Introduction

SRE and DevOps teams are the backbone of system uptime and reliability. But managing On-Call schedules, alerts, and communication during incidents can quickly turn resolution efforts into burnout. This blog explores the top On-Call management tools in 2024, designed to streamline Incident Response and keep your team ready for action.

What are On-Call Management Tools?

On-Call Management Tools are software applications designed to help software engineers, SREs, and DevOps teams manage and optimize their On-Call shifts. These tools enable teams to automate their On-Call processes, track their On-Call time, escalate incidents, and communicate with stakeholders.

These tools can help teams to work more efficiently and effectively, ensuring that they can respond quickly to incidents and maintain their systems' reliability and availability. With the best On-Call alerting management tools available in the market, you can ensure a smoother and calmer On-Call experience.

Benefits of On-Call Management Tools for SREs and DevOps

On-Call management software can supercharge your Incident Response team. A few benefits include:

Accelerated Issue Resolution with IT Alerting Tool

Utilizing automation for tasks such as alert routing and escalation protocols, the IT alerting tool ensures critical issues are immediately flagged for the appropriate personnel, enabling quicker identification and resolution of problems.

Minimized Team Stress and Burnout Through On-Call Scheduling Software

On-call scheduling software prevents the chaos typically seen during incident responses by facilitating effective communication and equitable distribution of tasks. This reduces burnout and promotes a more serene On-Call experience.

Enhanced Teamwork and Transparency

Features like real-time war rooms and collective incident threads offered by on-call scheduling software keep everyone informed and collaborative, speeding up the problem-solving process.

Increased Automation and Productivity with IT Alerting Tool

Many IT alerting tools integrate seamlessly with current monitoring systems to enact automated response actions based on set criteria, thereby freeing up time for more complex challenges.

Valuable Data Insights

These tools capture essential data from incidents to identify patterns and initiate preventive measures, reducing future issues' frequency and enhancing overall system reliability.

With this framework in mind, let's delve into some of the leading On-Call management solutions, including IT alerting tools and on-call scheduling software, to consider in 2024. While some may be newcomers to the On-Call scene, they offer innovative features worth considering.

Leading On-Call Management Solutions for 2024

AlertOps

AlertOps stands out as an advanced Incident Management and response system tailored for ITOps, NOC, and DevOps teams, aiming to streamline incident management processes comprehensively.

On-Call Features:

• Adaptable scheduling and rotation capabilities to accommodate shifts across various time zones and define user/group contact preferences.
• Establishment of intricate escalation policies coupled with notifications.
• Compatibility with a wide range of monitoring, alerting, ITSM, and collaboration platforms.
• Ability to generate schedules and export them via Webcal or iCal.
• Availability of mobile applications for both iOS and Android platforms. Options to customize notification timings, team escalation procedures, and routing based on temporal and data criteria. However, AlertOps may encounter delays in sending out notifications, potentially compromising the timeliness of alerts. The platform's user interface can be challenging for newcomers, described by some as convoluted and difficult to navigate, which could impede efficient utilization. Additionally, sporadic irrelevant alerts might disrupt the flow of Incident Management, leading to inefficiency. The mobile application's presentation of current On-Call responsibilities, especially for the users themselves, lacks clarity. Enhancements could include a home screen widget to indicate On-Call status or notifications regarding imminent On-Call periods. Furthermore, the process for overriding shifts is not straightforward.

A critique from an Apple store user suggests a need for significant user experience improvements: “This app requires serious enhancements to become more user-friendly.”

Modifying schedules, particularly with the inclusion of new team members or shift adjustments, proves to be a complex task often necessitating the creation of an entirely new schedule, which might not be user-friendly.

AlertOps is a competent solution for alerting and On-Call management with a range of workflows, offering numerous integrations, mobile Incident Management, and reasonable reporting & analytics capabilities, supported by an effective support team. Yet, access to some of its most valuable and advanced features is restricted to the premium and enterprise packages.

Incident.io

Incident.io stands as a comprehensive Incident Management platform, offering advanced automation for workflows, clear transparency options, and insightful post-incident analysis to ensure a smooth, collaborative approach to managing incidents for teams.

On-Call Features:

• Consolidation of alerts from different monitoring systems alongside adaptable scheduling capabilities.
• Intelligent routing directs alerts to the appropriate On-Call staff based on factors like severity, team, or service.
• Clear visibility of On-Call duties in real time to avoid confusion during transitions.
• The "Cover Me" feature supports easy On-Call swaps, helping to prevent team burnout.
• Slack integration for direct communication and dedicated incident channels.
• A mobile application to facilitate On-Call responsibilities and manage incidents remotely. However, incident.io's notification capabilities are somewhat restricted, necessitating an additional subscription for comprehensive escalation systems like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. While the integration with Slack is smooth and beneficial for organizations heavily reliant on Slack, it may not suit all companies due to its close integration. Furthermore, the platform starts with a limited number of integrations in its starter plan, and while incident.io excels in basic alerting, some of its most advantageous features are locked behind the pro plan, which can be considerably more expensive. Although incident.io is proficient in incident response, it falls short in providing proactive alerting and anomaly detection capabilities that are available with some alternative solutions.

Splunk On-Call

Formerly known as VictorOps, Splunk On-Call is tailored for SRE and DevOps teams, offering a comprehensive platform for incident management. It serves as a central point for orchestrating On-Call schedules, alert routing, and fostering teamwork in the midst of incidents.

