Migrating from PagerDuty is not a weekend project. I learned this the hard way. Here's the playbook I wish I had.
Before you start
- Audit every integration. Alerts, webhooks, Slack hooks, status page syncs. Ours had 47. I found 12 we had forgotten about.
- Export every schedule. Including overrides and holiday rules.
- Snapshot every escalation policy.
- Document your notification rules (who gets SMS vs push vs call).
The parallel period
Do not cutover. Run both systems side-by-side for at least 2 weeks.
- Route a small % of alerts to the new system first.
- Verify every alert fires in both.
- Let on-call engineers use the new app but keep PagerDuty as backup.
- Watch for silent failures (missing integrations usually hide here).
The cutover
Pick a Monday morning, not a Friday night. Cutover in stages:
- Non-critical services first
- Monitor for 24 hours
- Critical services next
- Keep PagerDuty subscribed but route-away for 1 more week in case of rollback
The cleanup
Don't forget the ghost integrations. Old CI jobs, dead services, third-party tools. They'll keep sending to PagerDuty silently until someone notices the bill.
Total time for a 50-person team migration: 6 weeks, not 6 days. Plan accordingly.
Written by Dr. Samson Tanimawo
BSc · MSc · MBA · PhD
Founder & CEO, Nova AI Ops. https://novaaiops.com
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