Are You Stuck with Outdated Alerting Tools? Here's What DevOps Teams Are Switching To

If you've been running incidents long enough, you probably know the feeling: your alerting tool fires off another ping at 3 a.m., and instead of thinking, *"Good, the system works,"* you think, *"Ugh, this thing again."* That's where a lot of teams using Opsgenie seem to be in 2025. Not angry, not thrilled—just tired. The conversation around replacements has exploded lately, and the pattern is impossible to ignore. Teams aren't just hunting for "the new shiny." They're fed up with tools that don't keep pace with how modern on-call systems actually run. And they're looking for something that doesn't require duct tape, six scripts, and a sacrifice to the alerting gods to stay functional. If you're wondering whether your team is the only one considering a move, you're definitely not alone. A surprising number of engineers have already taken the leap, and their reasons paint a pretty clear picture of what's changing in incident response. --- ### Why Opsgenie Is Losing Its Grip Let's be honest: Opsgenie isn't a terrible product. It's just… tired. And the teams depending on it feel the same way. Three themes kept popping up: **1. The tool feels like it's stuck in time.** There's a sense that the platform hasn't evolved in the direction on-call teams actually need. People mentioned the same UI quirks, workflow friction, and alert noise issues they've complained about for years. **2. Atlassian's ecosystem expectations are heavy.** Opsgenie tends to work best only if you're already deep in Jira's world. For hybrid, multi-cloud, or tool-diverse teams, that's not a great fit. **3. Engineers want flexibility without having to script everything.** A lot of users talked about having to bolt on custom logic just to get basic features. Others said they were spending more time managing Opsgenie than responding to incidents. That's… not ideal. And then there's something more subtle but important: teams are more protective of their mental load and more critical of operational friction. If a tool doesn't reduce noise, smooth out rotations, or handle escalating complexity gracefully, it's not worth keeping. --- ### So What Tools Are People Switching To? Here's where things get interesting. The migration paths aren't identical, but clear favorites are emerging—and each one solves a different pain point that Opsgenie couldn't. --- ### **1. Incident.io — For Teams Wanting a Modern, Drop-In Upgrade** If there's one name that kept coming up, it's this one. People like that it feels modern without being complicated, and the "works right out of the box" vibe is a huge selling point. A few things people called out: - It cuts down alert noise without a ton of configuration. - The on-call scheduling is simple rather than "enterprise complex." - It brings everything into Slack in a way that doesn't feel bolted on. - It makes postmortems not feel like punishment. One engineer described their evaluation like this: *"We didn't want something we'd have to babysit during Black Friday. Incident.io didn't get in the way."* That's probably the highest praise you can give any on-call tool. --- ### **2. Datadog On-Call — For Teams Already Living in Datadog** You can tell who's been all-in on Datadog for years—they're the ones saying the migration was "kind of easy" because everything just clicked together. The selling points are clear: - Metrics, APM, logging, alerting, and paging all live in one stack. - No more maintaining separate integrations. - Less cognitive overhead for the teams that live inside Datadog anyway. The catch? You guessed it: cost. Even the folks who moved admitted Datadog's pricing still feels like it's been sitting on the wrong side of inflation for a decade. But convenience often wins, especially for teams already drowning in dashboards. --- ### **3. FireHydrant — For Teams Needing Serious Incident Automation** FireHydrant has a long-standing reputation among SREs who want to build structured, repeatable, well-orchestrated response processes. It's not light or minimal; it's built for teams that want deep control. Highlights from users: - A migration tool that exports your Opsgenie setup into Terraform. - Detailed incident timelines without manual cleanup. - Wide automation hooks for companies with mature ops orgs. It does take more work to configure, but that's the tradeoff: control vs. convenience. --- ### **4. Rootly — For Teams Running Heavy Slack Workflows** Rootly showed up frequently in the discussion too. Teams said it blends well into Slack-based engineering orgs and feels like a solid middle point between "super opinionated" and "build everything yourself." Stuff users liked: - Shadow rotations and Slack user-group syncing. - PTO-aware scheduling (which Opsgenie users begged for for years). - Simple integration with Jira. A couple people mentioned overly loud notifications, but the general sentiment was positive—especially for teams that want everything to happen where conversations already are. --- ### **5. Jira Service Management Alerts — For Teams Already Married to Atlassian** This was the most predictable option, but also one of the most practical. Users moving here weren't looking for innovation—they just needed something stable, something already integrated, and something they didn't have to sell to security. Feedback looked like this: - Migration was straightforward. - Integrations carried over with minimal work. - Less training needed for the rest of the org. It's not a powerhouse, but it's the lowest-friction path if Jira runs your world. --- ### And Then There's PagerDuty… PagerDuty came up a lot, but not always in the way you'd expect. It's still considered reliable. It's still the "default" in most of the industry. But engineers weren't exactly excited about it. Words like "expensive," "stale," and "coasting" kept showing up. The vibe was: *"PagerDuty works, but doesn't feel like where the industry is going."* Teams want tools that feel like they were built this decade, not a decade ago. --- ### The Undercard: Other Tools People Are Exploring A few smaller players showed up too: - **ilert** — gaining traction with teams wanting alerting + status pages + call routing in one place. - **HeyOnCall** — built specifically as a simpler alternative to the traditional pagers. - **Grafana IRM** — attractive if your monitoring stack is already Grafana-heavy. - **All Quiet** — interesting to EU-based organizations and Teams users. - **Zenduty (IMR)** — mixed reviews post-acquisition; some praised integration, others complained about steep pricing changes. These tools aren't dominating the conversation, but they're carving out niches where older giants feel out of touch. --- ### The Real Shift: Teams Aren't Just Switching Tools—They're Changing Expectations This is the part vendors should be paying attention to. The loudest message from engineers wasn't about features. It was about **experience**. They want: - Shorter setup time - Less alert noise - Faster workflows - Better postmortem tooling - Smarter scheduling - Fewer scripts to glue everything together And above all, they want a tool that doesn't feel like extra work—because on-call already demands enough. Modern incident platforms are winning because they're reducing overhead, not increasing it. --- ### So… Should You Move Off Opsgenie? If your alerting setup feels glued together, dated, or harder to maintain each quarter, you're probably due for a rethink. You don't need a brand new incident philosophy—you just need tools that don't fight you. Based on what teams are actually doing, here's the rough breakdown: - **Want simplicity and immediate value?** Go with **Incident.io**. - **Deep in Datadog already?** **Datadog On-Call** simplifies your world. - **Need powerful automation?** **FireHydrant** is your best bet. - **Slack-native workflows?** **Rootly** fits that culture. - **Staying Atlassian?** **JSM Alerts** is the least painful choice. The point isn't that one tool solves everything—it's that Opsgenie no longer does. Engineers are tired of dragging legacy workflows into modern incident response. They want tools that fit the way they operate now. And judging by the volume of teams migrating, the era of "just stick with Opsgenie because it's there" is fading fast. Your tooling should evolve with your team. If it doesn't, it's already holding you back.