Disintegrated Tooling: The Hidden Problem Behind On-Call Engineers' Struggles

When it comes to on-call engineering, one of the most shocking statistics is that over 40% of engineers say they don’t have enough context in alerts to triage incidents quickly. Given the "You Build, You Own It" model, where engineers are responsible for on-call management, you'd expect them to have all the context they need right at their fingertips. After all, they built it! But research and interviews with engineers reveal a serious problem: Disintegrated tooling!

The Tools Problem: Too Many, Too Disjointed

If you're an engineer, you know the drill. You’re on-call, it's 2 a.m., and your phone rings with an alert. But instead of finding a clear, actionable summary, you’re greeted with just a few lines of text. The next step is to log into another portal to gather the full details. Then, you start searching for a runbook to find troubleshooting steps — which often aren't updated or, worse, don’t exist at all. From there, you might start sifting through past alerts, hoping to find similar issues that others have faced. But those logs don’t include any clear mitigation steps. And if you’re lucky, you might stumble upon some old notes from previous on-call engineers. At this point, you’re deep into debugging code that you barely recognize. All of this is happening at 2 a.m., when your focus and patience are at their breaking point.

Now let’s make things worse: once you’ve found a temporary fix for the issue, you realize you need to ask an expert for help. But, of course, you don’t know exactly who owns that part of the service or code. So you send out a message to your internal comms, hoping someone will point you in the right direction. Once your shift ends, you spend hours documenting the issue, consolidating links, and aggregating metrics, only to realize that in the rush of it all, you forgot to update the runbook with the steps you took to resolve the issue. Fast forward a few weeks, and another engineer is on-call, facing a similar issue at 3 a.m. without the context you failed to leave behind. It’s a vicious cycle that too many engineers know all too well.

The Solution: Centralized Dashboards for On-Call Engineers

As my co-founder and I discussed this issue, we kept asking ourselves: why isn’t there a centralized dashboard for on-call engineers? A single place where all the tools they rely on — alerting, monitoring, incident management, logging, and follow-ups — are integrated? That's when Next9.ai was born.

Next9 is designed to make on-call work far more efficient by bringing all relevant information into one place. With Next9, engineers can say goodbye to the frantic tool-hopping and wasted time spent gathering context. Instead, they get the context they need, directly linked to the alert in question.

How Next9 Can Help:

1. Integrated Solution: All your tools, including alerting, monitoring, incident management, and analytics, are in one place. No more jumping between multiple platforms, trying to gather all the pieces of the puzzle.

2. Improved Productivity: Next9 doesn’t just aggregate data. It links all relevant historical information, previous resolutions, and follow-up steps directly to your alert, saving you precious time. You’ll spend more time resolving issues and less time hunting for solutions.

3. Strategic Resolution: Next9 offers actionable insights that help you address the root causes of recurring alerts. Instead of putting out fires all the time, you can put in place long-term solutions to eliminate those pesky, noisy alerts altogether.

   
   

Experience It for Yourself

At Next9, we’re passionate about making on-call work less stressful and more productive. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the challenges you face in your on-call rotations. Try Next9 for yourself and see how it can drastically improve your engineering productivity.

No more missing critical information. No more frantic, disjointed tool-switching. Just a seamless, efficient on-call experience. Try Next9 today and take control of your on-call management like never before.