Atlassian is shutting down OpsGenie. New sales stopped on June 4, 2025, and the platform will be completely offline by April 5, 2027.
As an OpsGenie user, you now face a critical decision: Migrate to Jira Service Management (JSM), Atlassian’s recommended path, or choose a different solution. And if you’re not sure JSM is the right fit for your team’s alerting needs, this review will help you decide.
I signed up for JSM and put it through real-world testing. I created an email integration, designed an escalation policy, and triggered test alerts.
Then, I reviewed JSM’s alerting capabilities across 5 key criteria. You’ll discover them as you read on.
For each criterion, I shared what I liked and what I didn’t. This gives you a balanced look at JSM’s alerting features.
As you finish reading this review, you’ll know if JSM fits your team’s needs. If you decide JSM isn’t right for you, I’ve also included an alternative that might suit you better.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
My Alerting Criteria for Evaluating Jira Service Management (JSM)
- Control Over Alerts: I looked at how JSM provides control over alerting. Does it offer only individual-level control, only team-level control, or both?
- Setup and Configuration: This covers getting started. How fast can you add contact methods, create a service, connect an integration, and design an escalation policy?
- Alert Channels: I compared key channels like phone calls, SMS, email, push, and Slack. How rich is the information in each alert? What actions can you take directly from an alert?
- On-Call Handoff Notifications: This focuses on notifications for on-call shift changes. I checked how easy and flexible it is to get notifications when your on-call duty starts or ends.
- Alert Fatigue Handling: This is about cutting down on noise. I looked at what options JSM provides to help prevent team burnout.
Jira Service Management (JSM) Review for Alerting
| Criteria | What I liked | What I didn’t like |
|---|---|---|
| Control Over Alerts | Dual control at both team and individual levels | Can’t specify how alerts are delivered in escalation policies |
| Setup and Configuration | Extra notify options like next/previous member on rotation, repeat escalation with customization | Contact methods felt nested in UI, Slack setup requires multiple steps |
| Alert Channels | Multi-channel alerts with phone, SMS, email, push, and Slack | Can’t reply to emails to take action, alerts go to single Slack channel |
| On-Call Handoff Notifications | Individual shift notifications work through personal preferences | No team-level Slack/Teams channel notifications, no webhook automation |
| Alert Fatigue Handling | Notification Policies and Alert Policies for suppression | No ready-to-use templates, no work-life balance features |
1. Control Over Alerts
JSM offers dual control over alerts, just like OpsGenie. You can set individual notification preferences and create team-level escalation policies. Each escalation step lets you define when to send notifications, time delays, and who to notify.
What I liked
I liked that JSM gives you both individual and team control. Users can set their own notification rules for different situations. Teams can build escalation policies that route alerts to specific people, on-call schedules, or entire teams.
What I didn’t like
You can’t specify how someone gets alerted in the escalation policy. You can tell JSM to alert a user, but not whether that should be a phone call or SMS. That decision lives in the user’s personal settings, which limits team-level customization.
2. Setup and Configuration
JSM follows the same contact method setup as OpsGenie. You add email, phone numbers for calls and SMS, and mobile push notifications. However, JSM’s interface felt a bit nested. It took me some time to find where to add contact methods.
Slack setup requires multiple steps. You go to Teams, select your team, add integration, choose Slack, then pick a channel. It’s not as direct as adding an email or phone number. Service and integration setup work the same as OpsGenie.
What I liked
JSM adds more options for escalation policies than OpsGenie. You can notify the next member on rotation, the previous member, or a random team member. JSM also adds repeat escalation with customizations like time delay, maximum repetitions, and automatic alert closure when repeats finish.
What I didn’t like
Contact methods aren’t obvious in the interface. Slack configuration requires extra steps instead of a direct setup. The delay time in escalation policies is not relative and requires you to count from the top, which adds mental overhead.
3. Alert Channels
JSM delivers alerts across all standard channels: phone, SMS, email, mobile push, and Slack. Phone call alerts reveal the alert title. You get dial pad options to hear the description, close the alert, acknowledge it, or escalate.
SMS messages include the alert title, a link to the alert, and the alert ID. You can acknowledge by replying with ack [alert id] or resolve by replying with res [alert id].
What I liked
Slack alerts display title, status, responders, description, and priority. You can acknowledge, add notes, assign ownership, snooze, add tags, and update priority directly from Slack. This makes managing incidents from chat very convenient.
What I didn’t like
Email alerts show a button to view the alert, but you can’t acknowledge or resolve it by replying to the email. You have to click links and leave your inbox to take action. Also, you can’t configure alerts to go to different Slack channels.
4. On-Call Handoff Notifications
JSM handles on-call shift notifications by sending them to individual users based on their personal notification preferences.
