The best solution for OnPage is a small company with a small On-Call Team. The reason for this is because of how many it can trigger in a 30-minute time span. It's really good with us IT people as we understand the urgency of the call and we can react with the ticket. This gives the end-user peace of mind. This product would not be good for a large-scale company. It would not scale well for thousands of users.
I recommend Splunk on-call is more suited where there are high incident queues; multiple teams need to be involved in handling a P1 severity issue. Multiple levels of escalation are needed environment where automated action is required. I recommend the solution for large-scale & medium-scale business units. For small-scale business units, I see the functional value is less.
Not really a "downside": because it works so well, any details we haven't documented from our initial setup are probably lost. It's been almost four years since our initial configuration, and I can no longer easily navigate the OnPage site because I literally haven't logged in since the initial implementation.
VictorOps support has proven excellent for us. Because it is such a widely used tool, there is a lot of documentation on usage, and a large community of users to lean on. Also, many engineers have had experience working with VictorOps already, and the tool is so easy to setup / manage that much support isn't really necessary.
OnPage is the first we chose and would not change that. The ability to link to our CSM, RMM, and technicians on the road has made this the best solution. Our team is able to use the current setup to make custom alerts based on the ticket details. This allows for all of our future needs to be covered.
Splunk On-Call integrates better with our Splunk Cybersecurity and Reporting products due to the same family tree of the same eco system. We were previously using built-in on-call from individual applications and while adequate, they were difficult to manage and support SLA varied greatly across different applications. In addition we also used xMatters which did not integrate well with SAP products nor Citrix products so we were still using more than a single on-call product which was solved by implementing Splunk On-Call
Eliminated the concern that on-call personnel were not notified of an issue at all or on a timely basis
The reasonable cost, ease of use and reliability reassured management that any issues arising would be handled quickly
Users disliked carrying the bulky, unreliable and battery operated pagers. Today all users carry cell phones and can easily install and manage OnPage software