Opsgenie Alternative from Germany

When is Jira Service Management the better route?

When incidents are already handled in Jira. Atlassian recommends Jira Service Management for IT operations and incident handling, and Compass for development teams that track reliability per software component. Both take over alerts, schedules, escalations and integrations from Opsgenie. For teams already working with Atlassian, it is the route with the least effort.

Atlassian derives the target plan from the current one: Free becomes Free, Essentials becomes Standard, Standard becomes Premium, and Enterprise becomes Premium or Enterprise. Jira Service Management is billed per agent. Opsgenie shows the price under “Settings > Plan your move”, and a time-limited discount may be available.

This route is not a single click either. Chat connections to Slack or Microsoft Teams have to be reconnected. Bidirectional integrations and incoming call routing are only available on the Premium and Enterprise plans of Jira Service Management, and Compass currently offers no incoming call routing. Teams that manage Opsgenie with Terraform switch to the “Atlassian Operations” provider.

The main argument against this route is what it presupposes. Jira Service Management is a system for service requests and tickets. Teams that used Opsgenie on its own bring a ticketing system into the house just to keep their rotation. That can be the right call, but it is a bigger decision than replacing an alerting tool.

Where do alerts come from once Opsgenie is gone?

Opsgenie is built to receive alerts from other tools: Atlassian lists more than 200 integrations, and Opsgenie’s own monitoring is the heartbeat. LIVCK checks services itself, with HTTP, TCP, DNS, ICMP and SSL from several locations, plus heartbeats for background jobs. What LIVCK lacks are ready-made integrations for Prometheus, Grafana or Datadog.

With Opsgenie, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or a script of your own notices that something is wrong, and Opsgenie decides whom to wake. That is a clear division of labour. During an incident, though, two tools have to work together.

LIVCK combines both. Active checks run from several locations, and an incident is only raised once at least half of the checking locations involved see the outage; the threshold can be adjusted. The incident starts the escalation and can appear on the status page, with no interface in between.

For everything else there are two routes. Background jobs report in by heartbeat. From the Team plan, other systems open an incident through API v1, which triggers the same escalation. There is no ready-made connector that understands, say, the Prometheus Alertmanager format; that takes a small relay. Teams running dozens of integrations are better served by a tool whose core job is collecting alerts.

How does LIVCK handle schedules, overrides and absences?

Every on-call schedule has exactly one rotation: daily, weekly, every 1 to 90 days, or manual with shifts placed by hand. Handoff time and time zone are set per schedule, and up to ten people can be on duty at once. Overrides sit on top of the schedule for a period of time. Absences such as holidays or sickness re-plan the affected person’s shifts automatically.

The biggest difference is the rotation. Opsgenie allows several rotations in one schedule, each restricted to certain days and hours, for example for working hours, nights and weekends. LIVCK has no time windows inside a schedule. Primary and secondary on-call are two schedules in steps 1 and 2 of the same escalation policy, and a split between day and night duty only works as a manual schedule with placed shifts. What does follow the clock in LIVCK is urgency: with operating hours, an outage outside the agreed times can be treated as low urgency, and everyone keeps separate rules for both levels.

Overrides work as they do in Opsgenie: one person takes over for a period, and the schedule underneath stays. People in the rotation add overrides for themselves; those who manage on-call can add them for anyone. A public holiday without cover is entered as a deliberate gap. To hand off a shift of your own, you send a cover request to one person or to everyone in the schedule.

Absences are an object of their own. Whoever enters holiday, training or sickness drops out of every schedule for that period, and the next person moves up and is notified. Only the person concerned and those who manage on-call see the reason; everyone else sees “absent”.

On top come a 28-day preview before saving, reminders 24 hours before a shift and when it starts, and a calendar subscription for Google, Apple or Outlook. If a period ends up unstaffed, the schedule flags the gap. If an alert reaches nobody, the owner and everyone who manages on-call are told.

What does it cost when night-time calls pile up?

Opsgenie’s Standard and Enterprise plans include SMS and voice calls with no preset limit. LIVCK runs them on credits: 25 per month on Team, 50 on Business. An SMS costs 1 credit, a call 5. Anyone who wants to be woken by a phone call at night should count their volume before switching.

Opsgenie has the advantage here. Only a call reliably wakes someone at night, and LIVCK says so itself: each person’s readiness light only turns green once a verified phone call is part of their rules. SMS, WhatsApp and Pushover count as limited, because a phone in do-not-disturb mode may deliver them silently. The 25 credits included in Team cover five calls a month.

More credits come in packs: 100 for €12, 500 for €55, 2,000 for €190. Purchased credits never expire. An example: eight night-time alerts a month, each waking one person by call and SMS, need 48 credits. After the 25 included, one pack of 100 lasts a little over four such months. When credits run out, the owner is alerted and the person being paged gets an email instead. But an email wakes nobody.

Email, Pushover and the chat channels cost no credits. For high-urgency alerts, LIVCK sends the Pushover alert with emergency priority, and the phone keeps alerting until the alert is acknowledged in the app or a time limit runs out.

What does on-call have to do with the German Working Hours Act?

The Act requires an uninterrupted rest period of at least eleven hours after the end of the working day (section 5(1) ArbZG). On the Business plan, LIVCK checks whether a schedule gives the same person two shifts less than eleven hours apart. After a night-time alert it also states the earliest time at which eleven hours of rest are reached.

Both are hints, not locks. LIVCK does not know the rest of people’s working hours, so the assessment stays with the employer. The hint after an alert between 10 pm and 6 am goes to the person who was woken and to everyone who manages on-call, once per incident and person.

At the start of every month LIVCK produces a report per schedule, as PDF and as CSV: who was on call when, for how many hours, how many alerts there were and how many came at night or at the weekend, plus the results of the rest-period check. HR or the works council can receive it without an account once they have confirmed it. Shift history is kept for 24 months. Overrides currently still count towards the person originally scheduled in the report.