Hate your paging system? Alternatives for engineering on-call teams

If your team hates its paging system, start by naming what it hates, because each complaint points to a different kind of alternative. Noise is a deduplication and urgency problem, a schedule nobody can edit is a rotations problem, and a tool that goes quiet once someone acknowledges means you need a platform that also runs the incident. The table below maps the usual complaints to what to look for. Rootly covers each of them: On-Call for paging, schedules and escalation, and Incident Response for everything after the page, in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat.

This guide is about on-call paging for software and infrastructure teams. If you’re replacing physical pagers in a hospital, look at clinical communication tools instead.

What teams hate about paging tools, and what to look for

Complaint	What it usually means	What to look for
“It pages us for everything”	Every alert is treated as urgent	Deduplication, alert grouping, urgency levels that decide who gets woken up
“Pages don’t wake me up” or “it rang during my day off”	Delivery and notification rules are fragile	Critical push that bypasses Do Not Disturb, phone and SMS fallback, rules that can’t be saved in a broken state
“Nobody can figure out the schedule”	Rotations and overrides are hard to change	Simple rotations, overrides and shift swaps from the phone, shadowing for new responders
“Only a few people have seats”	Pricing keeps responders and stakeholders out	Clear per-user pricing, products you can buy separately
“The page is where the tool stops”	The incident runs in ad hoc chat threads	Incident channels, roles, status pages and retrospectives in the same platform
“We have to move anyway”	The tool is being retired	A migration that imports users, schedules and escalation policies

The kinds of alternatives

Dedicated paging tools. PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps) and xMatters focus on alerting, schedules and escalation. They are mature at the page. The incident itself usually needs other tools or manual steps. See Splunk On-Call alternatives.

Tools being retired. Opsgenie reaches end of support on April 5, 2027, and AWS closed Incident Manager to new customers. Teams on either need a destination, not just a stopgap. See AWS Incident Manager alternatives.

Paging bundled with monitoring. Grafana IRM and Datadog On-Call page from the same suite that fires the alerts. This works well when almost every signal comes from that suite, and less well when alerts come from many tools.

On-call platforms that also run the incident. Rootly pages from any monitoring source and then runs the incident: it opens a channel in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, assigns roles, updates the status page, records the timeline and drafts the retrospective. On-Call and Incident Response are separate products, priced separately on the pricing page, so a team can start with paging alone.

What Rootly On-Call fixes

• Noise. Alert deduplication, grouping and urgency mean a flapping check pages once, a storm becomes one alert, and only high urgency wakes anyone. See tools to reduce false-positive alerts.
• Missed pages. Notification rules step through critical push, phone call, SMS, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Rootly won’t save an audible rule that can’t reach you: the first step needs a critical alert or a phone call.
• Paging where you work. Pages can arrive as an interactive message from the Rootly bot in Slack or Microsoft Teams, where you acknowledge, escalate or resolve without switching apps.
• Schedules. Rotations with overrides, shift swaps and shadowing, managed from the web or the mobile app for iOS and Android.
• Phone escalations. Live call routing turns an inbound phone call into a page to whoever is on call.
• Everything after the page. With Incident Response, an alert can open an incident, and the incident runs natively in chat through to the retrospective.

How to switch without missing a page

1. List the complaints and the must-keeps. Note what the current tool does well, such as a specific integration or escalation pattern, so you don’t lose it.
2. Import, don’t rebuild. Rootly-led migrations from PagerDuty and Opsgenie use API-based imports for users, schedules, escalation policies and routing rules.
3. Run both in parallel. Point alerts at Rootly as well as the old tool, and send test pages to every responder until each one confirms delivery on their phone.
4. Cut over team by team. Move one team’s routing at a time, starting with a team that has fewer pages.
5. Retire the old tool. Once every team has run a full rotation on Rootly, switch off the old integrations.

UNiDAYS used this approach to replace a decade of PagerDuty in under two weeks; see the UNiDAYS story. A first incident runs in about 15 minutes with starter templates and defaults. For a broader buyer’s checklist, see on-call tools.