Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I’ve curated a list of 9 best incident response tools, plus 4 open-source options for you. But first, a quick note: Many people mix up alerting, monitoring, and incident response. Incident response is what you do after receiving an alert. It includes alert acknowledgment, escalations, incident communication, post-incident analysis, and response automation. Yes, some of these (incident communication and post-incident analysis) overlap with incident management.

I’ve curated a list of 9 best IT alerting software and 3 open-source alternatives for you. Every tool on this list handles the core alerting functions you need: incident detection, fast alert delivery, clear escalation paths, and reliable incident logging. Since all these tools tick those boxes, I focused on what makes each tool special. You’ll find their unique features under “Standout Alerting Features of ” for each option.

Today, we are introducing Live Call Routing, a direct phone line that connects incoming calls to on-call engineers. It captures human-reported incidents that monitoring tools might miss—closing the loop between automated alerts and real-world observations so nothing falls through the cracks. It helps you respond to critical incidents faster by eliminating manual call routing, reducing response times from minutes to seconds.

You’re likely here because you heard the news: Atlassian ended new sales for OpsGenie on June 4, 2025, with a complete shutdown scheduled for April 2027. For years, OpsGenie has been the backbone of on-call management for countless teams. It might have been your team’s trusted solution too. But now, that chapter is closing. The pressure to find an OpsGenie alternative for on-call is real. However, you can’t just pick any tool and hope it works for your team.

If you’re stuck between choosing Spike vs. PagerDuty for your on-call management, you’re at the right place. I wrote this blog post to end your confusion and help you make a better choice. I’ve presented a comparative analysis for these two tools across 4 key criteria (keep reading to find what they are). For each criterion, there’s either a winner or a tie. When it’s a tie, each tool gets one point. If there’s a winner, that tool gets two points.

Looking for the best on-call scheduling software for your team? Or maybe you’re exploring alternatives to your current tool? Signing up for different on-call tools and testing them all takes weeks. That’s a lot of time you probably don’t have, especially when you need reliable on-call coverage now. That’s why I did the heavy lifting for you. I signed up for and tested the 5 popular on-call scheduling tools in the market: Spike, PagerDuty, Incident.io, Splunk Oncall, and OpsGenie.

I use Slack daily. It works perfectly fine. Outages rarely happen. Even if they happen, they are resolved quickly. And this is the same for many other tools. But how are they all doing it—Keeping services running and resolving issues quickly? The secret: On-Call Schedules. On-call schedules make sure someone is always available to handle emergencies, so your systems stay reliable.

PagerDuty. You’ve probably heard it mentioned during outages or seen it in tech forums. Maybe your DevOps team talks about it, or you found it while looking for ways to handle system failures. So, what is PagerDuty exactly? And why do teams rely on it? This post breaks down PagerDuty in simple terms, explores its key features and benefits, and shows you how to get started. We’ll also introduce you to a PagerDuty alternative that might work better for your team’s needs.

Today, I’m excited to share the Internet’s Largest Incident Response Glossary. It’s a collection of over 500 terms covering on-call, alerting, monitoring, and system reliability. It took us over 2 weeks from ideation to completion of this project and in this post, I would like to share how we approached this beast!

If you’re comparing OpsGenie vs. PagerDuty, there’s something important you need to know right away: OpsGenie is shutting down. OpsGenie has been a trusted ally for incident teams for over a decade. In our Ode to OpsGenie, we celebrated its legacy—from simplifying on-call rotations to reducing alert noise effectively. Atlassian announced that OpsGenie sales will stop on June 4, 2025, with a complete shutdown by April 5, 2027.