jjtang1

It's always a bit jarring when a tool you've relied on announces its sunset. Opsgenie has been a staple for many teams, and transitions like this can stir up a mix of nostalgia and uncertainty.

At Rootly, we've seen firsthand how integral these tools become to daily operations. They're not just software; they're part of the team's rhythm and culture. When changes happen, it's not just about migrating data—it's about adapting workflows and ensuring continuity for the people behind the screens.

We're committed to supporting teams through such transitions, aiming to make the process as smooth as possible. Our focus has always been on building solutions that prioritize the human element in incident management.

To those navigating this change, know that you're not alone. The community is here, sharing insights and offering support. If there's anything we at Rootly can do to assist, even if it's just sharing best practices or lessons learned, don't hesitate to reach out.

Tbh this took us about a day to build and well worth it. Makes on-call lives so much easier. Not sure why they don't yet https://rootly.com/changelog/sync-on-call-schedules-with-sla.... Sorry to be promotional.

Def worth taking a look at Rootly On-Call, we've helped everyone from Rivian to Brex migrate over from PagerDuty :)

JJ here, obviously bias as I am the founder of Rootly.com that's building in this space.

We are a modern AI-native on-call and incident management platform here at Rootly.com. We are helping fast-growing companies like from Replit, Figma, NVIDIA, and 100s of others respond faster.

Some of the biggest frustrations with legacy providers like PagerDuty (who I have a lot of respect for in pioneering on-call) is their lack of innovation (only a phone call) and how expensive it is.

Some fan favourites include request coverage for overrides, automatic adjustments based on PTO and holidays, native Slack/Teams collaboration (not just paging), native shadow rotations, syncing with Slack user groups, a beautiful UI and mobile app, and an all-in-one platform for status pages, workflows, communications, retrospectives, and metrics.

If you're a small team Rootly has a pretty discounted version for startups. Here is a full comparison if you're interested: https://rootly.com/comparisons/pagerduty-vs-rootly-on-call

Where you host is underrated. When I started building on-call for Rootly the first thing we did was build a multi-cloud setup (AWS and GCP) for honestly pretty overkill reliability. Don’t regret it one bit.

Happy to give them Rootly as a backup ;)

>Most of the software I wrote requires mostly no interference or fix-ups, unless of course the requirements have changed

Bug-free software is great, but changing requirements are precisely the reason on-call needs to exist.

Even if you have a whole team of engineers who write bug-free software like this guy, you'll still have failures. Because the world is constantly slipping out from under your assumptions.

Customers never stop changing their usage patterns. They add load at different rates, come up with unexpected requests of all shapes and sizes, and invent new use cases that fly in the face of the original project requirements.

Even if you have created a software system with no bugs that perfectly meets both the functional and non-functional requirements of the project, changes in the state of the world vis a vis customer behavior will come along and change what counts as a bug. If your system has a blanket 60-second database query timeout, and everything's working fine, then there's no bug. But as soon as a new API usage pattern causes certain queries to run on average 10 times longer than before, now you have connection starvation and an urgent bug to fix.

I'm not saying that "timely maintenance and improvement" and "a culture of perpetual ownership" won't have positive effects on reliability. But it's unrealistic that any amount of responsible, careful software development will fully eliminate the occurrence of sudden and unexpected failures. Human on-call, as uncomfortable as it is, will remain a requirement as long as reliability is taken seriously.

FWIW my perspective is that of someone that runs an on-call/incident management platform (Rootly).

There are certainly more alternatives than ever. I am certainly team "hosting your own on-call is a terrible idea".

Standalone tools like Rootly (where I work) but also likely every observability company in the next couple of years will follow what Datadog has done.

You’re too kind :)

Ahaha the final boss.

Who alerts you when your own alerting system is down?

You profile is pretty interesting. Lmk if you want to come on the pod!

Cool! Mention JJ in the demo booking and I’m happy to personally join :)

That’s not good. On it! Thanks for catching.

Oof. On it!

That is def one way to evaluate velocity.

Appreciate the love sir! Canva and RevenueCat are still one of my fav teams to work with!

Not trying to dunk on my competition but that is one thing that always surprised me too. Speed to deliver/innovate. I see large corporations all the time like even Slack (Agent marketplace), AWS (Bedrock), deliver at a high clip. PD truly had the opportunity to be a Datadog sized company given the brand name. Now it's a reputation impossible to shake.

There are some pretty low hanging fruit stuff that would make the PD experience palatable (e.g. ability to page teams not just services, allow for partial overrides). These things for us were <1 week projects.

I do think PD is trying to rectify it by acquiring Jeli, giving it away for free in their new pricing plan, etc. Def feeling the squeeze a bit if I had to guess.

Ah yes. Terraform is super popular for us (almost 1m downloads). We also built a pretty cool "Terraformer" tool that lets you create workflows in UI and translate that to .tf easily.

