This is actually one of the big reasons we built PagerDuty. SMS is not as reliable as people think -- messages get dropped or delayed by hours all the time.
We've found the automated phone calls to be a much more reliable way of getting the alert out. We can tell right away that the message has been received by asking the listener to press a button on their phone, and repeat or escalate as needed if we don't hear the tone.
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We just picked up a couple of real, physical pagers because we're unwilling to trust SMS delivery.
This is actually one of the big reasons we built PagerDuty. SMS is not as reliable as people think -- messages get dropped or delayed by hours all the time.
We've found the automated phone calls to be a much more reliable way of getting the alert out. We can tell right away that the message has been received by asking the listener to press a button on their phone, and repeat or escalate as needed if we don't hear the tone.