Incident Response Management: A Category of Its Own

In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with several Opsgenie customers who are evaluating a migration to ilert after Atlassian’s decision to phase out Opsgenie and fold its functionality into other products. Atlassian is giving Opsgenie users “two options: move to Jira Service Management for robust end-to-end incident management, or move to Compass for alerting and on-call management.” This has raised a broader question in our industry: 

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Is Incident Response Management (IRM) a standalone category or just a feature within larger platforms?

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I want to reflect on that question and share why I firmly believe IRM remains a distinct, essential category—not merely a feature. I’ll highlight insights from those customer conversations and explain ilert’s vendor-neutral approach to integrations, which even led us to sunset our own uptime monitoring feature for the greater good of our ecosystem.

What Opsgenie’s transition taught us

First, let’s consider the insight from Opsgenie’s end-of-life. Along with PagerDuty, Opsgenie was a pioneer that helped build the incident response management category, so seeing it put on the shelf is bittersweet. Many of its users have expressed frustration that development stagnated as Atlassian integrated Opsgenie’s features into Jira Service Management (JSM). In fact, we have had customers switching to ilert way before Atlassian’s EOL announcement of Opsgenie, “citing Opsgenie’s stagnation as Atlassian folded its features into Jira Service Management.” 

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This sentiment captures the crux of the issue: the all-in-one solution offered in JSM may include incident response features, but it can be cumbersome for teams that primarily need a nimble, real-time alerting and on-call management tool. Opsgenie’s fate illustrates the dilemma. Atlassian’s strategy treats incident management as a component of a broader suite (ITSM or a developer portal like Compass) rather than a product in itself. 

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Opsgenie users I spoke with are weighing these Atlassian-provided paths, but many are also looking at dedicated IRM platforms because they feel something would be lost in translation if incident response became just another module inside a larger tool. Their intuition aligns with what we’ve long believed in the industry.

IRM: Feature or Standalone Platform?

It’s a fair question to ask: As adjacent software categories mature, could incident response simply become a feature of monitoring, observability, or ITSM platforms? After all, many monitoring tools now have alerting capabilities, and IT service platforms have incident modules. Atlassian’s move with Opsgenie is one prominent example of viewing IRM as a feature within a bigger product.

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However, there’s a reason dedicated IRM platforms like ilert, PagerDuty and xMatters exist (and continue to thrive). The nature of incident response—bridging humans and complex systems under pressure—calls for a specialized focus. Treating IRM as just a checkbox feature risks oversimplifying what it does. The core value of an IRM platform is to act as the central dispatcher between people and systems during critical moments. This goes far beyond what a typical add-on feature can accomplish.

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Let’s unpack that with an analogy: You wouldn’t consider “customer support” just a feature of your email service, even though you can technically manage support via email. Companies still invest in dedicated support platforms because specialization matters. Similarly, incident response has its own workflows and urgency that warrant a purpose-built solution.

Why Incident Response Management remains a distinct category

In my view, IRM stands as a distinct category for several key reasons:

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• Centralized alert dispatching: A true IRM platform serves as a hub for all critical alerts, regardless of source. It funnels signals from various monitoring, observability, and automation tools into one stream and ensures they reach the right people at the right time. This “single pane of glass” for incidents is difficult to achieve when incident management is scattered across different modules in different systems. Neither JSM nor Compass alone covers the need for a centralized alert dispatcher and incident management. By contrast, a dedicated IRM tool is built from the ground up to be that centralized dispatcher.
• Specialized on-call and escalation workflows: IRM platforms provide rich capabilities like on-call scheduling, rotation management, multi-step escalations, automated stakeholder notifications, and postmortem tracking. These aren’t side features; they are the heart of the product. When incident response is a mere feature elsewhere, these capabilities often end up less flexible or buried behind other priorities. A distinct IRM system keeps the focus on minimizing response times and coordinating people efficiently during high-stress incidents—its entire roadmap revolves around these outcomes, not around broader IT processes or monitoring features.
• Vendor-neutral integration hub: Perhaps one of the strongest arguments for IRM as its own category is integration breadth. Modern organizations typically use a heterogeneous set of tools: different monitoring systems (cloud provider monitors, application performance tools, etc.), logging and observability platforms, ITSM for ticketing, chat apps for collaboration, CI/CD pipelines, and more. An incident response platform needs to play nicely with all of them. If you rely on an incident feature inside one vendor’s platform, you might be limited in connecting to external tools. A standalone IRM platform is vendor-neutral by design, acting as a Switzerland that connects everything. For example, ilert deliberately does not compete with monitoring vendors; we focus on integrating with them. We even decided to discontinue our own built-in uptime monitoring feature so we could “maintain our vendor-neutral position” and avoid conflicts of interest with our monitoring partners. Being neutral ensures that the IRM system’s only goal is to reliably route alerts between all your systems and your people without bias toward where the data comes from.
• Lightweight layer over existing tools: A dedicated IRM solution adds a thin but crucial layer on top of your existing infrastructure. It doesn’t replace your monitoring or your ticketing system. Instead, it makes them more effective by ensuring that alerts from the former get actionable response and by avoiding overload of the latter. In practice, many companies pair an IRM platform with their ITSM. For instance, you might continue managing incident records and compliance in ServiceNow but use ilert to handle the real-time paging and human coordination. The two systems complement each other: ServiceNow is excellent for structured ITIL workflows, while ilert serves as a dispatcher for critical alerts, integrating with over 100 monitoring, observability, ITSM and chat tools to trigger immediate action before a formal ticket is even filed. This kind of flexible orchestration is only possible when IRM is a separate, integrative layer rather than locked inside one of the tools.
• Focus and innovation: Finally, keeping IRM as its own category fosters innovation. When a product’s sole mission is incident response, its team can iterate and improve on that problem faster than if incident features are just one item on a long list of priorities in a larger suite. The result is often more user-friendly on-call experiences, smarter alert routing (even leveraging AI for noise reduction or auto-remediation), and features like status pages and analytics that are deeply tuned to incident management needs. We’ve seen a wave of innovation from specialized IRM startups and platforms precisely because they are tackling this as a primary challenge, not a secondary feature.

