Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When your company has multiple offices or operational sites – whether that’s across the U.S. or around the world – getting alerts to the right team isn’t as easy as just checking who’s on duty. Events can come from a wide range of sources tied to different physical locations, time zones, or even separate departments, and not every alert is meant for every team. Let’s say your company has operations in New York, Dallas, and San Francisco.

Being on-call is one of the toughest responsibilities in IT. Engineers must be ready to respond at any hour, often balancing the stress of urgent incidents with everyday operations. But nothing drains energy faster than duplicate alerts. When one problem triggers dozens of notifications across different devices or monitoring tools, on-call teams spend valuable time sifting through noise instead of resolving the real issue.

Providing continuous, high-quality care takes more than clinical expertise—it depends on well-designed physician on call schedules that balance patient safety, physician wellness, and operational efficiency. Whether you manage a residency program or a multi-specialty group, creating an effective physician call schedule—or a broader provider on call schedule—is critical for 24/7 coverage and clinician well-being.

Being “on call” sounds simple: you’re not actively working, but you need to be available if something goes wrong. The real question many employees ask is: do you actually get paid for being on call? The short answer is: it depends. Your pay may hinge on labor laws, company policies, and how restricted your time really is.

At incident.io, we are building a product that our users rely on 24/7, all year round. This means it is crucial that it is always working, and that is where our on-call rotation comes in. We believe that everyone should be on-call because it tightens the feedback loop between shipping new features and maintaining what we have, leading to more pragmatic engineering decisions.

Managing developer on-call rotations and escalations isn't just about who gets woken up at 2 a.m. — it's about ensuring reliability, minimizing downtime, and scaling operational excellence. With so many tools out there, choosing the right on-call solution can be tough. We've analyzed 10 of the most trusted on-call scheduling platforms in 2025 — comparing usability, pricing, integrations, automation, and support — to help you choose the best tool for your engineering or DevOps team.

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.

Imagine it’s 2 AM and a critical system flatlines without warning. A bleary-eyed on-call engineer scrambles to restore service, shielding customers from a major outage that could torpedo your next Service Level Objective (SLO) review. Yet when daylight returns, debates over fair on-call compensation start all over again: What’s “just” pay for sleepless nights, unpredictable pings, and rapid-fire incident responses?