We take extensibility pretty seriously. Outside the basics, we just released our own agent ready API (https://rootly.com/blog/introducing-rootlys-api-ai-agent-fir...), MCP, docs are now LLM ready (https://docs.rootly.com/llms-full.txt).

15 eng prob falls nicely into our startup offering, would be pretty discounted: https://rootly.com/startups

You get on-call + incident response + status pages. And a pretty "defaults only" experience ootb.

I thought maybe a link was TOO promotional haha.

https://rootly.com/ || and Opsgenie comparison (features): https://rootly.com/comparisons/opsgenie-vs-rootly-on-call

[Promotional warning]

Damn. As a founder in the incident management space (Rootly) I've had a lot of respect for Opsgenie. They had unique features like heartbeats and ran a lean but mighty team before selling to Atlassian. We saw them the most in Europe by far.

Okay here comes to promotional part (don't hate me). If anyone is looking for a modern alternative to Opsgenie that isn't as expensive as PagerDuty, Rootly is worth checking out (Slack-native, holiday scheduling, request coverage, clean mobile app, etc).

Previous to Rootly I worked at Instacart where I helped us transition from PD to Opsgenie. Afterwards, still not being happy I built Rootly.

Today, we've helped Trivago, Motive, Yahoo, and quite a few others make the switch. Pretty easy with our importer tool, etc.

As a founder in this space (Rootly.com), I firmly believe in rising tides lift all ships. Let's all keep making incidents work better for folks! :)

Very cool. Disclaimer I am the co-founder of Rootly, a modern on-call and incident response platform doing some pretty cool things across GenAI. So quite passionate about this space and our platform is used by companies like LinkedIn, Figma, etc.

Some of the most impactful features outside of the post-incident process as noted in the article we see is how we can augment the responder during an incident. - detecting related incidents and suggesting how things were done in the past - being able to @rootly to draft comms updates - noting down action items said in Zoom calls - etc.

Than on the post-incident side of the house things like using natural language to generate reports and Q&A has been powerful (e.g. where are people getting commonly stuck).

CEO and co-founder of Rootly here - ask me anything about our on-call solution! Here's a bit about how we got here: We began this journey in early 2023 after hearing how frustrated you were with products like PagerDuty that were clunky, overpriced, and did nothing more than call you. Our teams have put in thousands of hours making sure we got it right.

One of the most challenging areas I am so proud we nailed is rock solid reliability. Building schedules, overrides, and escalation policies is not difficult. But making sure alerts get delivered successfully no matter what is.

We re-examined our infrastructure and invested heavily into being the only multi-cloud on-call solution on the market. Even in the very rare scenario of AWS with a 99.99% SLA going down, we still won’t. We’ll wake you up in the middle of the night no matter what (big thank you to our investors at Google here too)!

- Multi-cloud reliability and redundancy - AI-powered scheduling, configuration, and insights that are just intuitive - Sleek iOS and Android apps that you’ll want to be woken up by - Beautiful UI designed by incident experts for modern teams - Fair and simple pricing without a million hidden upsells - Migration in less than 10 minutes off any legacy on-call tool - Alert to response handoff all within Slack that just makes sense

A true end-to-end platform is here. Our customers have been running on Rootly On-Call already and loving it.

CEO and co-founder of Rootly here - ask me anything about our on-call solution! Here's a bit about how we got here: We began this journey in early 2023 after hearing how frustrated you were with products like PagerDuty that were clunky, overpriced, and did nothing more than call you. Our teams have put in thousands of hours making sure we got it right.

One of the most challenging areas I am so proud we nailed is rock solid reliability. Building schedules, overrides, and escalation policies is not difficult. But making sure alerts get delivered successfully no matter what is.

We re-examined our infrastructure and invested heavily into being the only multi-cloud on-call solution on the market. Even in the very rare scenario of AWS with a 99.99% SLA going down, we still won’t. We’ll wake you up in the middle of the night no matter what (big thank you to our investors at Google here too)!

- Multi-cloud reliability and redundancy - AI-powered scheduling, configuration, and insights that are just intuitive - Sleek iOS and Android apps that you’ll want to be woken up by - Beautiful UI designed by incident experts for modern teams - Fair and simple pricing without a million hidden upsells - Migration in less than 10 minutes off any legacy on-call tool - Alert to response handoff all within Slack that just makes sense

A true end-to-end platform is here. Our customers have been running on Rootly On-Call already and loving it.

Lots of great alternatives to PagerDuty these days. Would def recommend checking out Rootly On-Call too: https://twitter.com/rootlyhq/status/1764724452783202615

Can I use this to drop my kid off at school? ;)

Linear is the only thing saving startups like ours from using Jira ;)

Yup! I told the team at our all-hands I started doing this and usually while I am in motion. So far only positive feedback. I've also been able to get ahead of a few silos that were building at our business too. Fun way to get to know people on a more personal level.