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Integration over competition: ilert’s vendor-neutral stance

One concrete example of treating IRM as a category is how we at ilert approach our product strategy. We believe an incident response platform should complement the rest of your toolchain, not compete with it. This philosophy is why we made the conscious choice to sunset our uptime monitoring offering. By stepping back from providing our own monitoring, we can fully embrace integrations with best-of-breed monitoring and observability tools used by our customers.

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In our announcement about this change, we explained that discontinuing the feature allows us to maintain our vendor-neutral position for monitoring and avoid any potential conflicts of interest when engaging in partnerships with vendors of uptime monitoring software.

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In other words, we never want ilert to favor one data source over another. Our job is to reliably route alerts from any source to the people who need to see them.

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This vendor-neutral, integration-first approach has a big payoff for users: it means you can plug ilert into whatever systems you already have and trust that we’re focused solely on improving your incident response process. It’s the opposite of a walled garden. We’ve built 100+ integrations and even tailored our features to work hand-in-hand with systems like Jira, ServiceNow, Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and so on. The feedback from former Opsgenie customers moving to ilert is that this openness and focus are exactly what they were looking for. They want their incident response platform to be an unbiased orchestrator, not pushing them to replace tools that already work well for them.

The IRM Platform as the Central Dispatcher

At its heart, an Incident Response Management platform is the central dispatcher between people and systems during an outage or critical event. Companies often have monitoring tools that detect issues and ticketing systems that record and assign work. But it’s the IRM platform that bridges the gap in real time, ensuring that when something breaks at 2 AM, the right on-call engineer’s phone rings, and the team can mobilize immediately. It coordinates humans (through alerts, escalations, and collaboration) in response to machine signals. 

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This role is unique. If you try to handle it purely within a monitoring tool, you might get alerts out, but you miss the human workflow aspects (like escalations or communications across teams). If you try to handle it purely within an ITSM tool, you often sacrifice speed and simplicity (turning emergencies into tickets can introduce delay or bureaucracy).

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The true measure of an IRM platform’s value is in how effectively it connects and accelerates your existing investments: your monitoring becomes more actionable, your on-call staff more effective, and your incident process more transparent. All of this happens without forcing you to change the tools you use for observability or ITSM. That’s why I see IRM as its own pillar in the tech stack—a mission control that sits alongside observability and ITSM, not inside them.

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Closing thoughts

The question of “category or feature?” is a healthy one to revisit as platforms evolve. In the case of incident response management, my experience and recent customer discussions reinforce that it remains a category in its own right. 

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The stakes during incidents are too high, the integrations needed are too many, and the workflows are too specialized for IRM to be an afterthought or merely a line-item feature. Instead, we should view IRM platforms as complementary partners to our monitoring, DevOps, and ITSM tools, each doing what they do best.

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For ilert, this means continuing a calm and focused pursuit of being the best dispatcher of trust between all the systems that detect problems and all the people who solve them. We’ll integrate, orchestrate, and stay vendor-neutral, so our users can confidently rely on a platform that puts incident response first. 

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In a world where everything from cloud services to ticketing systems is expanding in scope, there’s real value in something that deliberately stays specialized. Incident Response Management is this something—a standalone discipline and platform that ensures when things go wrong, they get fixed as fast as humanly (and technologically) possible.

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