OpsGenie is sunsetting. Atlassian says April 2027, though some accounts are already going read-only. If you haven't started evaluating replacements, you're behind.
There's no shortage of comparison posts. PagerDuty vs. Rootly vs. incident.io vs. Grafana IRM. Feature tables, pricing breakdowns, Terraform exporters, migration timelines. All genuinely useful. All comparing the same half of the problem.
The half nobody's comparing is the one that determines whether your incidents resolve in 30 minutes or 9 hours.
What OpsGenie actually did
Two things, basically. It knew who was on call, and it woke them up. Schedules, escalation policies, routing rules. That's the coordination layer. OpsGenie was good at it. Good enough that most teams forgot it was running.
What it never did: help anyone figure out what actually broke.
The page lands. Engineers join a channel. And then OpsGenie is out of the picture. Everything from that point, every "which service are you looking at?" and "I'm seeing something different over here," that's on you and your collection of dashboards.
If you run two services, this barely matters. The blast radius is obvious.
If you run eight, the alert fires and four engineers open four different tools. They spend the next stretch narrating what they each see. One's in Grafana. One's in Datadog. One's tailing logs from the wrong service and doesn't know it yet. The conversation sounds like investigation. It's actually alignment. Nobody's debugging. They're trying to agree on what to debug.
OpsGenie got people into the room. It had nothing to say about what happened once they sat down.
The alternatives, honestly
You'll pick one of these. Here's what you're actually choosing between.
| Tool | Price (annual billing) | On-call included | Slack-native | AI post-mortems |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PagerDuty | $41/user/mo (Business) | Yes | Partial | No |
| incident.io | $15 + $12 on-call/user/mo | Add-on | Yes | Yes |
| Rootly | ~$20/user/mo | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Grafana IRM | Included in Grafana Cloud | Yes | Partial | No |
PagerDuty still has the best alerting engine. Strongest event orchestration, most mature routing logic. The Business plan, which is what you actually need, runs $41/user/month annual. AIOps is extra. Support is email-only unless you buy Premium. The UI is showing its age but the plumbing is solid.
incident.io is the strongest Slack-native lifecycle platform right now. On-call, coordination, status pages, post-mortems, one product. Their auto-generated incident timeline from Slack messages is genuinely good: it kills the manual reconstruction that makes everyone skip post-mortems. Pricing: Team plan is $15/user/month annual, but on-call adds $12, so your real number is $27.
Rootly occupies similar ground with more configuration surface and fewer opinions baked in. Good if your team has specific workflow ideas and doesn't want to adopt someone else's process.
Grafana IRM is the obvious pick if you already run the Grafana stack. OnCall OSS got archived in March 2026. Cloud IRM is actively developed and ships with Grafana Cloud.
All four handle coordination competently. They get the right people into the right channel and automate the lifecycle.
None of them change what those people see when they arrive.
The part that actually determines MTTR
The DORA State of DevOps report classifies teams recovering in under an hour as elite. Most organizations land in the medium tier: a day to a week. MetricNet benchmarking puts average MTTR around 9 business hours.
That's roughly a 10x spread, and it doesn't correlate much with which paging tool you use or how many Datadog dashboards you have.
What it correlates with is convergence speed. How fast does the team arrive at a shared picture of what went wrong? The coordination tools on your shortlist speed up the assembly phase: who gets paged, where they meet, how roles get assigned. Real improvement. But assembly was already the fast part.
The slow part is what comes after. Everyone's in the channel. Dashboards are open. Nobody agrees on what broke. Three engineers, three different signals, three different tools, having a conversation that feels like diagnosis but is really alignment. One person thinks it started in checkout. Another suspects the payment gateway. The third is reading deploy logs from an hour ago and isn't sure what they're looking for yet.
With multi-service incidents, unclear ownership, or cross-team dependencies, this alignment phase can swallow the entire timeline. Hours. Sometimes days. Your new coordination tool won't touch it. It doesn't know which services called which, or in what order. That was never what it was built to answer.
