Introduction

Incident management tools are important for organizations to effectively handle service outages. With so many incident management tools around with different feature sets, it's often difficult to find the one that is right for your needs. In this article, we attempt to make a list of incident management software available in 2024 with their features to help you arrive at the right one.

We have focused mostly on tools that offer incident management capabilities - which include at least incident lifecycle management, on-call scheduling, and third-party integrations.

There are many good tools which are focused only on incident response, or on monitoring and generating alerts, or on the ticketing aspect of incidents. We have not included those to avoid cluttering this article.

Benefits of Using an Incident Management Tool

• An incident management tool streamlines the incident management process by helping to define and automate workflows. It can help you create runbooks, alerting and escalation policies, and define and manage on-call schedules.
• Incident Management software often come with integrations with your observability stack. Your observability stack is a key source of incidents. They can also integrate with your existing communication and collaboration tools to provide real-time updates.
• Some incident management tools add context to your incident analysis by pulling in data from your infrastructure, applications, and observability systems. This can help in narrowing down the root cause.
• Incident management tools can provide analytics which can be used to gain insights into patterns and performance to create a culture of continuous improvement.
• An incident management tool can also provide audit trails and standardized documentation for compliance requirements.
• Some tools have public and private status pages so that stakeholders can get more visibility into the process.

List of Incident Management Tools in 2024

1. PagerDuty

Key Features:

• Alerting over multiple channels including phone, app, email
• On-call management - scheduling, roster management, overrides
• Rule definitions for alert routing
• Integrations with most common tools
• APIs for incident lifecycle management
• Status pages
• Support for teams with role-based permissions
• Integration with ITSM tools
• Analytics
• Single sign-on
• Maintenance mode

PagerDuty is best for large enterprises requiring comprehensive incident management, although it can be used by smaller teams too.

2. Opsgenie

Key Features:

• Alerting over multiple channels including phone, app, email
• On-call scheduling, management, overrides, and escalation policies
• Ability to add contextual information to alerts
• Custom actions for alerts like executing a script
• Automatic actions like running playbooks
• Third-party integrations
• Analytics
• Status pages
• Single sign-on
• Maintenance mode

Opsgenie is suited for ops teams tha need sophisticated alerting.

3. Splunk On-Call

Key Features:

• On-call schedules and overrides
• Role-based permissions
• Rules engine for triggering custom actions
• Incident waiting rooms to reduce alert fatigue
• Maintenance mode
• Notifications via email, phone, SMS, email, app push
• Third-party integrations with many common tools

Splunk On-Call, formerly VictorOps, is best suited for teams already using Splunk for monitoring.

4. Grafana OnCall

Key Features:

• Open source and also has a managed solution
• Alert grouping
• Escalation policies
• Alert routing
• Calendar-based on-call schedule and roster
• Maintenance mode
• Integrations with common third-party tools
• Role based access control
• Analytics

Grafana OnCall works seamlessly with other Grafana Cloud products, so it is best suited for teams already using Grafana for monitoring.

5. ServiceNow

Key Features:

• On-call scheduling with overrides
• Supports multiple notification channels
• Automated ticket routing
• SLA tracking
• Compliance and governance features
• Integrations with many third-party tools
• Analytics

It's best suited for organizations using ServiceNow products like ITSM.

6. iLert

Key Features:

• On-call schedules and escalation policies
• Notifications using SMS, push, voice call
• Maintenance support
• Critical phone call routing using customizable multi-language IVR
• Status pages
• Integrations with MS Teams and Slack for chatops-based incident management
• Integrates with most common tools

iLert is best suited for mid-sized Ops teams.

7. incident.io

Key Features:

• On-call scheduling and escalations, with overrides
• Notifications with app push, phone, email, Slack, MS Teams
• Incident lifecycle management from within Slack
• Private incidents support
• API for integration and data access
• Status pages
• Analytics
• Third-party integrations
• Integrates with CRM systems

incident.io focuses on being an incident management platform with a Slack-first approach.

8. FireHydrant

Key Features:

• On-call management
• Notifications on app push, Slack, Whatsapp
• Runbooks
• Service catalog
• Incident retrospectives
• Analytics
• Integrates with most common tools
• Status pages

FireHydrant with its strong incident workflows and retrospectives is best suited for SRE teams.

9. Squadcast

Key Features:

• On-call scheduling, escalation policies, and overrides
• Integrations with common tools
• Live call routing to connect to on-call folks directly
• Alert classification and routing rules
• Auto-pause flapping alerts
• Analytics
• Manage incidents directly from Slack
• Runbooks
• Status pages

Squadcast is meant for modern SRE and Ops teams with its alert routing, post-mortem support, and chatops features.

10. Better Stack

Key Features:

• On-call scheduling and escalation policies
• Incident grouping
• Status pages
• Integrations with common tools
• Single-sign on
• Teams support

Better Stack is a suite of products that includes monitoring and logging also, but we felt it should be included in this list because of its integrated on-call features.

11. Rootly

Key Features:

• On-call scheduling, escalation policies, and overrides
• Alert grouping based on time-window and on content
• Integrates with many third-party tools
• Playbooks
• Support for managing the incident lifecycle directly from Slack
• Retrospectives with automatic data capture and sync with Jira
• Analytics

Rootly specializes in automating incident workflows with strong integration capabilities and customizable playbooks.

Conclusion

Choosing an incident management tool involves looking at many aspects including:

• Features - Instead of looking at the number of features, list down the ones you actually need for your team and evaluate based on that.
• Cost - Incident Management is a key part of your business operations, so you also need to forecast future costs if your team or infrastructure is growing.
• Customer support - Your incident management systems' reliability needs to be top-notch. However, incidents happen, even in incident management software, so make sure they have great customer support.
• Integration capabilities - Your team might be using multiple observability tools, either third-party or custom or both. Any incident management tool should be able to integrate well with your existing stack as well as with your communication and collaboration tools.
• Reports - Metrics and analytics are invaluable for figuring out trends in your outages and where to focus on for improvement.
• Flexibility in scheduling - Easy roster setup and overrides are a must.
• Alignment with your regulatory requirements, if any.
• Documentation/knowledge base integration.

Choose the tool that is right for you and your team - which may not necessarily be the one that everybody else is using because it's the "best".

Photo credits: Miha Meglic

Originally published on the IncidentHub blog.