On-Call Features:

• Streamlines On-Call scheduling processes, including shift rotations and manual overrides.
• Automates time-sensitive tasks such as escalations, initiating war rooms, and conducting reviews after incidents.
• Enables alert filtering and prioritization according to set parameters.
• Facilitates integration with a variety of tools across monitoring, business, DevOps, and security domains.
• Provides post-incident analysis tools, including dashboards and reports enhanced by machine learning.
• Comes with a mobile app available for both iOS and Android platforms. However, a notable limitation of Splunk On-Call includes its somewhat restricted capabilities in producing detailed incident tracking reports by date, as well as constrained options for user management licensing. Its alert and escalation settings offer less detail and flexibility when compared to its more comprehensive rivals. The interface may feel overcrowded, potentially complicating navigation and use. Moreover, Splunk's pricing and plan structure primarily cater to enterprise-level needs, leading to essential features like email and push notification alerts or intelligent incident merging being gated behind higher-tier plans. The platform also lacks in dedicated features for alert correlation and ongoing adaptive learning.

Pricing details for Splunk On-Call are not publicly available, requiring direct contact for clarification, which suggests a potentially higher cost framework.

Squadcast

We can talk about our top On-Call management tool, Squadcast which serves as an excellent alternative to the other On-Call management tools. It bundles On-Call, Incident Response, and Reliability Workflows into a single platform for robust Incident Management solutions. You’ll probably cover most of your Incident Management needs from On-Call to Root Cause Analysis.

‍### On-Call Features

• Manage your On-Call rotations easily with the ability to create custom rotations or easily override schedules when needed.
• Define the chain of command and escalation policies for incidents and inform the subject matter experts during critical incident resolution.
• Visualize all your services in one dashboard, and classify and provision your services
• Establish and track Service Level Objectives and Error Budgets for better planning and commitments. Transparency is at the core of SRE principles, and Squadcast's Status Pages help keep all stakeholders updated.
• Intelligently group alerts to reduce resolution time, avoid false alarms, and notify the right people on multiple channels with APTA, Snooze Incidents, IAG, Routing Rules, and Delayed Notifications. Squadcast allows your On-Call team to manage their schedules on the go with a highly intuitive and seamless mobile app available for both Android & IOS. It supports all intelligent groupings of alerts and also caters to flapping or transient alerts to reduce alert noise (also during scheduled maintenance). For On-Call teams working on critical incident resolution, the alert correlation plays a very big role.

It also supports custom integrations and with 200 plus native integrations (monitoring, ticketing, ITSM and ChatOps tools), your On-Call teams get started with Squadcast in no time. Its Slack integration helps you resolve all incidents literally in Slack. So, for organizations using Slack dependent On-Call tools, this could be a better and more comprehensive option.

Multiple team management is a breeze where you can give Role-Based Access Control, create custom roles, and Squads for focused resolution. Outgoing webhooks help you create specific Workflow actions. And with bidirectional integrations with popular ticketing tools like JIRA and ServiceNow, your support teams also win big time!

As a reliability automation platform, Squadcast does more than just help you with scheduling and On-Call rotations. The tool keeps evolving based on customer requirements. In a recent development we’re also going to release Live On-Call Routing which was one of the most requested features. To figure how extensive the platform can be, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial and experience all Enterprise level features yourself.

XMatters

Xmatters is a service reliability platform designed to empower DevOps, SRE, and operations teams. It focuses on streamlining workflows and communication during incidents. The tool automates incident assignments by directing them to the appropriate individuals or teams according to predefined workflows.

‍### On Call Features

• Route alerts to the right team member based on set rules. Create and manage schedules with custom rotations.
• View alerts, manage shifts, and take action on incidents using the mobile app.
• Automated On-Call scheduling and escalations. On-Call reports to see who is the exact On-Call person across all groups.
• Provides reporting and analytics tools to help you gain insights into on-call activity and incident response times. There are several drawbacks to consider when using xMatters as an On-Call management platform.

Firstly, the process for implementing automation tasks can be complex, with limited training resources available to help users in learning these features effectively. Additionally, there is a need for more calendar integration options, as relying on separate calendar systems can lead to inefficiencies and confusion. It also lacks Live On-Call Routing.

Users have reported issues and delays when setting Short Messages (SMs) as their notification medium, often resorting to email for more accurate and timely notifications. So, the notification flexibility for users is a limitation.

Another inconvenience is the inability to close multiple alerts simultaneously, which can be a tedious process. Swapping "On-Call" shifts with colleagues can also be challenging to grasp initially, suggesting a need for clearer instructions or interface improvements.

The mobile features of xMatters are limited. Customer support responsiveness in handling significant issues is another area for improvement. User management processes hamper its usability.

XMatters can help acknowledge and resolve product related alerts by automation and save your time and effort. The free tier is a great way for smaller teams to start implementing On-Call management in your team.

Conclusion

You're likely aware that downtime comes at a steep cost—but have you considered just how steep?

In short, it's incredibly pricey. According to a survey by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), the minimum cost of IT downtime is estimated to be $5,000 per minute. Moreover, about 44% of respondents placed costs at a staggering $16,700 per server per minute, equating to $1 million per hour.

However, there's a way to mitigate these expenses.

By implementing a robust incident management tool and an efficient alerting system, you can significantly reduce these figures. Give Squadcast a try for free today and start safeguarding your operations against costly downtime.
Squadcast is an Incident Management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.