Why Teams Switch from PagerDuty to Faster, AI‑Driven Tools

See why teams switch from PagerDuty to faster, AI-driven alternatives. Cut costs, automate workflows, and reduce toil for quicker incident resolution.

PagerDuty pioneered the on-call and digital operations space, establishing a new standard for how teams handle alerts. But as software systems grow more interconnected and complex, the nature of incidents has evolved. Responding effectively now requires far more than just reliable alerting. Today's engineering teams are moving beyond alert-centric tools and toward integrated, AI-powered incident management platforms.

This shift isn't about replacing one tool with another; it's about evolving processes to reduce manual work, lower Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and prevent engineer burnout. This article explores the key drivers behind this trend and what modern PagerDuty alternatives offer.

Why the Traditional Alerting Model Is Showing Its Age

Legacy tools struggle to keep up with the demands of modern software environments. A simple alert is just the starting signal for a race against time, and the friction caused by older models leads to slower response times, frustrated engineers, and direct business impact.

The Growing Burden of Operational Toil

Operational toil—the manual, repetitive work associated with running a service—is a significant drain on engineering resources. Even with investments in AI, toil consumes 30% of an engineer's time [1]. This burden contributes directly to developer burnout and alert fatigue. When engineers are overwhelmed, they begin to tune out notifications. In fact, 73% of organizations have experienced outages caused by ignored alerts [1].

The Disconnect Between Alerts and Incident Context

Slow incident understanding—not slow fixes—drives up MTTR [2]. An alert from PagerDuty tells you that something is wrong, but it rarely provides the crucial context needed to understand why or what the impact is. Engineers waste valuable time switching between monitoring dashboards, logs, and communication channels just to piece together a clear picture of the incident.

4 Key Reasons Teams Look for PagerDuty Alternatives

As organizations seek to streamline their response processes, they consistently run into four major limitations with traditional alerting tools.

1. Fragmented Workflows and Tool Sprawl

A common incident workflow starts with an alert in PagerDuty. From there, an engineer manually creates a Slack channel, invites the right people, starts a video call, opens a Jira ticket, and creates a Confluence page for the retrospective. This constant context-switching between tools is inefficient and prone to error.

Modern platforms centralize the entire incident lifecycle within the collaboration tools teams already use. Chat-native tools like Incident.io [3] and Rootly are built to manage incidents from declaration to retrospective in one place, helping you boost incident automation with AI.

2. Limited and Rule-Based Automation

PagerDuty’s automation primarily focuses on routing alerts to the correct on-call engineer. While useful, this is only the first step. Modern platforms use AI to provide intelligent, context-aware automation that actively helps solve the problem. This can include:

Automatically creating incident summaries for stakeholders.
Suggesting relevant runbooks based on the nature of the alert.
Identifying subject matter experts from a service catalog.
Populating the incident channel with diagnostic data and graphs.

This moves the process from simply routing a problem to actively helping the team resolve it.

3. Complex Pricing and High Total Cost of Ownership

PagerDuty's pricing can become expensive and opaque as teams grow, with per-user costs that can limit who can participate in the incident process [4]. This creates information silos and adds friction. Many competitors offer more flexible models. For example, FireHydrant promotes a usage-based model that can lead to savings of 50% or more [5]. This makes it easier for organizations to find affordable PagerDuty alternatives that provide greater value.

4. A Focus on SRE and On-Call Health

Modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices emphasize sustainable operations and preventing burnout, not just reacting to alerts 24/7. On-call health has become a key metric for measuring team well-being. Teams are looking for tools that provide insights into on-call load, alert noise, and sleep interruptions. This proactive focus on sustainability is central to platforms designed for faster incident resolution and helps teams cut costs while boosting automation.

How Rootly Provides a Faster, AI-Driven Alternative

Rootly is an incident management platform built from the ground up to address the shortcomings of traditional alerting tools. It provides a unified, AI-driven solution that helps teams manage the entire incident lifecycle more effectively.

A Unified Platform for the Entire Incident Lifecycle

Rootly centralizes everything—from the initial alert to the final retrospective—directly within collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. This eliminates the need to jump between different applications, keeping all incident data, communication, and actions in a single, cohesive timeline. By providing a unified command center, Rootly stands out from other alternatives by ensuring everyone involved has the context they need to contribute effectively.

Powerful AI and Automation That Reduces Toil

Rootly uses AI to automate the tedious tasks that slow down incident response. Its capabilities can:

Instantly generate incident summaries and timelines for status updates.
Surface similar past incidents to provide historical context.
Recommend tasks and action items for retrospectives.
Automate status page updates to keep customers informed.

This powerful automation frees up engineers to focus their expertise on investigation and resolution, dramatically reducing toil.

A Proactive Approach to Reliability

Rootly is designed to help you build a more proactive and sustainable reliability culture. Features like automated retrospectives make it easy to learn from every incident and generate actionable insights to prevent future failures. A comprehensive service catalog maps ownership and dependencies, ensuring the right people are engaged from the start. Like competitors such as FireHydrant, Rootly provides an all-in-one platform that gives teams the context and tools they need to improve system reliability over time.

Make the Switch to Smarter Incident Management

While PagerDuty defined the last era of digital operations, the future belongs to integrated, AI-driven platforms that manage the entire incident lifecycle. The complexity of modern software requires a new approach—one that prioritizes context, automates toil, and supports the well-being of engineering teams.

Switching to a platform like Rootly helps teams resolve incidents faster, reduce engineer burnout, and lower the total cost of ownership. To see how Rootly's AI-native platform can modernize your incident response, learn more at Rootly.com. Book a demo to see Rootly’s AI in action.