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Critical incidents have a direct impact on your business revenue and the trust your customers place in you. The longer a critical incident goes unnoticed, the higher the stakes. A reliable alert routing setup automatically catches these incidents the moment they trigger and gets them to the right person without delay. This guide walks you through how to build that reliable routing setup.

When a midnight incident triggers, the goal is not to wake your entire team. It’s to reach the one person who can act on it. Everyone else should sleep through it undisturbed. The difference between a team that handles midnight incidents well and one that doesn’t usually comes down to a few decisions made ahead of time. Which incidents actually need a midnight response? Who should get the call? And what should happen to everything else? This guide walks through those decisions.

Severity and priority are two labels that describe different things about an incident. Severity covers the blast radius: how much of your system or how many customers are affected. Priority covers the urgency: how quickly someone needs to act. Routing rules then use these labels to load the right escalation policy for each incident. This guide covers how to define your severity and priority levels and map them to escalation policies.

A complete guide to modern incident management and how it’s transforming into a strategic business function. Kamalesh Srikanth , Product Strategy Leader at AlertOps If you’ve worked in IT, infrastructure, or operations for any length of time, you’ve lived through the chaos of a critical incident. Systems down, alerts blaring, Slack pinging, emails piling up and somewhere in that noise, your team is trying to figure out what actually broke and how to fix it fast.

It’s 2:47 a.m. A P1 alert fires. The on-call engineer opens ilert, sees the AI has already investigated, and is presented with three remediation options. What happens next is the moment we obsessed over. ‍ Most AI tooling at that moment hands the engineer a numbered list in a chat window and waits. The engineer reads, selects mentally, types a reply, and the agent resumes.

Disclosure: This comparison is written by our product marketing team that works closely with IT operations and on-call workflows. While we build on-call management and incident alerting software ourselves, this guide is designed to help teams understand how different tools fit different operational needs. We believe there is no single “best” tool. Only the right fit for a given team.

Every incident arrives with a payload, and that payload usually tells you far more than whether something broke. It points to which service is affected and how serious the issue looks. It also carries context about which customers are on the receiving end of that failure. The service name, severity, customer context — all of it can feed directly into routing decisions. This guide explores how to read those parts of the payload and use them to route incidents automatically.