Top Tools for On-Call Engineers: Rootly Beats the Rest

Being an on-call engineer is a high-pressure role. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams are the first line of defense, tasked with maintaining system reliability around the clock. In an environment where every second counts, having an efficient workflow can be the difference between a minor hiccup and a major outage. The right set of tools isn't just a luxury; it's critical for minimizing downtime, reducing engineer burnout, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

This article will explore the essential toolkit for on-call engineers in 2025. We'll break down the categories of tools needed, compare the top platforms, and demonstrate why Rootly is the leading solution for managing the entire incident lifecycle from start to finish.

The Essential Toolkit for Modern On-Call Engineers

An effective on-call strategy requires more than just a phone number and a ticketing system. It demands an integrated stack of tools designed to work together seamlessly. On-call management software is essential for streamlining operations, preventing burnout, and ensuring high service quality [2]. Modern on-call engineers rely on a few key categories of tools:

• Alerting & On-Call Scheduling: These tools are the foundation. They manage schedules, define escalation policies, and ensure the right person is notified immediately when an issue arises.
• Incident Response & Collaboration: When an incident is active, these platforms centralize communication, automate repetitive tasks, and provide a single source of truth for all responders.
• Observability & Monitoring: To understand what's happening, engineers need tools that collect metrics, logs, and traces. This provides deep visibility into system health before, during, and after an incident.
• Post-Incident Analysis: Often called retrospectives or postmortems, this is where learning happens. This software helps teams conduct blameless reviews and track action items to prevent repeat incidents.

The most effective solutions integrate these functions into a single, cohesive workflow, eliminating friction and saving valuable time.

From Monitoring to Postmortems: How SREs Use Rootly

Rootly stands out by unifying the entire incident management process into a single platform. Instead of juggling separate tools for alerting, collaboration, and postmortems, engineers can manage every phase within Rootly's cohesive workflow. You can get a deep dive into how Rootly works. From the initial signal to the final lessons learned, Rootly provides a structured path to resolution and improvement.

Detection, Alerting, and Incident Creation

The incident lifecycle begins with detection. Rootly integrates natively with dozens of popular monitoring and observability tools like Datadog, Grafana, and Sentry. Alerts from these sources flow directly into Rootly, where they can automatically trigger the creation of a new incident based on predefined rules. This automation reduces manual effort and ensures that critical alerts are never missed. For issues identified outside of monitoring tools, incidents can also be created manually from the Rootly UI, directly within Slack, or via API.

Triage, Response, and Coordination

Once an incident is declared, Rootly becomes the central command center for the response effort. It provides the structure and automation needed to coordinate complex incidents effectively. All-in-one platforms can help teams resolve incidents up to 90% faster by centralizing these activities [3].

Key response activities managed within Rootly include:

• Assigning roles like Incident Commander and Communications Lead to establish clear ownership.
• Updating status and severity with a single command to keep everyone informed.
• Automating communication to stakeholders and leadership via powerful workflow automation.
• Synchronizing updates to dedicated Slack channels, status pages, and other tools to ensure alignment.
• Creating and tracking action items in real-time to ensure no task is forgotten.

Resolution and Retrospectives

After an incident is resolved, the work isn't over. The most important step is learning from it. Rootly’s Retrospectives feature provides a structured template to document the incident timeline, contributing factors, and customer impact. Rootly automatically populates the retrospective with key data from the incident, such as the full timeline of events, participants, and associated action items. This ensures that follow-up tasks are tracked to completion, turning every incident into a valuable learning opportunity and completing the incident lifecycle in Rootly.

Analytics & Insights for Continuous Improvement

You can't improve what you don't measure. Rootly automatically tracks key reliability metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). Using built-in dashboards, teams can identify trends in their incident response, see which services are most prone to failure, and measure the effectiveness of their on-call process over time. This data-driven approach allows for continuous, targeted improvements to both system reliability and team performance.

