Alert fatigue is the desensitization engineers experience from an overwhelming number of low-value notifications, leading to burnout and missed critical alerts. It's a widespread issue across critical industries. In healthcare, studies have found that between 72% and 99% of all hospital alarms are false or non-actionable [3]. Cybersecurity teams face a similar challenge, with analysts becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of alerts from security systems [4]. This constant noise isn't just an annoyance; it's a significant operational risk that can lead to delayed responses and major incidents [5].
Traditional on-call management tools often worsen the problem by creating excessive noise. The modern solution is AI-powered escalation, which filters signals, enriches context, and ensures only important issues reach the right person. This guide explores how to reduce noise and protect on-call engineers using an intelligent, automated approach.
The Downfall of Traditional On-Call Management
Legacy alerting tools, which were designed for simpler monolithic systems, struggle with the complexity of modern microservices and distributed architectures. These tools often trigger "alert storms," where multiple monitors fire simultaneously for a single underlying issue, flooding the on-call engineer with redundant pages.
Furthermore, traditional alerts frequently lack context, forcing responders to manually investigate what is happening, where the issue is, and its potential impact. This manual toil wastes valuable time during a crisis. Platforms like PagerDuty can be rigid, expensive, and act more like a simple notification system than a comprehensive incident management tool. For these reasons, many DevOps and SRE teams are now looking for PagerDuty alternatives for on-call engineers that offer better collaboration, automation, and a more intuitive user experience. Modern solutions should go beyond just paging and support the entire DevOps incident management lifecycle.
How AI-Powered Escalation Reduces On-Call Noise
AI-driven alert escalation platforms are designed to address the root causes of alert fatigue, not just manage notifications. This approach represents a shift from reactive paging to proactive, intelligent incident response.
1. Smart Alert Grouping and Deduplication
Rootly uses AI to automatically analyze and group related alerts into a single, consolidated "leader alert." This prevents multiple pages for the same issue, reducing the cognitive load on responders and allowing them to see the full picture at a glance. Rootly's Alert Grouping logic intelligently clusters incoming alerts based on:
- Destinations: The team, service, or escalation policy the alert was routed to.
- Time Window: A configurable window to cluster alerts from the same incident episode.
- Content Matching: Rules that match alert titles, descriptions, payloads, or other fields to identify duplicates.
2. Automated Triage and Dynamic Escalation Policies
AI can triage alerts by automatically filtering out noise, resolving known issues, and escalating only what truly requires human attention. Rootly offers flexible escalation policies that define how and when to escalate if a responder doesn't acknowledge an alert. These policies can be dynamic, with different paths based on urgency, time of day, or alert content. This ensures critical issues get immediate attention while avoiding unnecessary nighttime pages for low-priority events. You can learn more about configuring these policies as you get started with a modern on-call platform.
3. Context-Rich Alerts for Faster Triage
AI also enriches alerts with critical context, such as links to runbooks, details on affected services, and information from relevant past incidents. Providing this information directly within the alert dramatically reduces the time responders spend gathering information, a key metric known as Mean Time to Triage (MTTT). This principle is a cornerstone of modern on-call management best practices.
Why SRE Teams Switch from PagerDuty to Rootly
Many Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams find that legacy tools don't meet the needs of a modern, collaborative incident response process. The move to platforms like Rootly is often driven by the need for a more integrated and human-centric solution.
From a "Very Expensive Phone Call" to a Complete Incident Platform
Many teams feel that PagerDuty functions primarily as a "very expensive phone call"—an effective tool for notification but one that falls short as a collaborative platform. Incident response requires cross-functional teamwork, yet most teams don't collaborate within their alerting tool. Rootly, in contrast, is an end-to-end incident management platform that integrates the entire incident lifecycle, from alert to retrospective, within a single, collaborative environment like Slack. This holistic approach is a key reason why SRE teams switch from PagerDuty to Rootly.
A Focus on Preventing Engineer Burnout
Constant alert fatigue is a primary driver of engineer burnout, a serious issue that can lead to high turnover. Studies in other high-stress professions have shown a direct link between overwhelming on-call duties and burnout [7]. Recognizing this, the industry is developing tools like On-Call Health, which analyzes incident data to detect early warning signs of burnout [6].
Rootly is considered one of the best on-call management tools for 2025 because its features are designed to create a sustainable and healthy on-call culture. By minimizing noise and automating manual toil, Rootly directly addresses the factors that contribute to burnout, helping teams stay effective and engaged.
The Measurable Impact of a Smarter Alerting Strategy
Adopting an AI-powered alerting strategy has tangible benefits that extend beyond simply reducing noise.
- Faster Signal Recognition and Lower MTTR: When alerts are trustworthy and actionable, responders act faster, reducing hesitation and improving Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA). Context-rich alerts and a unified incident timeline also lead to faster investigation and resolution, directly lowering Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
- Stronger Team Focus and Resilience: A quieter alert environment reduces stress and allows engineers to focus on proactive reliability work instead of constant firefighting [8]. This fosters a healthier on-call culture, strengthens team morale, and improves long-term performance.
- Better Business and Customer Outcomes: Ultimately, reducing alert noise leads to fewer missed incidents, shorter service disruptions, and improved system stability. Reliable systems create better customer experiences and protect business revenue and reputation.
Conclusion: Build a Quieter On-Call Culture with Rootly
Alert fatigue is a significant problem that traditional alerting tools often fail to solve. AI-driven alert escalation platforms like Rootly offer a modern solution by intelligently grouping alerts, enriching them with context, and automating the incident lifecycle.
Rootly is more than just a PagerDuty alternative; it's a complete platform designed to reduce noise, prevent burnout, and build a culture of calm reliability. By implementing a smarter alerting strategy, you can empower your teams to respond faster, collaborate more effectively, and focus on what matters most: building resilient systems.
Learn more about how Rootly can help you adopt a modern, sustainable way to protect on-call engineers.