What I liked
On-call shift notifications work through personal preferences. Each user gets notified when their on-call duty begins or ends. The notifications go through the channels they already configured.
What I didn’t like
You can’t route on-call shift notifications to specific Slack or Teams channels for different teams. If you have 10 people on rotation, each person gets their own personal notification. There’s no team-level visibility. JSM also doesn’t support webhook triggers when shifts change, so you can’t automate tasks.
5. Alert Fatigue Handling
JSM handles alert fatigue the same way OpsGenie does. You get automatic deduplication through alias fields, grouping through tags and routing, and suppression through integration rules.
JSM adds Notification Policies, where you can delay or turn off alerts based on time or deduplication count. You can also use Alert Policies to decide which alerts get created in the first place. This gives you another way to suppress unnecessary alerts.
What I liked
Notification Policies and Alert Policies offer good options to control alert noise. You can route alerts for business hours or after hours, based on priority and severity, or based on time of day. Time-based routing is possible.
What I didn’t like
JSM doesn’t provide ready-to-use templates for alert rules or policies. You have to build everything from scratch. There are no built-in work-life balance features.
So, Should You Consider Jira Service Management (JSM) for Alerting?
JSM gets the core of alerting right. The setup mirrors OpsGenie, and it gives both individual and team control over alerts. The alert channels are solid, especially the Slack integration with multiple action options.
However, JSM has some notable gaps. You can’t customize how alerts are delivered at the team level. Email alerts don’t support replies for actions. On-call shift notifications lack team-level visibility and webhook automation.
The interface feels nested, and Slack configuration requires extra steps. The delay time in escalation policies requires you to calculate from the top instead of using relative timing.
Pick JSM only if these gaps don’t matter to your workflow. Otherwise, there’s a better alternative that fills the gaps JSM leaves behind, offers more flexibility, and comes at a lower cost.
Spike: A Better Jira Service Management (JSM) Alternative for Alerting
Spike is a modern incident management platform that includes powerful alerting features. It’s designed to make alerting simple, flexible, and team-friendly.
Spike offers everything JSM provides, and also adds the key features it misses—all at a fraction of the cost.
Here’s why Spike is a better alternative to JSM for your alerting needs:
- Spike gives both teams and individuals control over alerts. Managers can set specific alert methods in escalation policies, while users can still set personal overrides.
- Spike uses relative delay timing in escalation policies. You just set “escalate after X minutes” for each step. You don’t need to calculate time from the top like in JSM.
- You can acknowledge or resolve by replying with
#ackor#resto alert emails. This means you don’t have to leave your inbox to take action.
- Spike lets you send alerts to different Slack channels based on the incident. You can add
@here,@channel, or@usermentions directly in escalation policies.
- You can send on-call shift notifications to specific Slack or Teams channels for each schedule. Backend notifications go to
#backend-oncall, and frontend to#frontend-oncall. Each team sees only their shift changes.
- Spike supports webhook triggers when shifts start or end. This lets you automate tasks like running health checks, creating tickets, sending SMS alerts, or granting database access when on-call rotations update.
Read JSM vs. Spike: Alerting for a detailed comparison.
- Spike provides ready-to-use Alert Rule templates to help you get started quickly. You can create custom logic to control alerts before they reach your team.
- Spike includes Cooldown mode and Out of Office settings. These help prevent burnout without complex configuration.
Above all, Spike offers 50% off to all OpsGenie users. Learn more →
Success Story: Virtually Human Moving from OpsGenie to Spike
When Virtually Human, a company that develops consumer-first entertainment experiences with blockchain, needed an alternative to OpsGenie, they chose Spike.
Steven Ryder, former Engineering Manager at Virtually Human, led the transition to Spike. The entire migration process was seamless with zero disruption to their operations.
This smooth transition helped them set up their on-call schedules that now include 15 members spread across 8 different time zones.
Steven’s team found Spike as a refreshing change from their previous experience with OpsGenie.
Final Thoughts
JSM offers solid escalation policies, dual control, and familiar OpsGenie workflows. However, the gaps show up when you need delivery-level control in escalation policies, email reply actions, team-level shift notifications, or webhook automation for on-call changes.
The nested interface and multi-step Slack setup add friction. Relative delay timing is missing, which makes the escalation setup more complex than it needs to be.
Spike fills these gaps with dual control at both policy and individual levels, email replies, multiple Slack channels, relative timing, webhook triggers, and work-life balance features. It’s a complete alerting solution for teams of any size, at a fraction of JSM’s price.
With OpsGenie shutting down completely by April 2027, now is the time to test your options. This lets you move on your own terms. And if you want a flexible tool that simplifies alerting, Spike is worth a look.