On-call engineers are the first line of defense for maintaining system reliability, but the role often comes with a significant challenge: alert fatigue. Traditional on-call tools, while foundational, can overwhelm engineers with a constant stream of notifications. While PagerDuty is a well-known name, the need for more intelligent, integrated solutions is leading teams to seek powerful alternatives.
Rootly stands out as a leading alternative, designed to address the core problems of modern on-call management. It moves beyond simple alerting to provide a comprehensive platform that reduces noise, automates tedious tasks, and prevents engineer burnout.
The Pervasive Problem of Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue is the mental exhaustion and desensitization that occurs when someone is exposed to too many unimportant alerts [1]. For on-call engineers, this means being bombarded with non-actionable notifications, leading to severe consequences like missed critical alerts, slower response times, and burnout. You can explore effective ways to reduce alert noise and protect on-call engineers.
This issue isn't unique to software engineering. Alert fatigue is a recognized problem in other high-stress fields:
- In healthcare, it's linked to delayed responses and an increased risk of medical errors [2]. The constant exposure to frequent or non-actionable alarms leads to sensory overload [3].
- In cybersecurity, security operations center (SOC) teams can face over 10,000 alerts daily, making it difficult to spot genuine threats [4]. This desensitization increases the risk of security breaches [5].
A primary cause of this problem is the limitation of older tools. Many traditional systems rely on simple, static rules that often trigger "alert storms"—a flood of notifications from a single underlying issue. This creates noise without providing helpful context, a common issue when comparing AI-driven approaches to outdated rule-based alerts.
Why Rootly is a Top PagerDuty Alternative for On-Call Teams
Rootly is a complete incident management platform, not just an alerting tool. It directly solves the challenges of alert fatigue and manual toil by providing a smarter, more automated way to handle on-call responsibilities.
Intelligent Alert Management to Cut Through the Noise
Rootly uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make alerts smarter and more manageable. It analyzes notifications to determine what's truly important, allowing your team to focus on signal over noise.
- AI-powered correlation: Rootly automatically groups related alerts from different monitoring tools into a single, cohesive incident, preventing distracting alert storms.
- Deduplication: Once an issue is acknowledged, Rootly silences redundant alerts related to it, keeping notification channels clear for the next critical event.
- ML-based prioritization: The platform learns from past incidents to understand an alert's true urgency. This is how Rootly uses machine learning to prioritize alerts faster, ensuring engineers are only paged for what matters.
- Anomaly Detection: Rootly can detect unusual patterns in system behavior, often identifying potential issues before a static threshold is ever breached.
Flexible On-Call Scheduling and Smarter Escalations
Rootly provides a highly flexible and reliable system for on-call scheduling and notifications, giving teams full control over who gets notified, when, and how.
- Granular Notification Rules: Set up different rules for "audible" alerts that bypass Do Not Disturb and "quiet" alerts for informational updates, so your team's focus is always protected.
- Multi-channel Notifications: Rootly supports various methods, including Critical Push, SMS, Phone Call, and Email, allowing you to build reliable escalation paths that get the right eyes on the problem.
- Testing Notifications: Engineers can easily test their notification settings to confirm they are configured correctly before going on-call. You can find more details in the On-Call Notifications documentation.
From Alerting to Automated Resolution
Rootly's key advantage is its ability to automate the entire response and resolution process, going far beyond just notifying an engineer.
- Automated Incident Response Playbooks: When an incident is declared, Rootly can trigger a playbook to automatically create a Slack channel, invite responders, assign roles, and provide key information in seconds.
- Automated Remediation: For certain alerts, Rootly can trigger automated fixes, such as executing a command to perform a Kubernetes rollback. This powerful automation dramatically reduces Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). This combination of smart escalation and auto rollbacks is crucial for eliminating alert fatigue.
The Best On-Call Management Tools for 2025: A Comparison
When searching for the best on-call management tools for 2025, it's vital to look beyond basic alerting. Modern teams need a platform that actively reduces cognitive load and accelerates resolution. Here’s how Rootly compares to other PagerDuty alternatives for on-call engineers.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
AI-Powered Alert Correlation & Grouping
Native, learns from past incidents
Basic event grouping rules
Basic correlation rules
Automated Remediation (e.g., K8s Rollbacks)
Yes, via integrated workflows
Limited, requires third-party tools
Limited, requires third-party tools
Integrated Incident Management Hub
Yes, single platform for entire lifecycle
Separate product or requires integrations
Separate product or requires integrations
AI-Drafted Postmortems & Summaries
Yes, native feature
No
No
Flexible On-Call Scheduling (Audible vs. Quiet)
Yes, granular notification rules
Yes, with complex rulesets
Yes, with complex rulesets
Proactive Anomaly Detection
Yes, via machine learning
Basic anomaly detection (add-on)
Basic anomaly detection (add-on)
The comparison shows that while tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie are effective for scheduling and alerting, Rootly offers a more comprehensive, AI-native platform. It integrates intelligent alerting with powerful incident management and automation into a single hub, providing more value and a better user experience.
How to Reduce Alert Fatigue and Improve On-Call Health
Adopting a better tool is a great first step, but teams also need effective strategies to create a healthier on-call environment. Here’s how to reduce alert fatigue on-call and support your engineers.
Implement a Smarter Alerting Strategy
- Audit existing alerts: Regularly review your alerts to identify and remove those that are noisy or not actionable.
- Implement smart grouping and deduplication: Use a tool like Rootly to automatically consolidate related alerts, immediately reducing notification volume.
- Enrich alerts with context: Ensure every alert includes important information like runbooks, severity, and potential impact to help engineers respond faster.
You can find more on these strategies to reduce noise and protect on-call engineers in our dedicated guide.
Focus on Engineer Well-being and Burnout Prevention
Better tooling directly contributes to a healthier on-call culture and helps prevent burnout, a significant issue driven by high workloads and unclear goals [6].
- Promote sustainable practices: Adopt on-call best practices like rotating schedules, ensuring time off after shifts, and conducting blameless postmortems to foster a supportive culture [7].
- Track on-call health: Proactively monitor for signs of burnout. Open-source tools are available that can analyze on-call data to identify engineers at risk of overload [8].
Conclusion: Moving Beyond PagerDuty to a Modern On-Call Experience
While PagerDuty helped define the on-call market, today's complex systems require a more intelligent, integrated approach. The noise, manual work, and risk of burnout associated with traditional alerting tools are no longer sustainable for high-performing teams.
Rootly represents the next generation of on-call management. It combines AI-powered alert intelligence, flexible scheduling, and powerful automation into a single, intuitive platform. The result is a more effective on-call process with drastically reduced noise, faster resolutions, and healthier, more productive engineering teams.
Ready to move from noise to signal and build a more resilient on-call culture? Book a demo of Rootly today.