We live in an era of instant gratification – customers are accustomed to same-day delivery, 24/7/365 days tech support and uninterrupted browsing experience. Rapid innovation powered by digitization has left customers expecting better experiences and faster service delivery. And organizations are left with no choice but to adapt their business to the new reality if they want to thrive in a competitive market.
Sure enough, delivering an always-on service has become the new normal. Organizations are under a lot of pressure to reduce the time it takes to detect downed servers, broken codes, or broken production environments to deliver continuous coverage.
While monitoring and observability tools take care of detecting downed services or broken codes, they must be complemented with IT Service Alerting (ITSA) tools. With ITSA tools, high-priority incidents are elevated to the top and incident response teams are mobilized to respond immediately.
PagerDuty is synonymous with incident alerting. However, it can be an overkill for some use cases. Sometimes, all one needs is the ability to be alerted reliably. Or, to reach an on-call tech based on alerting and escalation policies.
In this article, we explore various PagerDuty alternatives that can be leveraged for incident alert management.
PagerDuty
As we move into our list of alternatives, I want to give a fair shake to PagerDuty so that we know what they’re good at, what their value proposition is and why buyers might want to seek an alternative.
PagerDuty is a real-time operations platform that continuously processes, aggregates and routes alert to teams. By nature of their business, they are well-positioned to collect data from multiple data sources and present a holistic view of the IT asset’s health. Thus, when incidents occur, PagerDuty presents teams with contextual information in a way that reduces the mean time to respond.
With PagerDuty, users gain access to several capabilities, including live call routing, digital scheduler, alert routing, escalation management, and more. They also offer artificial intelligence-powered solutions (AIOps) to drive accelerated remediation.
While PagerDuty offers a robust solution for incident management, teams that need the whole nine yards of features may find it to be an expensive proposition. The costs add up and users have limitations on the number of schedules that can be created and alerts that can be sent. Small and medium-sized organizations looking for some reprieve from the technical debt of existing solutions may find themselves in even further debt through the additive costs presented by PagerDuty.
xMatters
With xMatters, customers gain a service reliability platform that allows them to keep their infrastructures and IT systems always operational. The xMatters solution is largely geared toward audiences within the DevOps, SRE and IT operations space.
Although similar to OnPage and PagerDuty in most aspects, they offer an additional low-code workflow experience for building complex workflows. This is a unique capability that sets it apart from PagerDuty, OnPage and other alternatives. While some users find this feature helpful, it can be an overkill for those looking to simply automate their incident resolution workflows and are not seeking to adopt complex features.
Similar to PagerDuty and OnPage, xMatters offers automated escalation to prevent issues from going unacknowledged when on-call technicians don’t respond.
Splunk On-Call
For those familiar with Splunk, their famous tagline, “Make on-call suck less” may ring a bell. Splunk On-Call labels itself as an automated incident response tool that makes on-call suck less for engineers and improves business outcomes.
The responder recommendation engine is a feature that distinguishes it from other IT alerting tools. The system uses advanced machine learning algorithms to uncover patterns and locate similar incidents that took place in the past. This information equips incident responders with the contextual information required to remediate downed services quickly.
Datadog Incident Management
Datadog’s automated incident management provides comprehensive, end-to-end incident management, built natively into their monitoring platform. With Datadog, users gain the ability to manage alerts from within the Datadog ecosystem without having to switch contexts.
Similar to PagerDuty and OnPage, the application focuses on empowering DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers to manage the initial stages of an incident lifecycle more effectively. With features such as PostMortem Notebooks, incident managers gain the ability to save data from the start of an incident to remediation for post-incident review. They can also include graphs from any data sources and scope them to the exact time of impact.
The application was launched in August 2020, so they lack the advancements of a solid incident management platform. For instance, the tool lacks an on-call scheduling capability. As a workaround, users may use OnPage’s powerful scheduler and combine it with Datadog’s monitoring and detection capabilities. Alternatively, they may use Datadog’s monitoring tool for incident detection and OnPage’s alerting tool to get alerted reliably.
OnPage
Last, but certainly not the least, is OnPage. OnPage’s differentiated platform elevates critical incidents and delivers them reliably to the team responsible for the service’s upkeep. With OnPage, communication barriers between cross-functional teams are eliminated and incident remediation is accelerated. OnPage truly embodies its tagline, “Never miss a critical alert” by offering comprehensive tools and capabilities that deliver incidents reliably.
With over a decade of experience in alerting and on-call management, OnPage extends its application to several use cases, including IT and Healthcare. Their award-winning tech support provides 24×7 on-call services, and can be accessed through email, phone and chat.
Customers also gain access to an unmatched implementation experience at no additional cost. Implementation technicians at OnPage make solution adoption a cakewalk, enabling teams to realize the impact of their optimized workflows almost instantly. Equipped with a wide range of industry knowledge through their own experiences, the implementation techs understand common issues and questions.
OnPage’s collaborative approach to incident management allows organizations to move towards an accelerated path to maintaining system uptime and minimizing service disruptions. OnPage offers teams the necessary tools to simplify on-call scheduling and alert distribution to service owners. Unlike PagerDuty, OnPage’s scheduler is notably intuitive and makes scheduling a breeze for technicians.
Team managers can gain an eagle’s eye view into real-time incident handling for process improvements through their real-time reports. They can also download customizable, post-incident reports to detect system vulnerabilities, optimize incident response and create an equitable on-call workforce.
Final Thoughts
We’ve discussed the significance of continuous monitoring systems to keep services “always-on”. To maximize the effectiveness of monitoring and observability tools, it must be further complemented with alerting systems. As such, Incident Alert and On-Call Management tools act as force-multipliers in the incident management lifecycle, mobilizing the right incident response teams to spring into action and accelerate incident remediation.
Now, while PagerDuty is a popular tool used to manage alerts, there are many other feature-packed alternatives that are best suited to your business needs. They may all offer the same base functionality, but they also deliver unique value. As such, the best solution is based on what features matter to you the most and how much are you willing to spend.
