On-call teams are the first line of defense in maintaining system reliability. However, traditional on-call tools often create more problems than they solve, leading to alert fatigue, manual coordination, and information siloed across different platforms. The industry has evolved from simple alert management to needing comprehensive incident management—a systematic approach essential for modern DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. Rootly stands out as a leading modern PagerDuty alternative, designed to address these legacy issues by integrating the entire incident lifecycle into a single, cohesive platform.
The Limitations of Legacy Alerting Tools like PagerDuty
Legacy platforms like PagerDuty were designed for a simpler era, focusing primarily on alert routing and on-call scheduling. This alert-centric model is no longer sufficient for managing the complexity of today's distributed systems.
- Focus on Alerts, Not Incidents: These tools excel at notifying the right person, but that is where their primary function ends. Teams are left to manually declare an incident, create communication channels in Slack, start a video call, page stakeholders, and document a timeline—all in separate tools. This fragmented process leaves critical context scattered.
- Manual Toil and Slow Response: The manual, repetitive work required during an incident is a significant drain on responders. This toil directly increases Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and contributes to engineer burnout.
- Siloed Communication and Learning: When incident data is spread across Slack, Jira, and Confluence, conducting a systematic post-incident analysis becomes a painful exercise in data archaeology. This fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to track key reliability metrics accurately and learn from past events. Many incident management solutions offer a low return on investment, with some taking around 15 months to show value due to these very inefficiencies [6].
What to Look for in a Modern Incident Management Platform
To overcome the limitations of older tools, a modern platform must provide end-to-end support for the entire incident lifecycle. Key capabilities to look for include:
- Seamless Workflow Automation: Look for codeless, automated workflows that trigger actions based on incident properties like severity. For example, a platform should be able to automatically create a dedicated Slack channel, invite the right responders based on an on-call schedule, assign an incident commander, and post updates to a status page.
- Native Collaboration Hub Integration: Deep integration with tools like Slack is non-negotiable. Responders should be able to manage the entire incident—from declaration to resolution—within the communication platform where they already work, eliminating context switching.
- End-to-End Lifecycle Management: A modern tool must cover every phase: detection, alerting, response, resolution, and learning. This includes integrated retrospectives (post-mortems) and action item tracking to ensure lessons are validated and improvements are implemented.
- Powerful Analytics and Insights: The platform must deliver actionable data on key SRE metrics like Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) and MTTR, incident frequency by service, and retrospective completion rates. This makes it one of the most critical
site reliability engineering toolsfor any team seeking to improve its processes.
How Rootly Modernizes On-Call and Incident Management
Rootly is an all-in-one incident management software that centralizes and automates the entire response process. Built for today's complex microservices environments, Rootly provides a unified hub for collaboration and action. The platform guides teams through the complete incident management lifecycle, from the first alert to the final retrospective.
From Alert to Incident in Seconds
Rootly connects with over 100 monitoring, logging, and observability tools, including Datadog, Grafana, and Sentry. Alerts are intelligently de-duplicated and grouped to reduce noise, ensuring responders only focus on what matters. You can configure rules to automatically create incidents from specific alerts, assign severities, and page the correct on-call teams without any manual intervention.
Collaborate and Respond Natively in Slack
Rootly’s deep Slack integration allows responders to run commands, manage tasks, update incident status, and communicate with stakeholders without ever leaving their chat client. The powerful workflow engine automates dozens of manual steps, such as:
- Creating a dedicated incident channel.
- Pulling in relevant runbooks.
- Setting up a video conference link.
- Sending scheduled reminders to the incident commander.
Learn and Improve with Integrated Retrospectives
Once an incident is resolved, Rootly can automatically generate a retrospective that is pre-populated with the entire incident timeline, chat logs, key metrics, and action items. This seamless process eliminates the manual effort of gathering data. Furthermore, Rootly's analytics dashboards are essential SRE tools for incident tracking, helping teams spot trends, identify service hotspots, and measure the effectiveness of their response process. These capabilities are part of a broader set of SRE tools that reliable teams use to maintain system health through continuous improvement.
Compare On-call Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty & Opsgenie
When you compare oncall platforms, it becomes clear that not all tools are created equal. While PagerDuty and Opsgenie alternatives are effective for alerting, Rootly offers a complete, systematic solution for incident management, making it one of the top incident management tools available.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
Native Slack-Based Response
✅ Comprehensive
❌ Limited (Add-on)
❌ Limited (Add-on)
Codeless Workflow Automation
✅ Yes
❌ Limited
❌ Limited
Integrated Retrospectives
✅ Yes (Automated)
❌ No (Requires integration)
❌ No (Requires integration)
Customizable Incident Properties
✅ Yes
❌ Limited
❌ Limited
All-in-One Pricing
✅ Yes
❌ No (Multiple add-ons)
❌ No (Multiple add-ons)
Advanced Reliability Analytics
✅ Yes
❌ Limited
❌ Limited
What’s included in the modern SRE tooling stack?
A modern SRE team relies on a stack of specialized tools to maintain reliability. Answering "What’s included in the modern SRE tooling stack?" involves looking at a few core categories:
- Monitoring & Observability: Tools like Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana provide visibility into system health.
- Log Management: Platforms like Splunk or the ELK Stack aggregate logs for troubleshooting.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Tools like Terraform and Ansible automate infrastructure provisioning.
- Incident Management: Rootly acts as the central hub that connects these tools, orchestrating a unified, data-driven response when things go wrong.
The growing need for these solutions is reflected in market trends. The incident management software market is projected to grow from $7.2 billion in 2024 to over $15.5 billion by 2032, driven by the increasing frequency of security incidents and the need for enhanced preparedness and response strategies [1].
Conclusion: Go Beyond Paging with True Incident Management
While PagerDuty alternatives like Opsgenie are useful for alerting and scheduling, modern teams require a comprehensive DevOps incident management platform. Rootly provides an end-to-end solution that goes far beyond simple paging, making it the best oncall software for teams focused on reliability.
By switching to Rootly, teams achieve faster resolution times, reduce manual toil, improve collaboration, and foster a culture of continuous, data-driven learning. Instead of just managing alerts, you can manage the entire incident lifecycle from a single platform.
See how Rootly can transform your incident response process. Book a demo or start a free trial to experience modern incident management firsthand.