Alert management software decides which monitoring signals reach a person; incident management software coordinates the response once a problem needs people. Alert management ingests alerts from monitoring tools, deduplicates and groups them, sets urgency, routes them to the owning team and pages the on-call engineer. Incident management takes over from there: it declares the incident, opens a channel, assigns roles, updates stakeholders and the status page, records the timeline and turns the incident into a retrospective with tracked action items. Rootly does both, as On-Call and Incident Response.
The two are easy to confuse because one hands off to the other. This guide separates events, alerts and incidents, compares the two kinds of software, and explains when one platform beats two.
Events, alerts and incidents
| Event | Alert | Incident | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Any recorded change or measurement | An event a rule says needs attention | A service disruption that needs a coordinated response |
| Example | A deploy finished; CPU at 62% | Error rate above 5% for 5 minutes | Checkout failing for EU customers |
| Volume | Millions a day | Dozens to hundreds a day | A few a week |
| Created by | Systems and pipelines | Monitoring rules | A person or a workflow, often from an alert |
| Who acts | No one, unless it becomes an alert | The on-call engineer | A team with defined roles |
| Ends when | Recorded | Acknowledged and resolved | Resolved, communicated and reviewed |
Alert management vs incident management software
| Capability | Alert management | Incident management |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Get the right signal to the right person | Coordinate people to restore service and learn |
| Inputs | Alerts from monitoring, uptime and SLO tools | Alerts, customer reports, security findings, manual declarations |
| Key features | Deduplication, grouping, urgency, routing, schedules, escalation, paging | Declaration, channels, roles, workflows, status pages, timeline, retrospectives, action items |
| Main user | The on-call engineer | Incident commander, responders, support and leadership |
| Success measure | Fewer, more accurate pages; fast acknowledgement | Faster resolution, clear communication, fewer repeat incidents |
| Ends with | An acknowledged alert, or an incident declared | A retrospective with action items in Jira or Linear |
Where one hands off to the other
The handoff is the point where an alert needs more than one person or more than a quick fix. In a connected platform, an alert workflow can open the incident automatically for high-urgency alerts, or the paged engineer declares it from Slack. Context travels with it: the alert, its service and owner, and the change that preceded it. After the incident, the retrospective feeds back into better alert rules.
With two separate tools, that handoff is manual. Someone copies the alert into a channel, recreates the owner, and later reconciles two timelines for the retrospective.
When one platform beats two
Running alerting and incident response in one platform means one on-call schedule, one service catalog, one timeline and one place to change routing or workflows. It also means one set of permissions and one audit trail. Separate tools make sense when a team must keep an existing pager for now, for example during a contract term, in which case the incident platform should connect to it.
Rootly covers both and works either way. Rootly On-Call handles alert sources, deduplication, grouping, urgency, routing, schedules, escalation and paging. Rootly Incident Response runs the incident natively in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, with status pages, AI-drafted retrospectives and action items synced to Jira or Linear. They are separate products, priced separately on the pricing page, so a team can start with either. Teams keeping PagerDuty or Opsgenie for paging can connect them and move paging over later; Opsgenie reaches end of support on April 5, 2027, so Opsgenie teams should plan that move early.
How teams set this up in Rootly
Connect monitoring tools as alert sources, set urgency and routing per service, and let high-urgency alerts open incidents through an alert workflow. For the alerting side in depth, see the alert management guide; for the response side, see the incident response lifecycle.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between incident management software and alert management software?
Alert management software decides which monitoring signals reach a person: it ingests alerts, deduplicates and groups them, sets urgency, routes them to the owner and pages the on-call engineer. Incident management software coordinates the response once a problem needs people: it declares the incident, opens a channel, assigns roles, updates stakeholders and the status page, records the timeline and drives the retrospective. Rootly does both, as On-Call and Incident Response.
What is the difference between an event, an alert and an incident?
An event is any recorded change or measurement, such as a deploy or a metric crossing a value. An alert is an event that a rule says needs attention. An incident is a disruption to a service that needs a coordinated response. Many events produce few alerts, and many alerts produce few incidents.
Do I need both alert management and incident management software?
Most engineering teams need both capabilities, but not necessarily two vendors. Alerting without incident management leaves the response to ad hoc chat threads; incident management without alerting relies on someone noticing. A platform that does both shares one schedule, one service catalog and one timeline from the first alert to the retrospective.
Is on-call software the same as alert management software?
Largely. On-call software holds schedules and escalation policies and pages the right person, which is the delivery end of alert management. Alert management also covers what happens before the page: ingesting alerts from monitoring tools, deduplication, grouping, urgency and routing.
Where does monitoring fit?
Monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana or Prometheus watch systems and fire alerts. Alert management decides what to do with those alerts, and incident management runs the response when an alert, or a customer report, turns out to be an incident.
Incident management vs alert management software: what's the difference?