In today's fast-paced digital environment, incidents are complex and carry significant financial risk. The cost of downtime is a critical business metric; a single hour of downtime costs over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises more than $300,000, with 41% of firms reporting costs that climb between $1 million and $5 million [6]. For years, PagerDuty has been a foundational tool for on-call management and alerting. However, an alert is merely the starting signal for a much larger incident response process. As a result, fast-moving companies are adopting comprehensive platforms like Rootly, which are designed to manage the entire incident lifecycle.
This article explores why modern organizations are leveraging Rootly to consolidate tooling and automate their incident response, often choosing to replace or enhance legacy alerting tools like PagerDuty.
The Shift in Incident Management: More Than Just an Alert
Modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps practices have fundamentally changed incident management. The focus has shifted from simply waking someone up to orchestrating a complete, end-to-end response. Today's teams must manage the full incident lifecycle: detection, coordination, resolution, retrospectives, and continuous learning. The ultimate goal isn't just to fix the immediate problem but to learn from every incident and build more resilient systems.
This growing emphasis is reflected in market projections, with the incident and emergency management market expected to grow to over USD 230 billion by 2031 [5]. The traditional model of using separate, siloed tools for alerting, communication, and ticketing has become a bottleneck. The contemporary approach favors a single, integrated platform that unifies the entire process.
PagerDuty's Role vs. The Modern SRE's Needs
PagerDuty is rightly recognized as one of the top incident management tools for its core strengths: robust on-call scheduling, flexible escalation policies, and reliable alert delivery. It excels at its primary job of getting the right alert to the right person quickly.
However, for fast-moving companies focused on holistic incident management, several gaps emerge:
- Limited Scope: PagerDuty is primarily an alerting tool. The actual "management" of the incident—coordination, stakeholder communication, and debugging—occurs in other tools like Slack, Jira, and Confluence.
- Manual Toil: Incident commanders often find themselves bogged down by repetitive manual tasks, such as creating dedicated channels, inviting responders, starting a video call, and posting status updates. This administrative overhead slows down resolution.
- Disconnected Learning: Retrospectives, which are vital for learning and improvement, are typically managed in a separate process disconnected from the incident response itself. This makes it challenging to capture accurate data and generate meaningful action items.
- Tool Sprawl: Juggling multiple disconnected tools increases licensing costs and adds cognitive load on responders, forcing them to switch contexts during high-pressure situations.
How Rootly Fills the Gaps: An End-to-End Platform
Rootly is a comprehensive incident management software platform built to manage the entire incident lifecycle from a central command center. It addresses the gaps left by traditional alerting tools by unifying the response process through automation, centralized collaboration, and integrated learning.
Centralized Command Center and Automation
Rootly centralizes incident response directly within the communication tools your teams already use, like Slack. Its powerful, no-code workflows automate hundreds of manual steps, freeing up engineers to focus on resolving the issue.
For example, when an incident is declared, Rootly can automatically:
- Create a dedicated Slack channel and Zoom bridge.
- Page the correct on-call person via PagerDuty or Rootly’s native on-call tooling.
- Assign incident roles and associated tasks.
- Automatically generate a retrospective template upon resolution.
- Send scheduled updates to designated stakeholder channels.
Full PagerDuty Replacement or Seamless Integration
For companies looking to consolidate their SRE tools for incident tracking and reduce costs, Rootly offers its own robust on-call scheduling and alerting solution. This makes it one of the best PagerDuty alternatives for organizations seeking a single, unified platform.
Alternatively, for teams that want to retain PagerDuty for alerting, Rootly provides a deep, bi-directional integration. This approach allows you to combine PagerDuty’s trusted alerting with Rootly's powerful workflow automation. Key integration features include importing PagerDuty services, automating paging from within Rootly, and maintaining a real-time sync between both platforms.
Data-Driven Insights and Learning
Rootly embeds learning directly into the incident process. It automatically generates retrospectives with key data like timelines, involved services, and chat logs already populated. This saves valuable engineering time and ensures that post-incident reviews are based on accurate, complete data.
Rootly’s analytics dashboards help teams track key metrics like Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR), incident frequency, and patterns by service or severity. This data provides the insights needed to identify systemic weaknesses and make data-driven improvements to infrastructure and processes.
Compare On-Call Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty at a Glance
When you compare oncall platforms, it's clear they are designed for different scopes. While PagerDuty is an excellent alerting tool, Rootly provides a more complete and centralized solution for the entire incident management process.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Core Function
End-to-End Incident Management
On-Call Management & Alerting
Automation
Powerful, no-code workflows for the entire lifecycle
Focused on alerting and escalation automation
Collaboration
Native incident command center in Slack
Relies on integrations and manual processes
Retrospectives
Integrated and automated
Requires separate tools and processes
On-Call Tooling
Built-in as a full replacement option
Core offering
Value Proposition
Consolidates tools, reduces manual work, improves reliability
Reliable alerting and on-call scheduling
This comparison highlights that Rootly delivers a comprehensive platform that extends far beyond just alerting, which is why a deep integration with PagerDuty is so valuable for many teams.
What's Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
A modern DevOps incident management strategy relies on an integrated stack of specialized tools. Here are the key components and how they fit together:
- Monitoring & Observability: Tools like Datadog and New Relic to detect issues and provide system visibility.
- Incident Management Hub: Rootly serves as the central nervous system, connecting tools and orchestrating the entire response, from declaration to retrospective.
- On-Call & Alerting: A system to notify responders, such as Rootly On-Call, PagerDuty, or other
Opsgenie alternatives. - Collaboration: Real-time communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- Ticketing & Project Management: Tools like Jira for tracking follow-up action items from retrospectives.
In this stack, Rootly acts as the cohesive layer that ties these disparate systems into a seamless, automated workflow, whether you use its native features or its powerful PagerDuty integration.
Conclusion: Why Consolidating with Rootly is the Future
While PagerDuty excels at alerting, fast-moving companies need a more comprehensive solution to manage the full complexity of incidents. The incident response market is projected to see significant growth from 2024 to 2030, reinforcing the industry-wide shift toward advanced, integrated platforms [4].
Rootly provides an all-in-one platform that automates manual work, centralizes collaboration, and fosters a culture of continuous learning. By either replacing or deeply integrating with PagerDuty, Rootly empowers teams to resolve incidents faster, reduce the risk of costly downtime, and ultimately build more reliable products.
Ready to modernize your incident management? Request a demo to see how Rootly can help your team automate workflows and resolve incidents with confidence.