SRE Observability Stack for Kubernetes

Monitoring dynamic Kubernetes environments presents unique challenges due to their complexity and ephemeral nature. The growth of the incident response market is largely driven by this increasing cloud complexity and the high cost of downtime [7]. A modern SRE observability stack for Kubernetes requires several layers:

• Foundation (Metrics, Logs, Traces): This layer consists of tools that collect the raw telemetry data. Core open-source tools include Prometheus for metrics, Fluentd for logs, and Jaeger for traces.
• Alerting Layer: Tools like Alertmanager, or the alerting features within platforms like Datadog and New Relic, sit on top of the foundation. They are configured to fire alerts when specific conditions or thresholds are met.
• Incident Management Layer: This is where Rootly operates. It sits on top of the entire observability stack, ingesting alerts from the alerting layer. Rootly transforms raw data and noisy alerts into coordinated action, providing the structured, automated response that is essential for managing incidents in complex systems like Kubernetes.

Comparing the Top On-Call Management Tools

The market for on-call and incident management tools is crowded, with options ranging from legacy players focused on alerting to modern, integrated platforms [8]. Here’s how the top contenders stack up.

Rootly: The All-in-One Leader

• Features: As an end-to-end platform, Rootly offers powerful workflow automation, deep and seamless Slack integration, integrated retrospectives, and robust analytics. It provides a truly unified experience across the entire incident lifecycle and is noted for its user-friendly interface and effective capabilities, even offering a free SaaS tier [4].
• Best For: Teams of all sizes looking for a modern, scalable, and highly automated solution. If your goal is to reduce toil and bake best practices into your process, Rootly is the top choice. Get a complete Overview of Rootly to see its capabilities.

PagerDuty: The On-Call Scheduling Veteran

• Features: PagerDuty is a market leader known for its strong on-call scheduling, robust escalation policies, and reliable alerting. While it has expanded into incident response, its features can feel less integrated compared to newer platforms built from the ground up for a unified workflow [6].
• Best For: Large enterprises or organizations that need a mature, battle-tested solution primarily for alerting and on-call management.

FireHydrant: The Strong Competitor

• Features: FireHydrant is another strong all-in-one platform offering automated runbooks, a service catalog, and analytics capabilities. It is a capable alternative for teams looking to streamline their response processes [4].
• Best For: Teams looking for an alternative to Rootly with a specific focus on building out and automating runbooks.

Grafana OnCall: The Open-Source Choice

• Features: Grafana OnCall is an open-source option that integrates natively with the popular Grafana observability stack (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus). It offers flexible scheduling and alerting directly within the Grafana ecosystem [1].
• Best For: Teams that are heavily invested in the Grafana ecosystem and prefer the control and customizability of an open-source, self-hosted solution.

Comparison Table

Feature

Rootly

PagerDuty

FireHydrant

End-to-End Workflow

✅ Seamlessly Integrated

➕ Add-ons Required

✅ Integrated

Workflow Automation

✅ Excellent

✔️ Good

✅ Excellent

Integrated Retrospectives

✅ Native & Automated

➕ Less Integrated

✅ Native & Automated

Slack-Native Experience

✅ Excellent

✔️ Good Integration

✔️ Good Integration

Service Catalog

✅ Yes

✅ Yes

✅ Yes

Analytics & Reporting

✅ Robust

✅ Robust

✅ Robust

Conclusion: Why Rootly is the Best Tool for On-Call Engineers

While there are many capable tools on the market, Rootly stands out as the best choice for modern on-call engineers. Its key differentiators make it uniquely suited to handle the pressures of incident management in today's complex technology landscape.

• Unmatched Automation: Rootly’s powerful and flexible workflow engine automates tedious manual tasks, from creating Slack channels to notifying stakeholders. This reduces cognitive load on engineers and enforces a consistent response process every time.
• Engineer-Centric Design: Rootly is built to meet engineers where they already work: in Slack. Its deep, native Slack integration means engineers can manage the entire incident without context-switching, leading to faster, more efficient collaboration.
• Complete Lifecycle Coverage: Rootly is not a point solution. It is a comprehensive platform that covers everything from the initial alert to the final retrospective. This ensures that valuable lessons are learned from every incident and used to improve system reliability.
• Data-Driven Reliability: By automatically tracking key metrics and providing insightful analytics, Rootly empowers teams to make data-backed decisions. It provides the visibility needed to continuously improve both your systems and your on-call processes.

To see how the Rootly platform can transform your incident management, book a demo today.

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