Why SRE Teams Drop PagerDuty for Rootly: Real‑World Benefits

For years, PagerDuty has been a staple for on-call management and alerting for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. However, the landscape of incident response is evolving. SREs today face persistent challenges with traditional on-call tools, including overwhelming alert fatigue, constant context switching between applications, and manual, repetitive tasks that slow down resolution times. Rootly is a modern, integrated solution designed to solve these exact problems by centralizing incident management within Slack. This article explores the real-world benefits and specific reasons why SRE teams switch from PagerDuty to Rootly.

The Core Problem: Disjointed Workflows and Alert Fatigue

Traditional incident response often forces engineers to juggle a suite of disconnected tools: one for alerts like PagerDuty, another for communication like Slack, a third for ticketing in Jira, and a fourth for documentation in Confluence. This fragmentation creates friction and inefficiency when every second counts.

This disjointed approach also leads to "alert fatigue," a state where engineers are so inundated with notifications that they start to ignore them, increasing the risk of missing critical incidents. In modern tech companies, where software uptime directly impacts revenue, effective alert and on-call management is non-negotiable [4]. The inefficiency is compounded by manual processes like creating a war room, inviting the right people, assigning roles, and keeping stakeholders updated—tasks that distract from the core problem.

The Rootly Solution: A Centralized Command Center in Slack

Rootly's core philosophy is to meet engineers where they already work: Slack. By integrating deeply with the platform, Rootly transforms it from a simple communication tool into a powerful, centralized command center for incident response.

Streamline On-Call Workflows Directly in Slack

With Rootly, on-call workflows integrated with Slack allow SREs to manage the entire incident lifecycle without ever leaving their chat client. Using simple slash commands like /rootly incident or /rootly page, engineers can declare incidents, page responders, escalate issues, and run automated playbooks. This approach eliminates disruptive context switching and consolidates all incident-related activity into a single, chronological channel. It keeps everyone on the same page and provides a complete audit trail of the response effort. You can learn more about this powerful Slack integration.

Automate Toil for Faster Resolution

Rootly’s powerful automation engine eliminates the manual, repetitive tasks that consume valuable time during an incident. Workflows can be configured to automatically:

• Create a dedicated incident Slack channel and Zoom bridge.
• Invite the current on-call engineer from PagerDuty or Rootly On-call.
• Assign key roles like Incident Commander and Communications Lead.
• Post automated status updates to a dedicated stakeholder channel.
• Create tickets in Jira and pages in Confluence.

This automation frees up engineers to focus on what they do best: diagnosing and resolving the problem. By handling the process, Rootly ensures a faster, more consistent response every time. These workflows are a core part of the experience.

Simplify On-Call Shift Handoffs

Traditional on-call shift handoffs—often a hurried sync call or a long, static document—are prone to losing critical context. When comparing Rootly vs. Opsgenie on-call shift handoffs, Rootly's method proves superior. Because all actions, decisions, and data are captured within the incident's Slack channel, the handover process becomes seamless. The incoming on-call engineer can simply review the channel's history to get a complete, context-rich picture of the current state, ensuring nothing is lost in translation.

Not Ready to Switch? Enhance PagerDuty with Rootly

Many organizations have deeply integrated PagerDuty into their operations and can't switch overnight. Rootly is designed for interoperability and can work in tandem with PagerDuty to make your existing setup more powerful. The Rootly + PagerDuty interoperability workflow adds a layer of automation and collaboration on top of PagerDuty's alerting.

Benefits of integrating Rootly with PagerDuty include:

• Automated Incident Creation: Ingest PagerDuty alerts to automatically declare and manage incidents in Rootly.
• Unified Paging: Page PagerDuty schedules and escalation policies directly from Slack via Rootly commands.
• Two-Way Sync: Maintain a synchronized state between Rootly and PagerDuty incident statuses.
• Smart Invites: Automatically invite the correct PagerDuty on-call personnel into the incident channel.

This powerful PagerDuty integration allows teams to adopt modern incident management practices without ripping and replacing their current alerting tool.

The Market is Shifting: Why Now is the Time to Re-evaluate

Recent shifts in the incident management market are prompting many teams to reconsider their tooling. It's an ideal time to evaluate modern alternatives that better suit the needs of today's engineering organizations.

The End of Life for Opsgenie Signals Change

Earlier in 2025, Atlassian announced it will end support for Opsgenie, forcing thousands of teams to find a replacement [5]. This decision has accelerated the move toward more integrated and automated platforms. Rootly is the natural, modern successor for teams migrating from Opsgenie, offering its own robust On-call and Scheduling solution alongside its core incident management platform. For those looking to manage incidents from Slack & Opsgenie during a transition, Rootly offers a clear path forward [1]. You can also explore how Rootly provides a migration path from Opsgenie.

User Ratings Tell the Story

When comparing platforms, user satisfaction and feature sets speak volumes. On third-party review sites, Rootly consistently outperforms legacy tools. For instance, on TrustRadius, Rootly holds a user rating of 9.3 out of 10, compared to Opsgenie's 8.0 out of 10 [3]. Users praise Rootly for its extensive functionality, ease of use, and native Slack experience, highlighting its suitability for modern, remote-first engineering teams.

Conclusion: Build a Better On-Call Culture with Rootly

While PagerDuty laid the groundwork for on-call management, its traditional, alert-focused approach creates friction for modern SRE teams who need to collaborate and resolve issues quickly. Rootly addresses these pain points by centralizing workflows in Slack, automating tedious tasks, and offering seamless interoperability with tools you already use.

Choosing Rootly is more than just a tooling change; it's a move toward a more efficient, less stressful, and highly collaborative incident response culture. By empowering your team with a platform built for speed and simplicity, you can reduce toil, shorten resolution times, and build more resilient systems.

Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management? Book a demo and discover a better way to do on-call.

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