Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Looking for the best on-call scheduling software for your team? Or maybe you’re exploring alternatives to your current tool? Signing up for different on-call tools and testing them all takes weeks. That’s a lot of time you probably don’t have, especially when you need reliable on-call coverage now. That’s why I did the heavy lifting for you. I signed up for and tested the 5 popular on-call scheduling tools in the market: Spike, PagerDuty, Incident.io, Splunk Oncall, and OpsGenie.

I use Slack daily. It works perfectly fine. Outages rarely happen. Even if they happen, they are resolved quickly. And this is the same for many other tools. But how are they all doing it—Keeping services running and resolving issues quickly? The secret: On-Call Schedules. On-call schedules make sure someone is always available to handle emergencies, so your systems stay reliable.

Signals is FireHydrant’s modern on-call product that is a replacement for legacy tools such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie. When we began planning Signals, we not only wanted to build a kickass on-call alternative, but also to reset the standard on how much on-call should cost.

When an incident wakes your team early in the morning, the last thing you want is confusion about who’s responding or how help will arrive. An effective on-call schedule doesn’t just get the right person online. It helps them stay calm, confident, and capable of solving problems quickly. Done right, your on-call setup becomes a powerful lever for reducing Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and the overall stress that incidents place on your team.

In today’s fast-paced, always-connected world, many businesses require employees to be on call to ensure smooth operations and quick responses to critical issues. However, compensating employees for being on call can be a tricky subject. It’s important to strike a balance between fairness, accountability, and incentivizing the right behaviors. Let’s explore four common methods of compensating employees for being on call, along with their advantages and disadvantages.

If you’ve been using Grafana OnCall OSS for incident management, you may have already heard the news—it’s now in maintenance mode and will be archived within one year. Grafana Labs recently announced that Grafana OnCall OSS is now in maintenance mode and will be archived in 2026. This means no new features, limited updates, and eventually, no support.

A well-structured on-call rotation helps you ensure the reliability of your services and meet your customers’ expectations by designating staff to respond to emerging issues. But the pressures of on-call work—such as long shifts, overnight hours, and dynamic situations—can compromise the well-being of your team members. This makes it harder for them to maximize service uptime during their on-call shifts and can limit the velocity of the feature work they do outside of their on-call duty.