What changes when you fix the investigation layer too
The alert fires. A trace already exists. It was assembled from the call relationships between your services in the 60 seconds before the alert, not after. Which service called which. What order. Latency per hop. Where the first error showed up. What it cascaded through downstream.
Someone drops the link in the incident channel. Every engineer who opens it sees the same causal chain. Not a dashboard that needs cross-referencing. The actual recorded sequence of calls.
The trace shows its own gaps, too. An uninstrumented service appears as a ghost node: visible in the graph, caller-side latency and error rates available, but no internal view. You know exactly where the evidence stops and where you'll need to go dig manually.
The team starts from one picture instead of five. That's the structural difference.
How it works
Incidentary is built for this. It's a causal trace layer for distributed systems that assembles the chain of calls leading to an incident, deterministically, before the alert fires. It runs alongside your coordination tool, not instead of it.
The SDK installs as middleware. Node.js:
npm install @incidentary/sdk-nodeimport { IncidentaryClient, createExpressMiddleware } from '@incidentary/sdk-node';
const incidentary = new IncidentaryClient({
apiKey: process.env.INCIDENTARY_API_KEY!,
serviceName: 'checkout-service',
});
app.use(createExpressMiddleware(incidentary));The open source SDK patches http, https, and fetch automatically. Outbound calls get captured into an in-memory ring buffer holding 60 seconds of history. When an alert fires, the trace assembles from what was already captured, not from what you start collecting afterward.
Assembly takes under 2 seconds. The trace link requires no auth. Paste it in Slack and everyone in the channel sees the same chain without signing up for anything.
The difference from Jaeger or Tempo: this isn't probabilistic correlation. The chain comes from actual parent_ce_id header propagation through every service boundary. HTTP, gRPC, queues. Two engineers looking at the same link see the same determined sequence of events. Not a statistical inference. A recorded fact.
SDKs for Node.js, Python, Go, and .NET. All Apache 2.0.
What this is not
Incidentary doesn't schedule on-call. It won't page you. It has no opinions about your escalation policies.
For that, pick one of the four tools above. They're good at it. The comparison guides floating around are genuinely useful for that decision. I'd recommend reading them.
Incidentary sits underneath: when your coordination tool fires the alert and opens the channel, Incidentary is what puts the causal trace there before anyone starts guessing.
One service, one npm install, and you get a live service map with ghost detection within 30 seconds of your first request.
Why this migration is the right moment
Most teams will handle the OpsGenie sunset the way they handle any forced migration: pick the closest replacement, move the schedules, close the ticket. Perfectly reasonable for the coordination layer.
But coordination was never the bottleneck. The distance between an elite incident response and an average one is almost entirely the gap between "team assembled" and "team investigating the same thing." OpsGenie didn't close that gap. Its replacement won't either.
The migration forces you to open the incident stack. While it's open, you can either do a 1:1 swap of the coordination layer, or you can also address the layer that actually moves MTTR. Both require effort. Only one of them changes the outcome.
Frequently asked questions
Should I just migrate to JSM since we already use Jira?
I wouldn't. JSM is a service desk with alerting bolted on. The workflow is: alert creates ticket, ticket sends notification, engineer opens ticket, then investigates. One indirection too many for 2am. Teams that went from OpsGenie to JSM consistently report worse on-call experience. Look at the dedicated tools before defaulting to your Atlassian contract.
What's the cheapest OpsGenie replacement?
Grafana IRM is free if you're already on Grafana Cloud. Rootly runs about $20/user/month with on-call. incident.io Team is $15/user/month but on-call adds $12. PagerDuty Professional is $21/user/month, though most teams end up needing Business at $41. Price was the first filter in every evaluation thread I read this year.
Can I run causal tracing alongside whatever coordination tool I pick?
That's the only way it works. Incidentary isn't a coordination tool. It sits alongside PagerDuty, incident.io, Rootly, or Grafana IRM. When your pager fires and the channel opens, the trace is already there. One SDK per service. No changes to your coordination workflow.
Try it
Free tier: 200,000 causal events/month. Full causal assembly, ghost detection, 14-day retention. No credit card.