Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Empowered engineers and effective tools are the foundation of incident management, and having a solid on-call process can help facilitate both. In practice, however, many paging approaches have the opposite effect, often overwhelming responders and increasing burnout. To create an effective paging strategy, organizations should focus responder attention on the most important issues and help facilitate a sense of ownership over them.

At Grafana Labs, we believe in treating everyone with respect, and a core aspect of respect is clear and transparent communication. When we decided to move Grafana OnCall (OSS) into maintenance mode, we knew that along with the public announcement, there would be a lot of questions.

At Grafana Labs, we’re always searching for ways to develop products that give our users the best tooling to help in their day-to-day understanding of their systems. We built OnCall and Incident in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, to make it easier to respond to and fix incidents — all on top of the Grafana dashboards you know and love.

Recently, we hosted a webinar on migrating from PagerDuty, where we explored why so many engineering teams are rethinking their on-call tools. This blog post is based on that conversation, diving into the frustrations teams face with PagerDuty and how incident.io On-Call offers a better way forward.

The stress, sudden disruptions, and high stakes of resolving issues while on call is one of the most challenging aspects of an engineer’s job. Many organizations, from startups to large enterprises, still struggle with their on-call experience, which leads to longer resolution times and lower employee retention rates. Constant context switching, managing multiple tools, and racing against time to resolve issues can cause frustration, burnout, and inefficiency.

Managing on-call schedules is a critical challenge for many industries, including healthcare, IT, customer support, and emergency services. As technology evolves, on-call scheduling software has become an essential tool for streamlining workflows, reducing burnout, and improving team efficiency. In 2025, the best on-call scheduling software not only simplifies schedule creation but also integrates with other tools, enhances communication, and ensures compliance with labor laws.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly is essential for maintaining operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. On-call management software plays a pivotal role in organizing and scheduling teams to respond to emergencies or urgent situations at any time, but especially after business hours when offices and operations centers are not or sparsely staffed.