make sure your comments are shared with our product team so they’re aware of the challenges you and others are facing.

In the meantime, here’s a quick guide to creating overrides that might help streamline things a bit. If you have any other tips, suggestions, or specific pain points, please let us know, we want to make PagerDuty better for everyone who uses it.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience. Enjoy your day and make sure to celebrate off-call when on-call gets too stressful!

PS: You would be amazed with some of the workarounds our own engineers come up to address product limitations and edge cases. 😂

 

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